Chicken wings.
They sell themselves, right?
Well, not lately.
What factors are making it harder for restaurants to sell these game day faves?
And can the situation be fixed?
Keep watching for all the spicy details.
At the start of the pandemic, chicken wings underwent what some might call a cultural
reset as people increasingly turned to cheap, reliable delivery food to eat from the comfort
of their homes.
According to Bloomberg, in the first quarter of 2020, sales at Wingstop went up by nearly
31.9%.
And it didn't take long for other eateries to take note of the craze.
According to The Verge, restaurants that didn't previously sell wings added them to menus,
and national wing sales increased by 10% from April 2020 to February 2021.
A year later, most restaurants in the U.S. have reopened fully.
And according to The Washington Post, people aren't quite as wild about wings as they used
to be, in part because they became more expensive due to inflation.
One restaurant owner told Bloomberg that while an order of wings at their restaurant sold
for $13.95 pre-pandemic, one now sets customers back a whopping $27.95.
So more than double the price.
"Wings are in the stratosphere.
I mean, they've gone up two times.
If it was a dollar, it's three-and-a-half now."
Bloomberg noted that some restaurants initially tried to fix this by simply taking the loss
or cutting staff, but now, even that has become insufficient.
For chicken wings to stay on the menu, they have to cost more.
High gas prices have impacted every part of the supply chain.
One farmer told WTVT in April that the price of chicken feed in his area had gone up by
nearly 20%, which resulted in fewer chickens on the farm.
Add in an avian flu outbreak that recently killed 22 million birds, and it means there
are even fewer chickens, further driving up the price.
Bloomberg reports that people are still buying chicken in general despite the price hikes.
So why have wings, specifically, taken such a hit?
There are a few factors at play.
One, wings are more commonly a dining-out food, and people may be cutting the expense
of eating at restaurants out of their budgets.
Wings are also commonly ordered as an appetizer rather than an entree, so they're potentially
less of a priority for consumers who are being more careful about spending.
As economist Paul Aho put it in The Washington Post,
"When gasoline prices get high, people have less money to spend on wings at the bar on
Saturday night."
"Unfortunately, we broke the news this week that we do need to raise our wing prices from
what we're used to."
You wouldn't know it from looking at wing prices on a menu these days, but before the
fated invention of Buffalo wings in 1964, that part of the bird wasn't particularly
desirable.
According to The Washington Post, the wings of mass-produced chickens were usually made
into animal feed.
By the 1980s, wings were getting a bigger spotlight than ever with the debut of Buffalo
Wild Wings.
That chain has recently been struggling from increased chicken prices like every other
poultry purveyor.
Judging from the Buffalo Wild Wings' spicy new Doritos-flavored sauce, it's turning to
some creative ways to keep people interested in the product it's named for, even if it
means asking customers to shell out more cash.
Wholesale wing prices reached a record high of $3.25 per pound last May.
But so-called "cold stocks" of wings helped offset prices throughout the rest of the year,
according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report.
Unfortunately, a later report showed that supplies of chicken in cold storage subsequently
dipped to "record lows."
Some say another factor of the nationwide chicken shortage is climate change.
The massive winter storm that hit Texas in February of 2021 had a big impact on the state's
poultry farms, according to Poultry World.
And any rush to cultivate more chickens to make up for the disruption could cause more
climate problems.
According to The Guardian, mass livestock farming creates 15% of global greenhouse gas
emissions alone.
The New York Times recently reported on an increased demand for laboratory-grown meat,
so if all these chicken issues don't sort themselves out, perhaps poultry science can
swoop in and save the day for wing lovers.
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