Super Bowl Sunday: The Ultimate Food & Bev Consumption Event
Super Bowl Sunday is on our doorsteps, and while the Philadelphia Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs prepare to battle for the National Football League’s championship on Feb. 9, consumers are also preparing to watch the big game — and eat and drink to their hearts’ content.
Super Bowl parties can be legendary or low-key, but there’s always snacks, drinks and all sorts of foods that get consumed in mass quantities, whether people go out to watch the game at a bar or restaurant, or stay in and watch with friends and family.
According to the National Retail Federation (NRF), Super Bowl LIX (that’s “59” for anyone who doesn’t want to do the Roman numeral conversion) will be watched by a record 203.4 million adults in the U.S., as found in the NRF and Prosper Insights & Analytics’ 2025 Super Bowl Spending Survey. More than half of those people (113.7 million) plan to throw or attend a party, and another 17.6 million will take in the game at a bar or restaurant.
For Super Bowl Sunday, the NRF says a record $18.6 billion will be spent on food, drinks, apparel, decorations and other purchases — or $91.58 per person. Of those surveyed, 81% said they’d be making food and beverage purchases for the big game, probably not surprising to hear for this industry.
The National Chicken Council each year projects the amount of chicken wings Americans will consume during the Super Bowl, and this year, NCC expects a 1.5% increase in wing consumption over last year.
In the annual Chicken Wing Report, NCC says 1.47 billion chicken wings will be polished off during Super Bowl LIX — around 20 million more than for Super Bowl LVIII in 2024. The fun part is visualizing exactly how many wings 1.47 billion really is, and NCC takes care of that for us every year.
For example, NCC says if every single player in the NFL ate 50 wings a day (and was immortal) it would take them collectively 720 years to eat 1.47 billion. All those wings laid end-to-end would stretch to and from GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium (the Chiefs’ home field in Kansas City, Mo.) to Lincoln Financial Field (the Eagles’ home field in Philadelphia) about 63 times — or they could circle the Earth more than three times.
Beyond wings, pizza is a heavily favored meal for many viewers. NielsenIQ cites data saying 52% of Americans serve pizza at their parties — and adds that Forbes reported more than 12.5 million pizzas (more than $130 million in sales) are sold during Super Bowl weekend.
Circana noted in an email to Food Processing that regular soft drinks and tortilla chips were the top-selling categories in 2024, with refrigerated dips up 9% on volume, and processed chicken and uncooked meats (not including poultry) up 8%. Circana anticipates an average of $44 will be spent on food and beverage, up 3% from last year.
We certainly could go on and on — data around food and beverage consumption and purchase in relation to the Super Bowl is almost its own game to watch. One final thing to know, however, is something food and beverage companies might aspire more toward in the future than the present.
That is, according to the NielsenIQ report we saw, 84% of Super Bowl viewers said they usually pay “a lot” of attention or “some” attention to the commercials. And if you’ve been reading Food Processing’s web site for the last few years, you know that we fit in with that 84%.
Come back next week to read the annual review of the food and beverage commercials by senior editor Andy Hanacek and digital editor Maggie MacHale. And see if this prediction — Eagles 23, Chiefs 21 — turns out to be right! (Apologies, somewhat, to our regional sales manager Betsy Norberg!)
