Chicken Wings and the Super Bowl

Americans have seen a lot of changes over the past year. Two things that have stayed the same are our love for the Super Bowl and chicken wings. Tom Super is the Senior Vice President of Communications with the National Chicken Council. He says Americans will be devouring a lot of chicken wings during Super Bowl weekend.

“Absolutely, there’s no hotter time for wings than in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl, and the National Chicken Council is projecting a record 1.42 billion wings to be eaten when the Chiefs play the Buccaneers for the Lombardi Trophy. That’s up about two percent from last year, and that’s despite the COVID-19 pandemic.*”

COVID-19 hit the restaurant industry hard, and he’s surprised at how many chicken wings the NCC came up with for this year’s report.

“When we were putting our annual Wing Report together, I thought there had to be a decrease in chicken wing consumption. And, when talking to folks in the industry, when looking at the demand numbers though, when looking at the price of wings, they’ve seldom been hotter.”

If you want a good visual as to how all that chicken looks, it could circle the circumference of the world three times.

“If you laid them end-to-end, they would stretch from Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City to Raymond James Stadium in Tampa 19 times back-and-forth. And let’s assume Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid could eat three wings per minute; he could probably eat more than that, but if he ate three in a minute, it would take him more than 900 years to eat 1.42 billion chicken wings.”