How many wings would a woodchuck fling?

Well hey there, February!

Though not traditionally a month of strong sales — being shortchanged a few days makes a big difference to the monthly bottom line — February is home to two major food events: the Superbowl and Valentine’s Day.

In The perfect match: Super Bowl and chicken wings, Vancouver restaurateur Sammy Hussein (Sammy’s Hot Wings) puts it simply: “Super Bowl is one of the biggest days we have.”

Chains echo this experience:
 

For Canadian chain Pizza Pizza, the televised event is expected to translate into such a high volume of orders, the company is recommending that customers place their requests online before game day to beat the rush.  Last year, Pizza Pizza restaurants across the country sold more than 200,000 chicken wings for Super Bowl, chief marketing officer Pat Finelli says. In comparison, the company typically sells between 70,000 and 100,000 wings on a regular Sunday.

Similarly, Boston Pizza’s Canadian locations recorded a 55-per-cent increase in its in-restaurant sales of wings during Super Bowl last year, compared with a typical Sunday. For takeout orders, chicken-wing sales jumped to 108 per cent above normal, says Perry Schwartz, Boston Pizza’s director of communications.

Nine days later, chicken gives way to chocolate.  In the U.S., consumers report plans to open their wallets along with their hearts this Valentine’s Day, with 46% planning to visit their favorite restaurants to celebrate the holiday, up from 39% last year (source: American Expres Spending & Saving Tracker).

Less popular than wings, pizza and heart-shaped ravioli?  Woodchuck, aka: whistle-pig, aka: land-beaver, aka: groundhog.  Less popular, but reportedly quite tasty — apparently a vegetarian diet and innate sciophobia make for tender victuals.

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Gridiron grub: when football and food collide

Anyone who knows me knows that I have questionable taste in films, as evidenced by the fact that I know this exchange from Coming To America by heart:

Prince Akeem: Sir, did you happen to catch the professional football contest on television last night?
Cleo McDowell:  No, I didn’t.
Prince Akeem: Oh sir, the Giants of New York took on the Packers of Green Bay.  And in the end, the Giants triumphed by kicking an oblong ball made of pigskin through a big “H.”  It was a most ripping victory.
Cleo McDowell:  Son.
Prince Akeem: Yes?
Cleo McDowell:  If you want to keep working here, stay off the drugs.
Prince Akeem: Yes.

And you’re thinking, “And that’s relevant to restaurants … how, exactly?”

Well, aside from the fact that the Prince is, as he speaks these words, working at McDowell’s, a thinly disguised homage to another popular chain — “Look … me and the McDonald’s people got this little misunderstanding. See, they’re McDonald’s … I’m McDowell’s.  They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs.  They got the Big Mac, I got the Big Mick.  We both got two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, but their buns have sesame seeds.  My buns have no seeds.” — the real reason I’m pulling this one out of the mental archives is because this very weekend, the Packers of Green Bay are taking on the Steelers of Pittsburgh in what I’ve been told is a rather important match: the Super Bowl.

What’s on the menu?

Last-minute planners can glean some inspiration from Ed Levine’s Top 10 Super Bowl Snacks, courtesy of Serious Eats: New York.  Ed’s picks range from the traditional (BBQ wings) to the oversized (six-foot long pizza bianca), with a nod to ethnic specialties (spanikopita, bo ssäm (slow roasted pork shoulder)), all sourced from NYC restaurants.

Of course, most operators have been planning their own Super Bowl strategies for months, as evidenced by this article from Associated Press: Pie-makers aim for pizza Super Bowl action.  Some amazing stats about Super Pizza Sunday:

• according to the editor-in-chief of Pizza Today, game day is one of the five big pizza days of the year, along with Halloween, the day before Thanksgiving, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day

• delivery and take-out are the real winners, as the game’s long duration — three or more hours — discourages sit-down sales

• Papa John’s, an American chain, expects to sell one million pizzas this Sunday, making it their biggest day of the year (and also their busiest: deliveries will involve 300,000 miles of travel, or 1.3 round trips to the moon)

• Papa John’s began their Super Bowl Sunday prep back in Decemeber, “with contingency supply plans in place and hourly plans laid out in preparation” — a good thing since the chain will be shipping “over 2 million pounds of cheese through its 10 distribution centers along with 350,000 pounds of pepperoni” in advance of game day.

(An interesting aside for Canadian fresh pizza makers:

According to CRFA’s latest news release re: dairy prices, the Canadian Dairy Commission has once again decided to increase the price of industrial milk used to make cheese and other products, driving up costs for restaurants that use dairy products in their menu items, “especially those that purchase mozzarella cheese for fresh pizza.”

Says CRFA President and CEO Garth Whyte: “When restaurant owners buy cheese, they are forced under the supply management system to pay prices that are 30 per cent higher than frozen pizza makers pay for the exact same product.”  That’s in addition to the fact that frozen pizza remains untaxed while customers are forced to pay up to 13% tax on pizzas ordered from restaurants, thanks to the GST/HST.

Every year it seems that the Commissioners of Canadian Dairy make an end run around the Restaurants of Canadian Pizza.  How much longer before fair dairy prices “touch down” in Canadian restaurants, grocery stores and kitchens, we wonder?)

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