Buffalo sauce orders jump 201% during Big Game week compared to a typical week, according to grocery delivery data Instacart published earlier this year. Shelf-stable dips climb even higher, up 227%, while queso spikes 196% and frozen chicken wings rise 123%. Instacart pulled these numbers from its own 2026 Snacktime Report, released in January around Super Bowl weekend, meaning it’s not new data, but it maps almost exactly onto the surge that’s about to start again as tailgate lots fill up and college and NFL football season kicks off this month. Game-day snacking doesn’t peak just once a year; the Big Game is simply Instacart’s biggest single measured spike, and the underlying pattern applies to any weekend with a marquee matchup on the schedule.
What makes the report useful heading into the fall isn’t just the buffalo sauce number itself, it’s what the data shows people are buying alongside it, and how differently regions snack once football’s actually on.
Buffalo sauce doesn’t travel alone
Instacart’s pairing data shows shoppers buying buffalo sauce are 886% more likely to also buy ranch dressing than they are during a random week, and 956% more likely to pick up chicken wings in the same order. Frozen chicken wings specifically see a 740% co-purchase lift. For anyone building a buffalo chicken dip, the pattern shows up there too: cream cheese purchases jump 319% alongside buffalo sauce, and canned chicken sees a 693% lift, evidence that plenty of game-day cooks are assembling dip from scratch rather than grabbing a tub of it pre-made.
Ranch dressing turns out to be the connective tissue across nearly all of it. Instacart’s report found ranch gets ordered 53% more often nationwide than the next most popular dip, French onion, making it the default companion to just about anything fried, breaded, or sauced that shows up on a game-day spread.
Why delivery data reads differently than a shelf report
Instacart’s numbers come from actual delivery and pickup orders rather than the point-of-sale scanner data that research firms like Circana typically report from. Coverage of the report noted that the underlying shift is less about pre-made snacks and more about Americans turning to home cooking for crowds on game day. That distinction matters here: order-level data captures what a shopper builds an entire cart around, not just which single items sold the most. Seeing cream cheese and canned chicken spike specifically alongside buffalo sauce only shows up clearly when you can track full carts and co-purchase patterns, a straight sales-by-category report would miss that a chunk of buffalo sauce buyers are assembling homemade dip rather than grabbing a tub of it pre-made off the shelf.
Regional tastes split sharply once you zoom in
Not every region snacks the same way. West Virginia orders ranch dressing at a rate 81% above the national average, the highest of any state Instacart measured, while Hawaii comes in 59% below average, the widest gap in the report. Geographically, queso dominates orders across the West and South, wings rule the Midwest and Northeast, and buffalo sauce itself peaks hardest in New York, which Instacart notes is fitting given Buffalo, New York is where the sauce originated. Tortilla chips, meanwhile, stay popular fairly evenly across the Mountain West and Plains states rather than clustering in one region.
The rest of the spread, and what’s in the cooler
Chips and dips weren’t the only categories moving. Tortilla chips rose 106% during Big Game week, salsa climbed 96%, potato chips increased 32%, French onion dip jumped 146%, and hot sauce orders rose 38%. On the drinks side, overall alcohol orders increased 10% for the weekend, with the sharpest growth in Mexican-style lagers, prosecco, unflavored tequila, light lager, and canned cocktails, a mix that suggests game-day drinking has broadened well past the beer-only stereotype.
None of this data is brand-new, Instacart built it around one specific Sunday in January, but grocery delivery patterns around football don’t reset themselves each week. The same dip-and-wings math that drove those spikes for the Super Bowl applies to any Sunday, or Saturday, with high stakes on the schedule, and tailgate season just started providing plenty of those. College kickoff weekends and early NFL Sundays tend to produce smaller versions of the same spike, spread across more weeks instead of concentrated into one. If your grocery cart hasn’t already started drifting toward ranch, wings, and something to dip them in, the data says it’s probably about to.
