Ingredient Statistics Analysis

Collecting the ingredients you want is one of the most challenging parts of the Facebook game Restaurant City.

My impression is that ingredients like tomato, cream, and lobster are some of the most difficult to obtain, while lime, lamb, and saffron are easier.

One reason may be that, some ingredients are required by many more recipes than other ingredients. For example, only one recipe requires saffron, but many recipes require tomato. If an ingredient is required in many recipes, then the chance of people seeking it will be higher; in other words, they are less willing to trade it out.

In order to understand what ingredients are most useful in a more scientific way, I have prepared a spreadsheet to analyze some statistics on the ingredients of the Facebook game Restaurant City:



The data are sorted by the column "Menu Total" in a descending order. The column "Menu" is the number of times an ingredient appears in the menu, while the column "Recipe" is the number of times an ingredient appears in a recipe. For example, cheese appears in 6 different recipes while it appears 9 times in the menu (as Cheese Board requires 3 cheese). The higher the number, the more useful an ingredient is.

It is no surprise that cheese is the most useful. But quite surprising is that, flour and potato are more useful than tomato. For me, the daily prize gives me flour and potato more often than tomato and cream. One thing for sure is, Sweetcorn is useless. Perhaps PlayFish should introduce more recipes like Grilled Sweetcorn with Lime/Garlic Butter, Braised Pork Rice in Sweet Corn Sauce, ...