Suds & Snacks Day nearly upon us

It's almost Suds & Snacks Day, better known as Super Bowl Sunday. For the non-believers, SB XLIII (43) will be played this coming Sunday when the Arizona Cardinals take on the Pittsburgh Steelers in Tampa Bay.

According to the folks at Nielsen, who measure everything from TV viewership to consumption of corn chips, mass merchandiser stores such as Wal-Mart recorded snack sales of $595 million in the two weeks leading up to last year’s game, up 5% from the previous year.

To wash down all that junk food, Super Bowl Sunday ranks as the eighth-highest beer-selling day of the year, with 51.7 million cases sold last year. That's behind the No. 1 selling day, July 4th.

And where is most of the beer sold? In the city that hosts the game and in the two cities that are home to the participating teams.

Eatswise, potato chips topped the list with a sales volume of nearly $147 million, although that's a slight dropoff from the prior year while tortilla chips jumped 20% to come in No. 2 at $125.5 million.

Once past the beer gut .. er, glut ... wine is doing better with Super Bowl Sunday drinkers. According to Nielsen, NFL fans spent 14% more on wine in 2007 than in 2006, outpacing the U.S. wine growth overall by 14%.

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