Some passionate football fans might want to grind film and break down matchups at each position. For the rest of us, we’re just planning on what food we intend to mash during the big game.

And since we love factoids so much, the fine folks at Forbes have decided to provide us with some interesting, yet kind of depressing facts regarding how much we stuff our face as football and musical performances are going on in the background.

Let’s start with how much we eat:

We eat more food, only on Thanksgiving. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Super Bowl is the second largest food consumption day in America.

A food we pretty much all think of with football is pizza. So, in case you didn’t know, we eat a boatload of pizza during the Super Bowl:

Pizza. According to the folks from the coupon website, RetailMeNot.com, Americans will buy 12.5 million pizzas on Super Bowl Sunday, with an average order value of $26.45.

Another way to look at how much pizza will be consumed over Super Bowl weekend…

  • In mid-January, Pizza Hut announced that they expected to hire 11,000 employees in time for the Super Bowl. (The company is also in the midst of a major expansion.)
  • Hungry Howie’s, a pizzeria with over 550 locations in 21 states, predicts that they’ll sell 200,600 pizzas on Super Bowl Sunday – 33,600 more than they would on a typical Sunday. And for those who like numbers, that translates into 61,800 pounds of cheese, 7,632 gallons of sauce and 93 tons of dough.
  • The people at the delivery food website DoorDash.com tell me that last year, orders from pizza places increased by 16 percent on Super Bowl Sunday, compared to a normal Sunday. (Actually, that doesn’t seem like a huge spike, which is kind of interesting and may just speak to who orders from DoorDash. For instance, deliveries from sports bars jumped 34 percent over a typical Sunday.)

Next on the popular food list is chicken wings. The National Chicken Council estimates that Americans will eat 1.33 BILLION chicken wings:

Chicken wings. Over the Super Bowl weekend, according to the National Chicken Council’s annual report, Americans are set to eat 1.33 billion chicken wings, which is up two percent (or 30 million chicken wings) from last year.

Drilling down, a little more…

  • The chicken wings chain, Buffalo Wild Wings, sent me their Super Bowl numbers, and the amount of food they sell on Super Bowl Sunday is striking. According to Karim Webb, who owns several franchises of BWW and is on several of the corporations advisory boards, each BWW sells approximately 6,000 wings on a typical weekend. But over the Super Bowl weekend, that number jumps to 13,500.
  • Wing Zone, an Atlanta-based restaurant chain that specializes in buffalo wings, expects to sell around 450,000 chicken wings nationwide this Super Bowl Sunday, up from the 411,611 wings they sold on Super Bowl Sunday in 2016. On a typical Sunday, they sell a little over 100,000 wings (for comparison’s sake, they sold 132,674 wings nationwide on January 8, 2017 and 108,071 wings on October 23, 2016).
  • Buffalo Wings & Rings not surprisingly reports a huge jump as well. The restaurant chain nationwide typically has over 9,000 orders of traditional wings and close to 8,000 boneless wings on Super Bowl Sunday – compared to around 3,700 traditional wings and 5,200 boneless wings on an average day.

Before we close out, we can’t forget nachos:

Nachos and cheese. To underscore my point that the Super Bowl truly is like Christmas for some business owners, Professor Thom’s is a Patriots bar in New York City, and the owner, Pete Levin, estimates that the Super Bowl weekend accounts for almost 75 percent of the bar’s food sales for the year.

He says that customers will eat more than 150 pounds of cheese over Super Bowl weekend. During any other typical weekend, customers consumer an average of 10 to 15 pounds of cheese, according to Levin.

All of these facts are interesting, but I hope I forget them on Sunday. I just want to eat nachos, chicken wings, and pizza while not thinking about the consequences that come with that.

[Forbes]

About Ryan Williamson

Ryan is a recent graduate of the University of Missouri and has recently returned to his Minnesota roots. He previously has worked for the Columbia Missourian, KFAN radio in Minneapolis and BringMeTheNews.com. Feel free to email me at rwilliamson29 AT Gmail dot com.