Super Bowl Weekend Faces Potential Wing Shortage

As Super Bowl Sunday draws closer, restaurant brands are struggling to source one of the holiday’s hottest commodities: chicken wings. 

The U.S. chicken wing market has traditionally aligned well with the sports calendar — prices and consumer demand peak around February and March due to the Super Bowl and the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament, level off for the rest of the year and then the cycle repeats. This year, however, has been anything but traditional.

A Strange Year for Chicken Wings

Prices and production of chicken wings shot up around the 2020 Super Bowl, as expected, but a month later when the pandemic hit, wing prices did a nosedive to less than $1 per pound as sports shut down, fewer consumers opted to order food, restaurants closed their doors and suppliers ran into complications, a Washington Post report on data from the Department of Agriculture revealed. 

“For the month of April and May, our domestic sales were up 45% over the same months last year, which is truly unmatched when it comes to how other brands are weathering during this time,” Wing Zone co-founder and CEO Matt Friedman told 1851 Franchise.

This is largely because chicken wings travel well for delivery and are a value-driven offering for consumers who are sitting at home and looking for an easy way to feed their family. Plus, delivery-focused wing brands like Wing Zone already had the proper infrastructure and business model in place to tap into this increased demand.

Chicken wings sales in restaurants saw a 7% year-over-year increase 2020 despite an 11% decline in trips to restaurants over the same time period, according to the National Chicken Council.

Many franchisors, including casual-dining brands such as Chili’s parent Brinker International, Applebee’s and even Chuck E. Cheese, opted to create delivery-only, ghost kitchen wing concepts to grab a piece of the market share and capitalize on the growing prominence of third-party delivery platforms. 

The Incoming Chicken Wing Shortage

Now, this demand has come to a head right before the Super Bowl, with many suppliers simply unable to keep up and prices skyrocketing as a result. 

The entire chicken industry will go through close to 1.4 billion wings, according to the National Chicken Council, up 2% from last year. This week, the Department of Agriculture data shows the average price for a pound of chicken wings was $2.65, up ten cents from the week before and up about 40% from where they were last January.

According to the most recent USDA Cold Storage Reports, there was a 29% reduction in November and a 24% reduction in December in year-over-year wing inventories in cold storage as operators stocked up months in advance for this weekend’s big game.

Isaac Olvera, a commodities and data analyst with supply chain firm ArrowStream, told Restaurant Business that, according to United States Department of Agriculture figures, “the current cold storage stock of chicken wings is at its lowest in a decade.” 

How Franchisors Can Prepare for a Shortage

Looking ahead, franchisors should expect this chicken wing shortage to continue and should prepare accordingly to minimize the impact of potential shortages and distribution challenges. 

“There is no question that supply is tight right now,” Friedman said. “That is why our vendor relationships are so important. The most important thing is communicating with suppliers and franchisees so that everyone is on the same page. As a franchisor, it is our job to make sure franchisees get the products they need to be successful — it is not the franchisee’s job to source wings.”

The increased consumer demand isn’t the only reason for inflated wing prices — expensive safety and sanitation equipment, worker shortages at chicken processing plants and transportation costs are also boosting production expenses. 

With a smaller and more-expensive supply of wings, franchisors will have to adapt if they hope to meet consumer demand, keep franchisees afloat and maintain healthy supplier relationships. 

For example, Wingstop announced in November it is testing bone-in chicken thighs as a part of a “whole-bird strategy” for the chain. By purchasing new parts of the chicken, Wingstop hopes to “mitigate the impact of continued inflation of bone-in chicken wings over the near term,” and create stronger contracts with suppliers, Charlie Morrison, the brand’s CEO, told analysts. 

Other brands have been shifting to frozen wings or rolling out plant-based alternatives such as cauliflower wings to satisfy their customers while also taking the pressure off of poultry suppliers.