National Hot Dog Day in July celebrates a summertime staple on a bun. Enjoy one piping hot and add some relish and mustard to go! One thing we want to know – is it a sandwich or not?
- Over 25 million hot dogs are sold at baseball stadiums each year.
- That’s enough to circle the bases 36,000 times.
- 7-Eleven sells the most grilled hot dogs in North America – 100 million annually.
- Sausage is one of the oldest forms of processed food, having been mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey as far back as the 9th Century B.C.
- The average hot dog is consumed in 6.1 bites. (average-sized mouth tested)
- From Memorial Day to Labor Day every year, Americans typically consume 7 billion hot dogs. That’s 818 hot dogs consumed every second.
- According to the National Sausage and Hot Dog Council, the most commonly used condiment is mustard which is the topping preferred by 32% of Americans. The second-place finisher, with 23% of the vote is ketchup and chili takes the third-place spot with 17% of the vote.
- The true origin of the hot dog is a mystery.
- Frankfurt, Germany claims to be the originator of the hot dog and celebrated the hot dog’s 500th birthday in 1987
- There are various theories about where the name “hot dog” actually came from. The most common attribution, however, is to a cartoonist named Tad Dorgan, who drew a cartoon depicting the “hot dachshund sausages” being sold at a New York baseball game and called them “hot dogs” because he could not spell dachshund.
- In 2018, consumers spent more than $3 billion on hot dogs in U.S. supermarkets
- Los Angeles residents consume more hot dogs than any other city
- A hot dog is a sausage but a sausage isn’t necessarily a hot dog
- Miller Park in Milwaukee is the only Major League Baseball ballpark that sells more sausages than hot dogs per season
- Mickey Mouse’s first on-screen words were “Hot Dog!”
- President Franklin D. Roosevelt served hot dogs to King George and Queen Elizabeth. The king ate two
- Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev ate a hot dog during the first visit of a Soviet Premier to the US in 1959 and admitted that Americans had the Soviets beat at sausage making
- Americans say the celebrity they’d most like to enjoy a hot dog with is Betty White
- In 1871, Charles Feltman, a German-American restaurateur opened up the first Coney Island hot dog stand selling 3,684 dachshund sausages in a milk roll during his first year in business.
- In 1893, sausages became the standard fare at baseball parks.
- The year, 1893, was an important date in hot dog history. In Chicago that year, the World’s Columbian Exposition brought hordes of visitors who consumed large quantities of sausages sold by vendors. People liked this food that was easy to eat, convenient and inexpensive.
- The man most responsible for popularizing the hot dog in the United States was Nathan Handwerker, a Jewish immigrant from Poland. An immigrant from Eastern Europe, he and his wife Ida borrowed $300 from friends to start their business on Coney Island in 1916. By the Depression, Nathan’s hot dogs were known throughout the United States.
- Nathan’s hot dogs were reportedly gangster Al Capone’s favorite food
- On July 4th, Americans will enjoy 150 million hot dogs
- NASA has approved hot dogs as a regular item on Apollo moon flights, Skylab missions and space shuttle flights.
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