Football fans, rejoice! You won’t have to go without your cherished chicken wings this year because the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) anticipates a sharp price decline.
The USDA reported that chicken wing prices reached a high of $3.25 per pound in May 2021, but this July, the price fell to $1.68 per pound, reaching the lowest monthly average since May 2020.
Chicken wings were in high demand during the COVID-19 pandemic, with plenty of people working from home making good use of food-delivery apps like DoorDash and UberEats.
Additionally, restaurants had to pivot and rework their operations and offerings to satisfy the delivery demand. Still, chicken wings were an easy appetizer for all kinds of restaurants to stick on the menu for dine-in customers.
However, labor shortages and supply chain issues caused the price of wings to eventually rise, and as prices rose, some chain restaurants pulled wings from their menus, replacing them with boneless wings and chicken thighs.
Chicken wing enthusiasts can rest easy as more reasonable prices could encourage restaurants to restore the sports-fan favorite.
“So with that, we saw a swift decline in the price of wings to the prices that we have today, a little bit of seasonality as well as we ended the football and basketball season,” stated Pilgrim’s Pride CEO Fabio Sandri on an earnings conference call in late July.
A July press release from the National Chicken Council showed that even with inflation, consumers continue to turn to chicken, buying just as much today as six months ago.
The release noted that 99% of respondents in the council’s chicken poll said they consumed fresh chicken more than once per month, and 88% said they did so more than once per week over the previous six months.