Holidays and Events through Chocolate and Google Trends
The world is approaching a whopping eight billion inhabitants who all take to the observer seemingly unpredictable actions; and yet it never seizes to amaze how predictable our actions become when viewed in aggregate. After all, humans are creatures of habit and tradition. Even when it comes to chocolate.
Looking at the worldwide google searches for “chocolate” in 2020 we can see some prominent spikes. Unsurprisingly, those correspond to the world’s most widely known and celebrated holidays — Valentine’s Day, Easter and Christmas.
However, our collective habit becomes especially apparent when viewing the trends in more than a decade of “chocolate” google searches. The resulting graph depicts an almost periodic function. The world’s chocolate heartbeat .
The simultaneous increase over the years could be an indication of a growing appetite for chocolate. While the chocolate consumption per capita of most countries has increased during the first decade of the 21st century, it has rather been decreasing in the past years (Squicciarini and Swinnen_Revised proofs (econstor.eu)). Another factor contributing to the upwards trend could simply be the worldwide increasing access to the internet.
Either way, this is a fun example of the information that can be hidden in seemingly unassuming data.
