Post-COVID-19 situational analysis assessment of the food and beverage sector using Rasch and PAM clustering techniques

The COVID-19 pandemic forced business owners to re-think how to manage and protect their business in the new normal. The food and beverage (F&B) sector was one of the areas, which rebounded first in the post-pandemic era and adapted by managing their operational challenges and different consumer requirements. This research tried to identify challenges faced by the food and beverage sector in Greater Jakarta through an open questionnaire to business owners and grouped them into 20 key challenges. The key challenges were then quantified through a closed questionnaire to 315 F&B stakeholders and analysed using a Rasch model. With the Rasch model, the key challenges (KC) were then grouped into fighting KC (five KC), efficient KC (five KC) and advantage KC (ten KC). For each group, clustering was done using the partitioning around medoids (PAM) approach to give situational analysis/insights of the F&B sector in Greater Jakarta area.