National Chicken Wing Day may have been cooked up in Buffalo, New York, but it's become a nationwide excuse to indulge in the dish.
Back in 1977, then-mayor of Buffalo, New York Stan Makowski, proclaimed July 29 as National Chicken Wing Day to celebrate that “thousands of pounds of chicken wings are consumed by Buffalonians in restaurants and taverns throughout the city each week."
That's a smidgen of the amount of wings now consumed annually in the U.S. Americans ordered more than 1.2 billion servings of wings in the 12 months ending June 2025, which is down 1.5% from the year before, according to research firm Circana CREST tracking data.
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The history of chicken wings still spices up a debate, but the dish arose in the 1960s and flourished in the 1980s as the cooking of whole chickens declined and consumers began preferring chicken breasts in entrées.
