The Lowdown on the Chicken Wing Shortage and Anthony's Joliet

Chicken wings are a staple food for all seasons and sports that will please even the pickiest eaters in Joliet. Whether it’s watching a summertime baseball game under the sun or cozying up on your couch for a late-fall football game, chicken wings are a fan favorite. And it’s no wonder - with tons of different ways to prepare and spice them up, the possibilities are endless. 

But something threw a big ol’ wrench in the world’s love for chicken wings - a shortage that forced many businesses (ours included) to put a stop to chicken wing specials and even stop selling them all together! We wanted to get to the bottom of this issue and find out for ourselves: what the heck is going on with chicken wings? 

Why is there a chicken wing shortage? 

It turns out; things are a bit more complicated than they may seem. For starters, COVID-19 put a tremendous amount of stress on the chicken industry. Options for dining became limited to cooking or ordering out, and it seems that everyone had chicken on the brain amid lockdown, or more specifically, chicken wings! Chicken was dubbed “The Nation’s #1 Quarantine Protein” by the National Chicken Council. And with each chicken only having two wings, it’s no wonder that things started to get a bit tricky. After all, chickens aren’t raised just for their wings. Producers have to sell all of their other parts too! 

Another issue was a massive and rare winter storm that happened in February this year in Texas. The devastating storm resulted in the death of millions of chickens and hundreds of thousands of destroyed fruit groves. And boy, did this storm have poor timing because it happened right around Super Bowl Sunday - the biggest wing-eating day of the year! 

And that’s not all. With all of these events piling on top of each other, that’s when the surge began to happen. In April of 2020, the price per pound of an entire chicken was around $2.80. Prices then increased to $3.30 for the rest of the year but began to spike again in January of 2021 to $3.99. In May, the cost of chicken increased even further to a whopping $5.99 a pound! That’s a price increase of about 87% from April 2020. 

When will the chicken wing shortage end? 

Unfortunately, there isn’t an end in sight to the shortage of chicken wings, which puts a huge damper on all of us wing-lovers out there. Even major chicken wing distributors like Bojangles and Buffalo Wild Wings feel the very real effects of the shortage, so you can imagine how hard this shortage hits small businesses like us!  

So while our chicken wing special may be on pause, we’ve got TONS of other mouth-watering food that’ll fill the tasty void the chicken wing shortage has created in all of our wing and flap-loving hearts. Come on by and taste for yourself! And don’t worry - our chicken wing special isn’t gone forever; it’s just on hiatus until the shortage ends! 

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