Where to Find America’s Best Burger, Based on the Data

I love burgers, I always have.

You know I really have enjoyed looking at data

to try to figure out what makes an amazing burger

and where you can get one.

A burger breaks down into the bun, the meat, the cheese

and the other stuff on top of it.

So what is the best cheese?

What is the most popular and what is the highest rated?

And then what is the best bun

and then what is the best meat?

You may or may not be the kind of person that eats a meal

and then immediately goes to the internet

and writes a little story about it

and gives it a score, but a lot of people do that.

We have over 900,000

reviews people have written of burger eating experiences

at different venues around the country.

[Interviewer] Got it, so what's the best cheese?

It turns out that if you cross ratings

with frequency of order American cheese

is actually the top cheese to order on a burger.

[Interviewer] So then you go to meat.

We get all of these menu burger listings

and then break down the language in those listings.

69% of available burgers are beef.

So the next thing was figuring out what makes a bun

really good.

There were a lot of different (laughs) words

used to describe buns.

The ones that really emerged were toasted,

and toasted correlated with higher reviews than not toasted.

When we put everything together and we say

who has the toasted bun, a beef burger with American cheese

the winning place was actually

the original Shake Shack in Madison Square Park

in New York City.

Which is one I've been to many times.

[Interviewer] You didn't skew the analysis

because of that experience?

[Hilary] I did not skew the analysis.

[Interviewer] But Shake Shake just edged out the top.

Shake Shack just happens to be number one.