Every fall the same argument starts in the same parking lots. Wings or chili. Brisket or burgers. Whatever your uncle insists on bringing.
So we settled it with data. We tracked Google search interest for 60 tailgating foods across the 2025-26 football season (both college and NFL), August through February, all fifty states plus D.C., then scored every term against key dates including opening weekend, rivalry Saturday, the playoffs, the Super Bowl.
Four foods run the country. Wings, chili, dip, and chips are the only terms in the set that finish first anywhere, and between them they take all 51 states. Everything else, the brisket, the pigs in a blanket, is fighting for scraps.
Key Findings
- Nationwide, Wings are the most popular tailgating food, narrowly chased by Chili.
- If you're tailgating in Wyoming, Montana, or Kansas, do not expect a wing platter. Chili won the outright #1 spot across the entire Mountain West, and Wings failed to win a single state west of Nebraska.
- California is the only state where "chips" win.
- Dip pulled off a massive upset on the biggest day of the year, beating Wings outright on Super Bowl Sunday.
- Chili is a cold-weather play, peaking on late-October and January Sundays, while Wings hold steady from August through December.
The Most Popular Tailgating Foods Nationally
Ranked by median search interest across the 12 key event dates.
| Rank | Food |
| 1 | Wings |
| 2 | Chili |
| 3 | Dip |
| 4 | Chips |
| 5 | Mac and cheese |
| 6 | Meatballs |
| 7 | Brisket |
| 7 | Queso |
| 9 | Chicken wings |
| 10 | Hot dogs |
| 11 | Pulled pork |
| 12 | Buffalo chicken dip |
| 13 | Pasta salad |
| 14 | Gumbo |
| 15 | Nachos |
At the other end: tortilla pinwheels registered zero interest on all twelve dates. Reuben dip managed a single nonzero reading all season.
Winner By Event
| Event | Date | Winner |
| CFB Week 0 | Aug 23 | Wings |
| CFB Week 1 (Labor Day) | Aug 28 – Sep 1 | Wings |
| NFL Kickoff Game | Sep 4 | Wings |
| NFL Week 1 Sunday | Sep 7 | Wings |
| Thanksgiving | Nov 27 | Mac and cheese |
| CFB Rivalry Saturday | Nov 29 | Chili |
| CFB Conference Championships | Dec 5 – 6 | Wings |
| CFP First Round | Dec 19 – 20 | Dip |
| NFL Regular Season Ends | Jan 4 | Chili |
| NFL Playoffs Begin | Jan 10 | Wings |
| CFP National Championship | Jan 19 | Chili |
| Super Bowl LX | Feb 8 | Dip |
The Most Popular Tailgating Food In Every State
Only four foods win any states.
Wings – 26 states: Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia.
Wings take the entire Southeast except Kentucky, the whole mid-Atlantic corridor, and the industrial Midwest. Notably, wings beat brisket, carne asada, and barbacoa in Texas.
Chili – 18 states + D.C: Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Washington, Wyoming, and the District of Columbia.
Chili sweeps the Mountain West and Pacific Northwest without exception — wings do not win a single state between the Rockies and the coast — plus the Upper Midwest and two New England holdouts.
Dip – 5 states: Iowa, Maine, New Hampshire, West Virginia, Wisconsin.
Chips – 1 state: California, the only state where the plainest term on the list finishes first.
The Menu Is Set
Now that you've settled the food spread, there's still the point spread. Check out the best NFL betting promos before Sunday, or grab the latest college football betting promos if your Saturdays matter more.
Unfortunately, we have no wing promos to offer or recipes for dips. Maybe you can tailgate California style and just pull up with a bag of chips.
Methodology
Sixty search terms pulled from Google Trends via the SerpApi Trends API, restricted to the Food & Drink category to strip out non-food query volume (the filter cut "wings" by 41% while leaving "chili" and "queso" essentially unchanged, evidence it was removing airline and hockey traffic, not applying a blanket discount). All terms volume was then examined for volume on big tailgating events.
State winners come from per-term state indices converted into geographic distributions and rescaled by each term's national season average, which makes the 60 terms comparable both within a state and across states. No terms were excluded.
All figures are relative search interest, not sales, servings, or grocery volume. Search interest tells you what people are looking up, usually a recipe or take out food option, which is a good proxy for what's getting made and what people are actively seeking out.
You can see the full dataset here.
