The $1 hot dogs at Blue Jays games have been a stunning success — but are they actually making a profit?

The doors open at 5:30 p.m. and the hot dog sales start immediately. By 6 p.m. the stadium has sold 4,235.
The meat usually arrives at the Rogers Centre a few days before Loonie Dogs Night, delivered to a warehouse on the ground level behind right field. On game day, the wieners move up to a massive, central kitchen hidden on the so-called mezzanine level — a floor, totally off-limits to fans, tucked somewhere between the field and the 100 level. The kitchen has about 50 cooks on Tuesdays, and they start steaming hot dogs before the doors open. After that, they’re loaded into hot boxes and wheeled across the stadium to one of the 38 concession stands selling $1 hot dogs.
Each concession stand is responsible for putting the wieners into buns and wrapping them in foil. Staff behind the counter look like they can do dozens in a minute, with a kind of monastic calm, twisting and folding and stacking the hot dogs into a pile that is almost always getting smaller, like trying to fill a bathtub without a plug.
By the first pitch, sales were up to 25,542 hot dogs.
The Loonie Dogs Night promotion, every Tuesday the Blue Jays are in town, has transformed a typically slow night into one of the busiest, most anticipated days at the ballpark, selling more than a million hot dogs over the past three years.
At the same time, the promotion has puzzled hot dog vendors outside the stadium, as well as food industry bigwigs. The price is just too low. They all have theories. Something has to be going on, they say, some quiet handshake deal, some scheme, some loophole to allow them to sell a hot dog for a dollar, especially after years of high inflation have made almost everything more expensive. The fear, for some in the hot dog business, is this runaway promotion will distort the public perception of how much a hot dog really costs.
But will it? Or is it truly possible to make a profit on a $1 hot dog?
On Tuesday nights, the central kitchen can’t keep pace with hot dog demand on its own. So every concession stand is under orders to use every available cooking surface for wieners.
“If there’s a place that hot dogs can be cooked tonight, they will be cooked in that kitchen,” Michelle Seniuk, the Blue Jays vice-president of fan experience and concessions, told me just before the game started.
Demand for hamburgers drops on Loonie nights, so the stadium rebrands the hamburger stands as hot dog stands for Tuesdays only, commandeering their flat-top grills to cook dozens of wieners at a time. Staff cook hot dogs on every roller grill in the building. They use a pop-up kitchen, hidden behind curtains on the 500 level, and the Pizza Nova stalls. There are hot boxes parked in the middle of the concourse, with hot dogs stacked on sheet pans inside, staffed by two people, one taking payment with a POS machine, the other handing out orders.
As the gates opened for the first game in Toronto’s series against Baltimore on Tues., Aug. 6, Seniuk jotted out her best hot dog unit sales guess for a staff pool, which has been running among members of her department since the start of the promotion in 2019. Other departments have since joined, including people from the business strategy department.
“They’re very good at it,” she said.
The trick is to know the evening’s projected attendance. Critical decisions at the ballpark are based on that number. It helps determine how many staff are called in, how much beer is on hand, how many hot dogs are brought in.
On Aug. 6, the Rogers Centre was expecting just over 30,000 people, edging toward its total capacity of about 40,000.
Seniuk figured the crowd that night would be extra eager to outdo the previous Tuesday, which had set a record for the year with more than 69,000 hot dogs sold. So she doubled the attendance number and added a buffer for a guess of 67,482 dollar dogs (though the guess didn’t qualify for the pool, since she was distracted by our interview and missed the deadline).
Throughout the game, Seniuk was getting emails on her phone, each one just a number reporting the latest hot dog sales. It seemed like unnecessary information to clutter her inbox with, since the number is broadcast from the stadium’s point-of-sale system directly to a giant digital hot dog counter above right field.
“I just want it,” she said about the email updates.
Seniuk, who has worked with the Jays for more than a decade, keeps a radio with her during the game. For her, it is a beeping, squawking heart monitor for the entire operation. Crowd management staff call in when they spot a short line, so colleagues can direct people the right way. And the pit bosses at each concession stand are in charge of alerting a floor supervisor when their hot dog levels dip, so the supervisor can call the kitchen to send a hot box for restocking.
During our interview, Seniuk’s radio interrupted with a staff member calling in from the 500 level.
“Anyone in the 500s,” the voice said, “you can send people to 508, the Pizza Nova, the line is really short.”
Listening, Seniuk seemed proud.
She was on the team that dreamed up the dollar dog deal more than five years ago. They were looking for a way to get more fans into seats for sleepier weeknight games. Seniuk said the team researched for more than a year, meeting with executives at other MLB parks that do weekly dollar dog nights, including the Houston Astros, Chicago White Sox and Cleveland Guardians.
Some of the best advice was, basically, brace yourself.
“Have a plan,” she remembered someone at a rival team telling her. “Don’t just go into it blindly.”
They told her to get serious about forecasting hot dog demand. Based on sales at other parks, Seniuk said the Blue Jays launched the promotion in 2019 expecting crowds to buy about 1.3 to 1.7 hot dogs per person.
On Aug. 6, the crowd had eaten well beyond that range by the end of the sixth inning, hitting 59,264, according to the stadium’s hot dog counter. Every time I glanced at the screen, the stadium had swallowed another 3,500 hot dogs while I wasn’t looking. The counter, perched up at one end of the stadium, can make the whole spectacle feel far away, as if it’s other people eating a shocking amount of hot dogs, as if there wasn’t a hot dog in my hand too, as if I was not part of the insatiable beast.
At this point, the park has never run out of hot dogs. In previous seasons, Seniuk’s team has had to institute a stadiumwide pause on dollar hot dogs until the kitchen could get caught up. They haven’t had to do that yet this season.
“You never want a fan to wait for a hot dog,” she said. A little while later, she was scanning around a crop of tables and chairs and muttered to herself, somewhat amused. “Four,” she said, clocking a man in cargo shorts who was sitting down with a full box of hot dogs.
“He’s eating four.”
Seniuk has the sort of job her friends are endlessly interested in, to the point that she has a 20-minute rule at parties. She’ll answer questions about work for 20 minutes, then she wants to hear about everyone else and leave the job and all its intensities behind, because when she is at work, it’s all consuming.
On Loonie Dogs Nights, she even makes a point of trying to sample a hot dog from every level of the stadium.
The Rogers Centre uses a Schneiders Roller Grill wiener for the dollar deal — a hot dog designed with food service operators in mind, according to Maple Leaf Foods, the Canadian meat processor that owns Schneiders. “This variety of hot dog is perfectly suited for safe and even cooking on the roller grills at the stadium,” according to the company.
The top ingredient is mechanically separated chicken, followed by beef. Mechanically separated chicken is known to be one of the cheapest ingredients for wieners, a way to stretch the more premium ingredients, like beef.
Mechanical separation is part of a strategy in the meat business that one veteran food executive described as “carcass utilization” — the meat industry’s constant push to find a use, and incremental revenue, for every possible piece of the animal.
After the breasts, legs and wings have been sliced off the chicken, there’s still scraps of meat clinging to the bones. It has to be separated from the carcass somehow. Doing it by hand would take too much time and money. So meat processors use a machine to crush the carcass into a paste and strain out the chips of bone and cartilage, leaving a slurry of edible meat that can be mixed with other meat, preservatives and spices, including onion powder, garlic, paprika and nutmeg. It looks like a pinkish meat pudding, or, as the U.S. Department of Agriculture describes it, “a blend of soft tissue with a paste-like consistency and a cake-batter form.”
Maple Leaf said mechanically separated chicken, or MSC, is derived from premium cuts, like breasts or boneless thighs. “MSC is not a by-product or a waste material, but a valuable source of protein that is used in various food products,” the company said in a statement, adding that mechanical separation reduces food waste and uses more of the chicken than hand de-boning methods. “It is safe and nutritious for human consumption.”
Maple Leaf said it stands behind the quality of its products, and the Roller Grill wiener is “a classic hot dog that offers a traditional, authentic baseball experience.”
By the 7th inning, Loonie dog sales hit 62,703.
The fascination with cheap hot dogs goes beyond baseball. Ikea has a $1 hot dog. Costco developed a massive following for its $1.50 hot dog-and-pop deal. That price has been the same since the 1980s, with founder Jim Sinegal famously telling his successor: “If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.”
There are a few schools of thought about why you’d sell a hot dog for a dollar. One is the loss-leader strategy — a classic in the retail playbook, where a store draws customers in with a ridiculously good deal on something with near-universal appeal, like milk. Even if the store takes a loss on the milk, or just breaks even, the grocer will more than make up for it because the customer won’t just buy milk, they’ll fill a basket. 
But many in the food industry believe the Blue Jays hot dog deal is more complicated than a regular loss-leader. First, most suspect the stadium must be getting a sweetheart deal on the hot dogs, since Schneiders sponsors the promotion.
“I’d be giving them a special price on hot dogs, no question,” said one former executive who worked in food manufacturing and retail. It just makes too much sense as a mass sampling opportunity for Schneiders, he said, since baseball fans are likely a core customer base for a hot dog company.
Seniuk, the Blue Jays vice president, said Schneiders isn’t giving away the hot dogs for free, but wouldn’t say whether the stadium is getting a discount.
”(Schneiders is) a great partner,” she said. “But we are purchasing the hot dogs.”
Technically, the hot dogs are purchased from Schneiders by Legends, the concession operator contracted by the Rogers Centre. Maple Leaf, parent company to Schneiders, wouldn’t comment on pricing details.
But even if the Blue Jays aren’t getting a discount, it’s still possible to find a wiener and a bun for less than a buck, even at retail.
A standard, brand-name bun and five-inch brand-name wiener goes for around 80 cents, give or take, according to invoices, price lists and estimates provided by sources at three Canadian grocery stores. You can add up to four cents for each packet of ketchup, mustard or relish, according to an executive in the condiment business. And a few more cents for packaging, according to a senior executive at a major fast food chain. A single napkin typically costs a fraction of a cent, but few people only take one, so best to budget about a cent and a half, he said, plus about five cents for a foil wrapper.
(All of the executives were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive pricing information they are not authorized to disclose.)
The wholesale estimates might not give the whole picture, though. A spokesperson for Dempsters, which sells hot dog buns to the Rogers Centre, said food service operators typically pay a significantly different rate than retailers, due to differences in distribution methods and other factors.
But that cost would have to be dramatically lower for the stadium to make a profit, according to a classic rule in the hospitality business.
Food cost should be only 30 or 35 per cent of the menu price, said Bruce McAdams, a former executive at Oliver & Bonacini who teaches food and beverage management at the University of Guelph.
So in the Blue Jays case, that would mean the total hot dog cost would theoretically have to come in at under 35 cents.
Another 30 per cent would need to go to labour, then another 20 or so to overhead costs like rent and utilities, leaving the average food service operation with a profit margin of 10 to 15 per cent, according to the senior fast food executive.
The executive said it wouldn’t make sense for the Blue Jays to break even or lose money on a hot dog unless the stadium had data that showed dollar dogs helped what’s called the “attachment rate.” For example, if 75 per cent of people will buy a beer with their hot dog, that hot dog has a 75 per cent attachment rate to beer.
If the dollar dog deal isn’t driving fans to buy more beer or pop, “you’re just giving something away,” he said, adding that it’s worth it “if you’re going to sell an incremental beer.”
The executive suggested a hypothetical scenario, where the stadium notices a large contingent of fans only buy one beer at the beginning of the game. In this scenario, he said, research might show they’d buy a second if they got some food, but they won’t shell out for food at a stadium. So how do you convince them to buy food?
“You make it so incredibly cheap you’d be an idiot not to buy it,” he said.
By the end of the game, fans had bought 71,391 hot dogs. It was a banner night for the ballpark, a record for the season and about 5,000 shy of the all-time record.
But talking to Blue Jays brass, you get the sense that those numbers, while impressive, aren’t really the point. All this fuss, the lines, the steaming, the wrapping, the hot boxes as big as armoires, none of it really seems to be about the hot dogs — at least not from a financial perspective.
Asked point blank, Seniuk was clear.
“We don’t make a profit on a Loonie dog,” she said. “And it’s not about making a profit on the Loonie dog.”
The point, then, is probably best illustrated by another number altogether: 35,051, the official attendance for Aug. 6, a few thousand more than projected after accounting for last-minute walk-ups.
The team says attendance on hot dog nights has been up by as much as 10,000 fans, compared with normal weeknights, which is staggering if you think hard about it. Does a five-inch Roller Grill wiener have that power? The ticket, the train fare, or the parking, maybe a babysitter — all to save a few dollars on the hot dog?
But maybe there’s something beneath all that, a kind of mischief, as if you and thousands of others are getting away with something in plain sight. At a time when everyone seems to want you to pay full freight, here is this hot dog, this little burst of satisfaction, so cheap it’s basically free, so small it’s basically nothing at all.