Walt Disney World is big, and a lot of people visit it every day.
Those people, like most people, need to eat.
That means Disney sells food.
Lots and lots of food.
This is a video I’ve wanted to make for a while, and thanks to a couple of fact sheets
from Disney themselves, I finally can.
So let's jump into some of the numbers when it comes to food and drinks at Walt Disney World.
First up, soda!
People love soda.
Disney World sells 75 million Coca-Colas every year.
It averages out to just over 205,000 cokes every day, and assuming a 14 hour day of operation,
that’s an average of about 4 cokes every second.
Which means since the time I started this paragraph, Disney has sold around 100 cokes.
Now they don’t specify what size coke, since you have everything from the bottles to the
fountain drinks, but if we assumed an average of 20 ounces, which is a regular bottle, that
would amount to 11.7 million gallons of coka-cola a year.
That would fill the entire aquarium at the Seas in Epcot… twice.
As far as water, Disney sells 13 million bottles of water every year.
That’s over 35,000 bottles per day.
That’s enough to fill three Olympic sized swimming pool.
Now obviously that’s a lot less than the amount of soda they sell.
In fairness, you can get free water at any dining location on property, but I’d wager
that even with the free waters accounted for they probably still sell more soda.
Ten million.
That’s the number of burgers that are sold on property every year, or 27,397 per day on average.
Now if you think that's a lot of burgers, to throw that sense of scale in the other direction,
the burger chain McDonald’s reportedly sells that many burgers in about a day and a half.
Now if burgers aren’t your thing, then of course there’s the American pastime of hot dogs.
Disney sells 6 million hot dogs every year.
That’s over 16,000 a day.
Joey Chestnut currently holds the hot dog eating record at 74 hot dogs in 10 minutes.
If he ate like that every meal of the day, every day of the year, it would still take
him 74 years to eat the number of hot dogs Disney sells in one.
And what comes with all those burgers and hot dogs?
French fries!
9 million pounds of french fries are served up every year at Disney.
If we average out the weight of a single fry at 2 grams, that would come out to around
2.04 billion french fries a year which, by the way, I think is about how many fries you
get in a bag at Five Guys.
Of course we can’t talk about Disney food without talking about snacks!
How about popcorn?
Disney sells 324,000 pounds of the stuff every year.
I don’t really have a fun fact about that one.
That’s just an insane amount of popcorn.
Or what about those massive turkey legs?
They sell 1.8 million pounds of them every year, which averages out to nearly 5,000 pounds a day.
The average turkey leg at Disney weighs one and a half pounds, which means they sell about
1.2 million turkey legs a year.
Today those turkey legs cost $11.75, meaning if you wanted to pay for everyone’s turkey
legs this year it’d run you just over $14 million dollars.
So who’s buying?
And finally how could we cover food at Disney without talking about the famous Mickey Mouse
Ice Cream bars?
Disney sells a whopping 3.3 million of these every year, which is just over 9,000 a day.
By the way, at 330 calories per bar, that's 1.08 billion calories in total.
Would probably have to loop around the parks for a bit to walk that off.
And this is all just a drop in the bucket when it comes to food and drinks at Walt Disney World.
There are over 6,000 menu items across 475 locations on property where you can buy food.
Of course with that much food there’s bound to be a lot of food waste.
I have a whole other video that goes into detail on what Disney does with that food
waste and how they put it to use.
But what about the food that gets prepared but doesn’t get sold?
Well back in November of 1991 Disney formed a charity called Disney Harvest.
They partnered with another organization called the Second Harvest Food Bank of Central Florida
and began to donate prepared but unsold food to help feed the hungry in the area.
Valued in the millions, they’ve had years where they’ve donated as much as 720,000
pounds of prepared food.
Today, their donations equate to nearly 13,000 meals each week.
That’s a lot of food, and thankfully it’s not going to waste.
These numbers are all so crazy, but to me they’re another reminder of just how big
Walt Disney World is.
Sometimes it seems like a small city because it essentially is, and a small city happens
to eat a lot of food.