Americans Are Expected To Eat Truckloads Of Chicken Wings For Super Bowl LX

There's no doubt that chicken wings are an American institution. In the past, studies have estimated that the nation consumes tens of billions of chicken wings per year, and the average meat-eating American will account for 18,000 wings throughout their entire life. And the highest holy day for this American icon is Super Bowl Sunday.

According to an email from the National Chicken Council, Americans are projected to eat 1.48 billion — with a b — chicken wings during Super Bowl LX. The NCC's 2026 Chicken Wing Report details that this is a modest 10 million more wings than were eaten during last year's Super Bowl, reflecting the nation's ever-growing desire for this staple.

To try to conceptualize 1.48 billion chicken wings, imagine a line of wings stretching from near Boston to Seattle. Now imagine that wing line repeating 26 more times. If you ate one of those wings every 30 seconds, you'd finish the meal by the year 3430. And if all that meat was trucked to one delivery site, it would take 3,400 fully loaded 18-wheelers — a 40-mile convoy of over a billion wings.

America's obsession with chicken wings isn't just about the taste, especially when it comes to the NFL championship. The reason chicken wings became a Super Bowl staple involves the rise of sports bars in the 1970s and 80s and the economic fact that chicken wings were a relatively cheap food to source and sell. Low prices were key to chicken wings' rise, but price increases proved not to be a detriment.

Boneless wings are also popular, and their origin story begins with Buffalo Wild Wings in 2003, but this dish didn't become a hit until the Great Recession, when bone-in wings became more expensive than breasts. To satisfy frugal consumers' demands, other restaurants began selling deep-fried breast chunks as boneless wings. The NCC found in 2024 that 53% of Americans still prefer bone-in, but boneless wings are clearly here to stay.

If you're hosting a feast for the Super Bowl, there are plenty of places to order party platters of fully cooked, ready-to-serve chicken wings. But you'll save a lot more money cooking them yourself. If you're making your own wings for the big game, consult our 19 tricks for gourmet chicken wings, starting, of course, with buying the highest-quality meat possible.