Executive Summary

This study researches the habits of college students when they order food online. This includes the motivations behind ordering food online from an online food service provider as well as when students are ordering food online. This study also includes the observation of what types of food students are ordering as well as gauging how financially conscious students are when ordering a meal online. Previous studies have focused on similar topics and have gone in depth to research the general population's motivations and the perceived benefits when ordering food online. Other studies have also been conducted to show restaurants most popular food items. Our study included a convenience survey sent out electronically to DePaul University students. Limitations include the fact that the survey only documents a handful of the entire student population as it was a convenience sampling.

After the conclusion of our survey, we found two of our three hypotheses were supported. Supporting our first hypothesis, we found the majority of our student participants order food more on the weekend than during the week. Our second hypothesis was supported when no participants with a meal plan ordered more than three times a month. Whereas three out of the twenty-six participants without a meal plan order more than three times a month making them more likely to order food online than participants with a meal plan. Our third and final hypothesis was found to be unsupported and the null hypothesis was supported. The majority of participants indicated that the type of food was the most important factor they considered when deciding to order food online. Therefore more students are not as concerned about how much their food costs so much as what it is.

We have identified some topics for discussion that are included at the conclusion of our paper. One of them being the fact we identified a limitation because we do not have equal representation from all school years at DePaul, namely only three percent of participants were of freshman standing. Had we had equal representation our results might have been different due to the fact freshmen are required to have a meal plan. We also chose to define a "weekend" as a DePaul weekend, which means Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Perhaps if our study chose to define a weekend as only Saturday and Sunday,

In conclusion to our study, even though there were limitations, such as an unbalanced sample size and not a lot of participants with meal plans, we feel as though we have more understanding of college students online food ordering habits.