Sprouts is a student run food co-op located in the SUB. It focuses on providing healthy, local, and organic food to UBC students. Every Friday, Sprouts hosts Community Eats. Community Eats is an event where you bring your own dish and cutlery and in return, you are served a free (technically by-donation), vegan, and healthy lunch! Almost all of the food they serve is food that is donated by grocers and distributers that would normally be thrown out. We wanted to look at how many people Sprouts serves on a normal business day versus a Community Eats day. From there, we are looking to draw conclusions about the business, health, and food waste implications that Community Eats can have on the UBC/Sprouts food system. Below is the basis of our project: our research question, our hypothesis, and our methods of data collection.
Research Question:
Is the number of people that eat at Sprouts on Community Eats days between 12 and 1pm significantly greater than the number of people that eat lunch at Sprouts between 12 and 1pm on non Community Eats days?
Hypothesis (Ho):
The number of customers at Sprouts on Community Eats days between 12 and 1pm is not significantly greater than the number of customers at Sprouts between 12 and 1pm on non Community Eats days.
Hypothesis (Ha):
On Community Eats days, the number of people that come to Sprouts for lunch between 12 and 1pm will be significantly greater than the number of people that eat lunch at Sprouts on normal store days.
Methods:
To assess the number of students who bought soup for lunch at Sprouts on Mondays and Wednesdays (non Community Eats days) between 12 and 1pm, our group sat at a table in Sprouts and took a tally count of the number of customers Sprouts received during that hour. We repeated this method for two Mondays and three Wednesdays to achieve our final results.
On Fridays, when Sprouts holds Community Eats, there were many more students being served and the servers keep tally of the amount of people they serve throughout the day. To collect the data needed for the one hour slot between 12 and 1pm we asked a server to make a mark in his tally count beginning at 12pm and another mark at 1pm. We then counted the number of tallies recorded between these two times to find the total number of people served between 12 and 1pm. We repeated this method for three Community Eats sessions in order to achieve our final results.