Supermarkets will be the big winners of this year’s big game. And the losers? Definitely the chickens.

The National Chicken Council’s 2017 Wing report estimates Americans will eat 1.33 billion wings on Super Bowl Sunday.

That’s up 2 percent from last year and up more than 6.5 percent from 2015, revealing a steady climb of America’s unofficial favorite football party food.

About 25 percent of those will be purchased at local supermarkets.

Originally reported by Supermarket News, Philip Tracey, spokesman for the New England division of Stop & Shop said, “In the two weeks leading up to Sunday’s game, Stop & Shop will sell more than one million chicken wings.”

Visualize just how many wings that is.

  • — If you laid 1.33 billion wings end to end (think how much delicious sauce you’d have to lick from your fingers in this process!), they would stretch from Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass. to the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia almost 80 times.
  • — 1.33 billion wings would circle the Earth almost three times.

Supermarket delis identified ready-made hot foods as an area for growth, and they have been proven correct. In recent years, they have honed their skills and their flavors to produce restaurant quality foods. This helps them compete for a share of the more than $14 billion in food spending the National Restaurant Federation predicts will be spent on this Sunday’s game.

About three out of four consumers polled in a NRF survey said they planned to watch the game. Of those, about 80 percent said they also planed to spend money on food and beverages. About half (45.2 percent) of consumers responded they would be either throwing or attending a Super Bowl party this year.

The projected $14.1 billion will be down from the past two years when spending reached it’s record peak in 2016 at $15.5 billion. The decrease is on target with declining NFL viewership overall this season.

The NRF’s annual Super Bowl Spending Survey was conducted by Prosper Insights & Analytics. The poll contacted 7,591 consumers.

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Meghan is a full-time writer exploring the fun facts behind food. She lives a healthy lifestyle but lives for breakfast, dessert and anything with marinara. She’s thrown away just as many meals as she’s proud of.