Toilet paper is hard to find. Hand sanitizer is only available if you make it yourself. Some retailers have even begun limiting the number of boxed goods customers can purchase at one time. But fear not. There’s at least one essential item stores won’t be running out of any time soon: chicken wings.
The coronavirus pandemic has inadvertently created a chicken wing surplus.
Wing sales and production always ramp up around February and March — first, for the Super Bowl and then for the NCAA’s “March Madness” college basketball tournament. But as the virus began to spread throughout the United States in early March, the NCAA agreed it was in the best interests of fans and players alike to cancel the tournament.
This cancellation directly affected the supply chain. Poultry producers sold more than 1.2 million pounds of wings at the beginning of the week of March 17 — the week the tournament was supposed to start. By the end of March, that number had fallen to 433,000 pounds, as had the price of wings in general. Typically, wings can sell anywhere from $1.50 per pound to $2 if they’re in high demand. Now, they’re selling for a little more than $1 per pound.
“The basketball, it’s for real,” Erik Oosterwijk, president of Baltimore’s Fells Point Wholesale Meats, told the Washington Post. “The basketball didn’t happen. People are not going to restaurants, and there’s a lot of excess.”
Business closures have only exacerbated this problem, according to Will Sawyer, the lead animal protein economist at CoBank. The major wing chains, such as Buffalo Wild Wings and Wingstop, have had to close down thousands of franchises, which means there are fewer large buyers in the market right now.
The poultry industry has tried to adapt to this surplus in a few ways. Some have thought about closing processing and packaging plants temporarily, while other poultry producers have toyed with reducing the number of hatched chicken eggs, or limiting the chickens’ food supply, so they develop at a slower pace. Retailers have also begun freezing excess chicken wings.
These solutions might work, or they might not. Either way, we don’t need to worry about a wing shortage any time soon, according to Sawyer. “That is fact,” he said. “That is real.”
