What's on your Super Bowl menu? Chips? Dips? Beer? Pizza? If you nodded at that last one you are far from alone. The Super Bowl is one of the five biggest pizza purchasing days of the year; the others being Halloween, New Year's Eve, New Year's Day, and the day before Thanksgiving (because nothing gets a tummy prepped for a huge turkey feast like large quantities of dough and cheese).
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On average, pizzerias across the country will see a 35% rise in sales Super Bowl Sunday. The NFL's official pizza provider, Papa John's, expects to sell a million pizzas this Sunday, which would make it their biggest day of the year. In order to prepare for the onslaught of order they are stocking up on over 2 million pounds of cheese and 350,000 pounds of pepperoni. According to Tony Thompson, Papa John's Food Service president, their delivery staff will travel 300,000 miles (300 times farther than The Proclaimers offered to walk or 1.3 round trips to the moon). Domino's Pizza expects to deliver about 1.2 million pizzas while their competitor, Pizza Hut, predicts that they will sell around 2 million pizzas. It's not just football fans on the homeland that will be snacking on pizza. Uno Chicago Grill along with another private label pizza company will be sending 7,000 pizzas overseas to U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Korea.
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Orders, though larger, remain standard. The past few years have seen a rise in non-traditional toppings (sun-dried tomatoes, pesto, bbq chicken, avocado, etc) but the old standbys of pepperoni and sausage are still the favorites. Why pizza over other cheesy treats? "It's a communal food. It's meant to be shared. It's inexpensive and everyone likes it," Jeremy White, the editor-in-chief of Pizza Today magazine told The Washington Post.
Will you be dining on a pizza pie this Sunday? What's your traditional Super Bowl menu?
