Why is Chicago Arena and Stadium Food So Bad?

When’s the last time you went to a sports arena and said, OMG, that’s the best meal I’ve ever had!

The answer is never.

No doubt maybe you looked forward to a bowl of helmet nachos or a grilled sausage at the baseball game. Maybe they were even decent. Although if my recent experiences at Guaranteed Rate Field are any indication, that bun was either stale or cold, and the helmet nachos took 17 minutes to snag from a small overwhelmed kiosk.

Doug “Hot Doug” Sohn, the famous former encased meats purveyor used to pack his own sausages and bring them to the Cubs game because as he joked the Wrigley dogs were so bad they were probably moldering in a hot box below home plate before the game started. Sohn did what he could to fix this personally in recent years by launching a Hot Doug’s kiosk in the Wrigley bleachers.

Ballpark cuisine can give us carb on carb violence at best, but it’s generally never memorable.

How did we get here?

1)        Stadiums have a captive audience. Barred from bringing in food and drink, sports fans have to eat what you provide at the venue.

2)        The scale of cooking for tens of thousands of people at a high-level is an almost impossible task

3)        The concessions at arenas and stadiums are run by oligopoly of corporate titans like Aramark, Sodexo Live, Delaware North, and Levy.

4)        In Chicago competition is even worse, Levy has a hand in all the major stadiums with Delaware North handling some of the concessions at Guaranteed Rate. There is no real competition or incentive system to get better.

5)        The media process of reporting on and reviewing concession options is broken.

My expertise lies in the fourth point so that’s where we’ll focus.

Ultimately as we’ve established here many times at The Hunger, a lot of food media and influencers cozy up to the powers that be and rarely see a free meal they don’t like. Add in a big dollar corporate interests and a dose of pop culture and you’ve got the perfect intersection of drivers that court breathless coverage and the subsequent likes, follows, and shares, that drive the world.