Chicken wings are among consumers’ favorite foodservice offerings at convenience stores, and they provide operators with ample opportunity for menu customization and innovation.
Well-suited for off-premise consumption, wings surged in popularity across the foodservice landscape during the pandemic, with menu penetration increasing from 42.9% in the third quarter of 2020 to 44.5% in the fourth quarter of 2021, according to Ignite menu data. Entire restaurant concepts, including delivery-only ghost kitchen brands, have been built around menus of fried chicken wings.
For c-stores, wings represent all-day snacking and/or meal opportunities and are easy for consumers to share and to eat on the go. They can also carry a variety of flavors, either through seasonings incorporated into the breading or glaze, or through dipping sauces served on the side.
Some of the most popular restaurant LTOs of the past year have featured a broad variety of wing flavors, according to Ignite menu data from the fourth quarter of 2021 through the second quarter of 2022. These include Korean BBQ, sweet bacon glaze, honey, mustard, garlic, sriracha and chipotle, along with various combinations of those flavors and others.
Chicken wings clearly offer a highly versatile vehicle for flavor experimentation and innovation, ripe for driving menu excitement and sales at convenience stores.
The c-store channel has runway for growth when it comes to wings. Only 28% of c-store operators offer wings on their foodservice menus, according to Technomic research as of the second quarter of 2022, compared to 55% of supermarkets and 59.2% of QSRs. Across the total foodservice landscape, wings appeared on 44.3% of all foodservice menus in the second quarter, up 0.4% year-over-year.
Wings also represent an opportunity for c-store retailers to satisfy consumers’ interest in snacking. Other than beverages, hot grab-and-go items are the most popular foodservice category for snacks, outpacing cold grab-and-go, made-to-order, and roller-grill items, according to Technomic’s April 2022 C-Store Operator Update.
Young consumers in particular are becoming more interested in purchasing foodservice snack items from c-stores, according to Technomic’s Q4 2021 C-Store Market Brief. Nearly two-thirds (65%) of consumers aged 18-34 said they purchase foodservice snacks at least once per week from c-stores, and 28% of consumers in that age group said they are buying foodservice snacks from c stores more often than they did before the pandemic.
“Operators should evaluate their portable foodservice snack portfolio and identify any holes in their offerings for this key time of the day,” Technomic concluded in its 2021 C-Store Market Annual Report.
In order to capitalize on these trends, retailers ideally need foodservice solutions that optimize their menu opportunities with restaurant-quality offerings, without sending their labor costs through the roof. By working with trusted suppliers like Tyson Convenience, operators can tap into consumers’ growing interest in flavorful, hot grab-and-go items like wings.
Tyson Convenience offers fully cooked and ready to cook from frozen wing varieties from Tyson® and Tyson Red Label® brands. These wing offerings can be easily incorporated into c-stores’ menus and can help reduce time and labor costs. Some can be finished in a fryer, then tossed in Buffalo sauce, for example, while others come with seasonings and glazes already incorporated. These include varieties such as oven-roasted, applewood-smoked, hot ‘n spicy and others, in a range of sizes and price points to meet the demands of customers. Tyson® and Tyson Red Label® fully cooked wings are also available in both boneless and bone-in varieties, allowing for additional options for menu customization.
Visit Tyson Foodservice for more information about how to grow foodservice sales with the versatility and consumer appeal of Tyson® chicken wings. To explore additional c-store offerings, visit Tyson Convenience for more!
This post is sponsored by Tyson Convenience