Analysis of Food Delivery Using Big Data: Comparative Study before and after COVID-19

This study examined consumers’ change in perception related to food delivery using big data before and after the COVID-19 crisis. This study identified words closely associated with the keyword “food delivery” based on big data from social media and investigated consumers’ perceptions of and needs for food delivery and related issues before and after COVID-19. Results were derived through analysis methods such as text mining analysis, Concor analysis, and sentiment analysis. The research findings can be summarized as follows: In 2019, frequently appearing dining-related words were “dining-out,” “delivery,” “famous restaurant,” “delivery food,” “foundation,” “dish,” “family order,” and “delicious.” In 2021, these words were “delivery,” “delivery food,” “famous restaurant,” “foundation,” “COVID-19,” “dish,” “order,” “application,” and “family.” The analysis results for the food delivery sentimental network based on 2019 data revealed discourses revolving around delicious, delivery food, lunch box, and Korean food. For the 2021 data, discourses revolved around delivery food, recommend, and delicious. The emotional analysis, which extracted positive and negative words from the “food delivery” search word data, demonstrated that the number of positive keywords decreased by 2.85%, while negative keywords increased at the same rate. In addition, compared to the pre-COVID-19 pandemic era, a weakening trend in positive emotions and an increasing trend in negative emotions were detected after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic; sub-emotions under the positive category (e.g., good feelings, joy, interest) decreased in 2021 compared to 2019, whereas sub-emotions under the negative category (e.g., sadness, fear, pain) increased.