Adam carb: I’m curious to hear your recommended strategies for portions of chicken wings, such as offering a 12-count deal versus a 10-count offering. I’d also be interested to hear any feedback about the prospect of offering a snack-size (six-count) portion of wings. If the snack size is a six-count, does it make sense, operationally speaking, to offer a 12-count (instead of 10) as the regular size, keeping the increments the same? Or do you go with 12 instead of 10 in order to get a few more dollars per order?

 

d9phoenix: We offer a five-piece wing deal. Any multiple of that is just the five-piece repeated. We don’t offer a 10-piece as a menu item. This keeps things simple and eliminates the mistakes that employees make when preparing the larger orders (such as remembering to add all of the extras).

 

Steve: Currently, we accept orders of six and 12 pieces. Customers get a 50-cent discount on the 12-wing deal, as opposed to ordering two six-wing deals. We currently offer a jumbo party wing, but we may switch to a whole wing. We actually just purchased a Cookshack smoker today! Once we see how different styles of wings come out of the smoker, we’ll decide if we need to rethink how to portion them and, of course, how to price them, too.

 

Durbancic: We switched to selling wings by the pound, listing the approximate count of pieces on our menus. This helps to solve the problem of inconsistency in wing sizes—it’s better for us and for the customer. We offer half-pound, one-pound and two-pound sizes. My advice is to keep it simple in order to eliminate mistakes.

 

Pizzapiratespp: We sell our chicken wings by the 10-count, but we also offer a five-count deal. Most of the chains in our area have switched to an eight-count offer. One of our Pizza Pirates locations, meanwhile, offers a single wing for $1.10.  

 

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