How to Solve a Chicken Wing Mystery

At a whopping 276 in 12 minutes, Australian James Webb won the wings eating competition in Buffalo on September 1, 2024.

However, you might wonder (as did I) how they select the winner when everyone strips chicken off a bone–some more and some less. They solve the problem by weighing the wings before and the remains after to calculate how many chicken wings were really guzzled.

I was happy to see that, ahead of a slew of male champs, a woman came in second:

Chicken Wing Prices

We continue with a mystery.

Why would egg prices soar but not chicken wings? The answer here is the chicken.

Just last year, farmers had to cull 38 million egg laying chickens; this year already the numbers touched 13 million.  As you know, with less supply, price goes up.

Chicken wings, however, come from broilers. Raised on different farms, the egg layers and broilers are separate. Because a broiler is on a farm for just seven weeks, there is less time to get sick. And even when they do, replacement is faster than for egg layers.

Below, my arrow points to the broilers that provide our wings. You can see that broiler prices have barely budged:

Our Bottom Line: Wing Demand and Supply

Although during the NFL playoffs wing demand was up 12% from the previous month, their price remained below a five-year average. Meanwhile, the price estimate for the 1.47 billion wings we might eat for this year’s Super Bowl is 7.2% more than last year.

Like eggs, wing prices take us back to where they came from. Broilers are raised for breast meat demand, not their wings (just 6-9% of the bird). Because the boneless wings produced by the largest wings supplier come from breast meat, his costs depend on the market for breast meat.

So, to solve our price mystery, eggs and wings come from completely different chickens.

My sources and more: The Hustle and the Bleacher Report had the facts about the wing eating competitions. More crucially, NPR solved the egg/wing mystery and the University of Minnesota and Axios had current egg data. Still, for the most knowledgeable discussion about wings and chicken, I recommend Bloomberg’s “Beak Capitalism” podcast series.