Beyond the Stars: How Sentiment Analysis Offers Deeper Insights into Levain Bakery

Purpose of Case Study

At first glance, a $5 cookie might seem pretty overpriced — and a line that stretches around the block entirely for that $5 cookie might seem like a waste. But who knew just a cookie could be that good?

Levain Bakery, based in New York, exploded into a huge craze pretty recently — in fact, many have named them the source of New York’s most famous cookies. But it seems a little unbelievable, right?

I mean — people are naturally impatient and a high price brings on high expectations. But despite all that, they still have a nearly 5-star rating across all locations. Do people really think Levain is worth it? And how can they be sure they’ll be able to keep this vast sea of customers around long term?

These are the questions we wanted to answer using a little help from sentiment analysis.

The Analysis

To get these questions answered, we took thousands of reviews from one of Levain’s most famous locations in NoHo and ran it through our Copilot program.

First, we wanted to know if people felt like they were getting bang for their buck.

So we had our program break down all reviews into positive or negative sentiment buckets and identify specific categories where reviews overlapped. And here’s what we found.

Here, we can already immediately see that there are significantly more positive reviews compared to negative reviews in every category across the board. Especially in terms of taste and quality, people are significantly more satisfied than dissatisfied.

To our surprise, we found that a whopping 90% of comments explicitly mentioning the price-value dynamic of Levain admitted that the cookie ended up being worth the price.

On the flip side, we also managed to use our AI to identify negative sentiment in positive comments with 4 or 5 star ratings. Here are just a few of the many we found.

You can see that despite some customers enjoying their overall experience or purchase, they weren’t satisfied with every element. For example, we found that lots of people weren’t happy with the length of the line, along with the quality of their coffee — but they still ended up giving a generous rating anyway.

Meaningfulness of Results

So if you’ve been wondering about whether the line and price is worth it for Levain Bakery, it seems like the general consensus is a big, fat yes! If 90% of people are saying it’s worth it — there’s a good chance you’ll agree.

BUT our analysis has shown us that there are cons as well — AND that you can’t assume a brand is perfect simply from a glance at their overall rating.

Levain’s NoHo location has a 4.7 star rating — absolutely exceptional — but even the 4 and 5 star reviews have some grievances.

So while the cookies are fantastic, the coffee doesn’t seem to live up to some people’s expectations. And although lots of people think it’s worth the wait, you’ll have to come prepared to stand in line for a hot minute before you can get your hands on even just one cookie.

But if Levain can use this feedback to improve on some of these areas — they can be sure that customers will be more eager to stick around long-term, rather than getting sick of these painpoints over time and eventually churning. Now that’s how you retain your top customers.

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