Analysis of Consumers’ Behaviors

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restaurants compete against each other by prices, too. This is the reason why the restaurant industry of Taipei is exposed to a high threat of substitutes and, every restaurant owner needs to keep an eyes on not only their food offerings but also the associataed services to satisfy the customers’ demands as much as possible.

1.2. Analysis of Consumers’ Behaviors

The analysis of consumers’ behaviors of restaurant industry of Taiwan market will focus on two key segments, including characteristics of Taiwanese cuisine (also consumers’ taste preference) and consumers’ behaviors in response to the restaurant offerings. The analysis of Taiwanese cuisine will clarify the consumers’ expectation from the restaurant menus, thereby enabling the owner to design and include the most appropriate dishes in their offerings not only to match the demands but also avoid the possible business failure caused by poorly-matched offerings. Besides, the analysis of consumers’ behaviors will breakdown the traffic time in restaurant industry, the online social ratings on consumers’ flow and, how consumers often react to the promotion programs; it is believed that this analysis could facilitate the designing of operation hours and marketing policies of a restaurant.

Sub-analysis of Taiwanese Cuisine and Taste Preferences

Basing on current figure of Taiwanese government, 97.3% population of Taiwan are Han people, which originated from China, while the rest 05% are Taiwanese local aborigines. In details, the Han people refer to Hoklo (i.e. people from Fujian of mainland China), Hakla (i.e.

those coming from Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangxi, Guangxi, Sichuan, Hunan, Zhejiang, Hainan and Guizhou) and mainland Chinese people, who were post-war immigrants following

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Kuomintang to come to Taiwan during the period from 1945 to 1950 and, most of these people were originated from the southern areas of mainland China, including Fujian and Guangdong. So, it is reasonable to believe that the cuisine culture of southern area of China play a huge role in shaping the eat and drink habits of these immigrants and, with the

dominant chunk in the population structure of Taiwan, these habits of Han people controls the characteristics of Taiwanese cuisine in general.

Besides, the Japanese Taiwan period from 1895 to 1945 when Taiwan was under the

dominance of Japan as the result of the failure of Qing Dynasty to Tokyo in 1985, also had a significant impact on the Taiwanese culture in general and brought some exotic factors to Taiwanese culinary culture.

Figure 3. Taiwanese ethnic group structure (Source: IFAT)

Taiwanese cuisine, as mentioned above, is significantly influenced by that of the central and southern area of mainland China, especially Fujian, and Japanese culinary. The food culture comes to Taiwan together with the immigrants and the Japanese dominants. Therefore, there are lot of Chinese and Japanese food found throughout Taiwan; except for Fujian originated cuisine, the other food could be from Guangdong, Jiangxi, Zhoushan, Shanghai, Sichuan or,

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Beijing. The key ingredients of Taiwanese cuisine mostly consisted of rice, cereal grain, pork and chicken while beef was not so biased because the cows, back to old days when Taiwan was an agricultural country, were considered helpful animals for the farming work. However, there is an interesting thing is that beef noodles are one of the most well-known of Taiwan food culture, unlike what showed in the old culture and, this was the result of the cultural value brought by the Chinese immigrants, whose favorite meat was beef. Nowadays, thanks to the developed agriculture with advanced technologies, Taiwan’s supply of food ingredients and fruits can meet the local demands and, the people also warm welcome the exotic raw materials from Japan such as miso and tempura, which are very popular in Taiwanese restaurants, or fruits (the local ones have a habit of gifting others exotic fruits as a sign of appreciation or respect), this somehow enriches the ingredient and food market of this country.

In terms of the preference tastes, Taiwanese people has a wide selection of spices such as salt, pepper corn, chili pepper, cooking wine, lard, sesame oil, pickles to cook dishes. Besides, during the meal time at restaurant, they usually use the condiments offered by owners to self-customize their dish tastes to match their preferences. Therefore, there can be “fifty-shades of food tastes” in Taiwan, it can be salty, sweet, spicy, numb spicy, bitter, smelly or, the

combination of tastes of these basics. The locals really like the soft and chewy texture of the food structure and, the most typical examples for this should be the boba in boba milk tea, the squid ball/ meatball or, the chewy noodles (e.g. udon) they use when enjoying hotpot or the dried foods they eat as desserts, these ingredients are kind of indispensable. Besides, as consuming livestock, nothing is wasted because the local cook can make nice dishes from

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meat, bones or, especially intestines, which are cooked with special herbs that not only flourish the taste but also turn them into healthy dishes.

Sub-analysis of Consumers’ Behaviors

Just like any other Asian countries, Taiwanese people have three main meals per days, including breakfast, lunch and dinner. The operation hours of restaurants here depend much on the eating habit of the customers; for more details, restaurants will open from 7.00 am to 9.00 am for breakfast time, from 11.30am to 14:30 pm for lunch time and, 17:30 pm to 20:30 pm for dinner, except for some restaurants opening 24/7 (which are not so many in Taipei).

Normally, people do not invest much time on having breakfast, they rather going to

convenient stores and grabbing something available there and eat them quickly before work/

school time or buying to-go things by the street than getting up early and cooking themselves a fancy breakfast. Some of the popular breakfast of Taiwan can be “dan bing” (a kind of crepe made from flour and egg with some customized toppings), congee served with pickles, fried dumplings, meesua (a kind of soft noodles soup) and, bread with some common drinks like tea, milk or, coffee. Perhaps, the number of convenient stores and the abundant of street-food vendors somehow affect the breakfast habit of Taiwanese people. Lunch time must be the highest traffic for any restaurants in Taiwan because at this point of them, the number of customers having meals in restaurant is quite high, especially the restaurants located around office or school areas. If some people might choose bring homemade lunchboxes, most of them prefer lunching out with colleagues and family for socializing or, simply, just a quick meal before nap time to be energized for the afternoon work shift. As for dinner, people have a tendency of reserving a table in their favorite restaurant before coming there for dinner, especially during weekends, the customer traffic for dinner during weekends is higher than

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lunch because of rest taking habit, whereas they often have outdoor activities on Saturdays or Sundays then, it would be nothing else better than a dine out with friends or family members.

Basing on what the author observed in Taipei, local people prefer having meal in food chain restaurants or buffet restaurants they like because the food quality is identical and the price range is stable while buffet model can offer a wide array of food theme for anyone, even vegetarians. In addition, Taiwanese people are quite sensitive to the ratings of restaurants, they often check the online reviews or ratings of a new restaurant before deciding to go there to give it a try.

This is just like a double blade to any restaurant because there are many cases of restaurant becoming famous thanks to their ratings and high recommendations from customers or the creative (or, sometimes weird ideas) food ideas, however, if the ratings drop due to some certain reasons (like, bad comments or complaints about service attitude), it is easy for them to lose customers in the future.