Food Industry
OVERVIEW

Introduction

This tutorial is designed to help you begin researching the Food industry.The Food industry generally encompasses all aspects of providing snacks and meals away from home, including quick-service and full-service restaurants; bars and taverns; school, hospital, and military cafeterias; catering and carry-out services; food outlets at festivals and sporting events; and so on.

According to the National Restaurant Association, there are 945,000 restaurant locations in the United States, employing more than 13.1 million employees. The overall economic impact of the restaurant industry is expected to exceed $1.5 trillion in 2009.

Information on the Food industry runs the gamut from news and brief articles for practitioners to scholarly books and articles for academic researchers. This tutorial will help you find the right information at the right time.

Topic Selection

A good topic for an academic project is one that interests you, fulfills the parameters of the assignment, and is researchable. The following guidelines may assist you in choosing an appropriate Food topic:

Try to choose a "manageable" topic that is not too broad or too narrow for the assignment.

For example, customer service in restaurants is probably too broad of a topic for a ten-page research paper. You would quickly be overwhelmed with thousands of relevant books and articles on such a topic, which is way too many to use in a ten-page paper.

On the other hand, how customers' likelihood to return is affected by service failures at Houlihan's restaurants is probably too narrow for such a paper. You would have difficulty finding information in trade or scholarly books and articles on such a specialized topic.

In this scenario, you might eventually refine your topic to something more manageable, such as the impact of service recovery strategies on restaurant customer loyalty. A librarian or professor can also help you identify suitable topics in your area of interest.

Identify concept clusters associated with your topic: these are relevant main keywords and their synonyms and near-synonyms. For example, for our topic of the impact of service recovery strategies on restaurant customer loyalty, you might identify clusters such as:

• Cluster 1: restaurant... foodservice
• Cluster 2: service recovery... service failure... customer service... customer satisfaction
  
• Cluster 3: loyal... loyalty... repeat

These keywords will be helpful when you search for information on your topic in library catalogs and article databases. As you do more research, you may add or delete keywords (or even entire clusters) from your search. Throughout the process, try to remain flexible and be willing to alter the focus of your topic as you learn more about it.