How many hot dogs do Americans eat on the Fourth of July alone?

How to get close to this number

Per person, as always with national event consumption. A country of a few hundred million, with a large majority marking the holiday and most of those eating a couple of hot dogs, gives a total in the hundreds of millions. Roughly one every two people across the whole country is a plausible figure for a single day, and that is what the arithmetic produces.

The comparison to a normal day is what makes the number meaningful. This is the single largest consumption day of the year for the product, concentrated into one afternoon, which is why an industry body tracks it at all. Event-driven demand spikes matter more to a food industry than annual averages do, because they are what capacity has to be built for.

The provenance deserves the same scepticism as the Super Bowl wings figure on this site: the source is a trade body promoting the product, and the end-to-end distance comparison is exactly the kind of statistic such organisations exist to generate. The magnitude is credible, the framing is publicity, and saying so is more useful than pretending the number is neutral.