SUPER BOWL FOR CHICKEN WINGS

Super Bowl Sunday is synonymous with football, entertaining commercials and food. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) says that Super Bowl Sunday is the second largest food consumption day of the year, behind Thanksgiving.
And what is on just about every menu? Chicken wings.
The National Chicken Council (NCC) says that Super Bowl weekend is the biggest time of the year for wings. More than 1.25 billion wing portions will be consumed during Super Bowl weekend in 2012, totaling more than 100 million pounds of wings, according to the NCC’s 2012 Wing Report.
If the wings were laid end-to-end they would circle the circumference of the Earth— more than twice—a distance that would reach approximately a quarter of the way to the moon, according to the NCC. But we all know that they would be eaten before the wings would be put end-to-end.
NCC Senior Vice President and Chief Economist Bill Roenigk on the NCC website said that chicken wings will be consumed by three times the number of Americans on Super Bowl Sunday than a typical Sunday throughout the year. About half will be ordered from restaurants and half purchased from retail grocery stores. (For a full list of Batavia restaurants and retail shops, click here.)
A chicken has two wings, and chicken companies are not able to produce wings without the rest of the chicken. Therefore, the supply of wings is limited by the total number of chickens produced. When the demand for wings is stronger than the demand for other chicken parts, the price of wings will go up.
Wing prices always go up in the fourth quarter of the year as restaurants stock up for the Super Bowl and prices usually peak in January during the run-up to the big game, according to the NCC.
In the Midwest, for instance, the price of wings (whole) for the week of Jan. 16-20, was $1.96 a pound wholesale, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Poultry Market News Service. This represents a 50 percent increase in price from six months ago in July 2011. The USDA estimates that the cost for frozen party wings in the Midwest cost $1.60 to $3 per pound.
“The good news for consumers,” said NCC’s Roenigk, “is that food service and retail outlets generally plan months in advance for the NFL playoffs and Super Bowl Sunday, meaning that increased wholesale costs for the most part aren’t passed on to consumers’ plates.”
Consumers looking for great chicken wing recipes can find them on the National Chicken Council website at eatchicken.com.