Case Study: New York City Economic Development Corporation achieves personalized food-and-health insights with Neo4j

New York City Economic Development Corporation - Customer Case Study

Alicia Powers, Senior Vice President at the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC), set out to better understand how food and eating behaviors relate to health by building a recommendation engine. The challenge was visualizing complex, multi‑dimensional relationships — people, meals, timing, location and biometric data — in a way that revealed patterns and felt true to real life, something harder to do with SQL or document databases.

She modeled those entities and relationships in Neo4j and used graph visualizations to explore connections, surfacing personalized insights like who eats what, when and where alongside age, weight and height. The graph approach made patterns and recommendations far more intuitive and actionable, bringing the data closer to the people it represents and demonstrating how graph technology can model real‑world complexity.

New York City Economic Development Corporation

Alicia Powers

Senior Vice President