Plant-Based Companies in Europe

Introduction

This project explores plant-based food companies in Europe, analyzing their presence in media articles and industry trends. The analysis leverages data from The Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe and a vegan business magazine (Vegconomist) to extract meaningful insights.

Data Sources

• The Good Food Institute (GFI) Europe: Provides a dataset of plant-based food companies.
• Vegconomist: Articles in the "Marketing & Media" category mentioning plant-based companies.
• Web Scraping: Extracted article data from Vegconomist.

Challenges, Strengths, and Weaknesses

Challenges:

• Web scraping feasibility and handling infinite scrolling.
• Standardizing company names across sources.

Strengths:

• Diverse data sources enable a broader perspective on the industry.

Weaknesses:

• Low number of matches in company names between both datasets.

Key Questions & Conclusions

1. Does Vegconomist favor European companies in their articles?

Conclusion: No, only 2/10 top-ranked companies in article count were European.

2. Have more plant-based companies been founded year after year since 2000?

Conclusion: No, although there was a rise in company formations from 2017-2020, the trend declined afterward.

3. Do plant-based cheese manufacturers also produce vegan yoghurt and butter in Germany & the Netherlands?

Conclusion: No, most manufacturers focus on a single product category.

4. Are Germany and the Netherlands leading in plant-based cheese and dairy alternatives?

Conclusion: While both countries rank in the top three, neither is the top leader in the sector.

Methodology

1. Data Cleaning:

   • Filtering missing values (e.g., “Year Founded”).
   • Removing duplicates by standardizing company names.
   • Formatting text (case adjustments, accents, punctuation).

2. Web Scraping:

   • Extracted company names from Vegconomist articles using Beautiful Soup.
   • Counted occurrences of each company in articles.

3. Data Merging & Analysis:

   • Outer join of datasets.
   • Grouped and filtered values to assess trends.
   • Created bar charts and time-series plots for visualization.

Lessons Learned & Adjustments

• Merging datasets yielded low business value due to few matches (only 24 companies).
• Future approaches should emphasize insights from the GFI dataset alone.
• Avoid pre-planning hypotheses based on web scraping results without verifying data availability.

Further Questions

• How do European plant-based companies compare financially to their American counterparts?
• What are the key factors driving consumer adoption of plant-based products in different regions?

Links to Data Sources

• Vegconomist - Marketing & Media
• GFI Europe Company Database
• Slides Presentation

How to Run This Project

Clone this repository and open the Jupyter Notebook:

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/plant-based-companies.git
cd plant-based-companies