Pick one random element from a vector for each row of a data.table

Question

I have a dataframe of names. And I have a vector of different food items. I want to pick one element from that vector randomly for each Name so that the data.table looks like be

Answer 1

We can use group by option and then do sample

dt[, NextItem := sample(x, 1), by = Name]

Or you can also do this with .N instead of by

dt[, NextItem := sample(x, .N, replace = TRUE)]