The Arms Race to Create the Wildest Ballpark Concessions

Rachel Parker went into Yankee Stadium on April 25 with a plan: First, secure one of the free hockey jerseys the team was distributing to the first fans in the ballpark; next, make a beeline for the food and drinks. 

She and her friend procured frozen margaritas, hot dogs (“classic, you must,” she says), and popcorn to take to their seats. Then, Parker started hunting down the real prize: a creamy Italian confection topped with cocoa powder and served in a palm-sized souvenir Yankees helmet, priced at $12.50.

“[My friend] was like, ‘Somewhere here, there’s tiramisu in little hats, and we have to make it happen,’” Parker tells Front Office Sports. Usually, tiramisu wouldn’t be the kind of food she’d seek out at a stadium, but the unexpectedness made it all the more appealing: It was whimsical, delightful! 

The dessert is a new addition to the Yankees’ concessions menu for the 2025 season, and it is one of the tamer examples of the novelty food and beverage items that Major League Baseball teams have begun serving up in recent years. The Braves have the Home Run Stack, a gargantuan tower of beef patties, smoked brisket, bacon, and curly fries sandwiched between slabs of brioche toast and topped with a turret of onion rings (it runs a cool $100). The Rangers have the Boomstick, a two-foot, $32 chili-and-cheese-covered hot dog—the biggest in the league—and its equally colossal descendants, including this year’s $36 Boomstick Burrito. And the White Sox have the $15 Celebration Cake Shake, a 16-ounce, birthday-cake-flavored follow-up to last season’s viral s’mores-inspired Campfire Shake, also $15.

While hot dogs, popcorn, and beer are still a core part of the ballpark experience, the landscape has evolved by leaps and bounds.

Ron Krivosik has had a front-row seat to these changes in his 39 years at Levy, a major food and beverage provider that today services seven MLB ballparks, where he is senior vice president of culinary. In the 1980s, he tells FOS, the menus were strictly of the peanuts-and–Cracker Jacks variety. 

A decade later, though, ballparks began testing souped-up hot dogs and gourmet popcorn, and elevated sandwiches on pretzel bread entered the fray. Then, as social media hit in the 2000s, the industry kicked into high gear. As fans shared photos of themselves at games, food and drinks in hand, friendly competition picked up among teams. 

Concession providers such as Levy began fielding requests from their MLB partners to develop more inventive items that would set their ballparks apart and become destinations—with baseball as the secondary attraction. Expectations around taste and presentation ratcheted up as fans raised on the Food Network sought out items worthy of both Instagram and their more sophisticated palates. 

“You need that ‘wow’ factor from flavor because flavors are bold now, and people are very educated,” says Krivosik. 

Malcolm Rogel, vice president of fan experience with the Mariners, has been with the team for 27 seasons, during which time food and beverage have played an increasingly central role. A key inflection point came in 1999, when the Mariners moved to T-Mobile Park (then Safeco Field), allowing the team to bring in local eateries like Ivar’s, a beloved fish and chips shop. The ballpark continued to diversify its offerings throughout the 2000s and 2010s, but its real limelight moment came in 2017, when it took a chance on an unusual snack: a cup of toasted grasshoppers seasoned with chili, lime, and salt. They were such a hit with fans (and, just as crucially, the media) that the park sold through its whole season’s supply—20 pounds of crispy insects—on Opening Day. 

The fervor around the grasshoppers created a host of logistical challenges—shifting to sourcing directly from Mexico, reducing the serving size in each cup—to ensure the park could keep up with demand. It also permanently altered the way the Mariners and their hospitality partner Sodexo Live! approached concessions. 

“Once we started to see things go viral on the food side, that really changed everyone’s thinking,” Rogel tells FOS. There was a new mandate to think more creatively about culinary offerings and explore unconventional flavor profiles, attention-grabbing packaging concepts, and player-inspired dishes, such as this season’s Ichi Wings and IchiRoll, named after Mariners Hall of Famer Ichiro Suzuki.

The conversations about the following season’s concessions start in July or August, when the team can take stock of what’s selling, what’s missing the mark, and what might resonate with fans next year. This also gives them time to test and refine ideas, such as prototyping a 32-ounce trident-shaped souvenir cup that sits flat on a table and fits in every kind of cup holder in T-Mobile Park. In the first month of this season, fans bought nearly 7,000 of the Tridents Up Cup ($24.99 with free soda refills), with each purchase also acting as a walking advertisement for the novelty item.

Shawn Mattox, vice president of operations for Delaware North Sportservice, traces the virality race in ballpark food to the Rangers’ Boomstick hot dog, which his team helped launch in 2012. The Rangers had successfully trialed an oversize dog the previous year, so during the offseason, the team was tasked with creating an item that would make an even bigger splash. They expected to sell a few dozen of the resulting Boomstick dogs per game, Mattox tells FOS, but instead, they ended up selling a few hundred, bringing in an estimated $500,000 in sales. And the item has grown in popularity every year since, he says.

“A lot of these fun, crazy ideas don’t make it past one season,” he admits. The Boomstick has been an exception—and a high bar for Delaware North’s 10 MLB ballparks and their peers to reach for year after year. “Honestly, it has created a very competitive environment around the signature over-the-top, shareable, Instagrammable items.”

While no one expects ice cream nachos and monster burger stacks to replace traditional ballpark fare—Dodger Stadium, for example, sells 2.5 million standard hot dogs per season, according to trade figures—these wilder items do create value that simple sales numbers can’t convey.

For one, they can help drive awareness around a ballpark’s concession program as a whole. All the press around the grasshoppers also got people talking about the Mariners’ sushi, Italian, and Latin food offerings, Rogel recalls. For the 2025 season, Delaware North’s new MLB offerings generated media coverage that reached a combined audience of 1.8 billion people, driving $15 million in advertising value, according to Critical Mention analytics supplied by the hospitality company.

The increasingly diversified options at ballparks are also a service to both season-ticket holders and occasional fans. MLB teams play 81 home games per season, double that of NBA teams and nearly 10 times as many as NFL teams—so for die-hard attendees, variety is essential. Fans who may go to only a couple of games in their lives also tend to be enthusiastic about the novelty items, says Mattox, since it means they can commemorate the experience with a photo of the family posing with cotton-candy-topped french fries or a hot dog the length of a baseball bat.

Some fans even cite these dishes as their main impetus for buying tickets. Jackie Predale, a retiree from the New York City area, is currently traveling the U.S. with her boyfriend and saw an Instagram Reel featuring the Boomstick Triple-Play, a two-foot feast combining a hot dog, burger, and loaded nachos. They were enticed enough to go to a game in Arlington—and while they didn’t end up tracking down the Triple-Play, they shared a Boomstick dog with all the toppings. 

“I’ve been to the Mets Stadium, and the food there is good, but Texas is different. It’s bigger. And that hot dog was unlike anything I’ve ever seen at any ballpark,” Predale tells FOS.

The draw of a buzzy concession item can be a saving grace for teams plodding along at the bottom of the league. The White Sox’ 2024 season was, by almost any measure, abysmal. The team lost 121 games, breaking MLB’s modern-day loss record. One bright spot, however, was the Campfire Shake, which took off online following the ballpark’s annual media preview and became something of a local sensation, giving fans—and the White Sox marketing department—something to talk about besides the team’s performance. Rate Field sold 500 milkshakes on Opening Day, and demand has kept up at a steady clip since, with fans now returning to try the Celebration Cake Shake, a tribute to the team’s 125th anniversary. 

Back at the Yankees game in April, Rachel Parker and her friend scoped out the tiramisu helmets and made a dash from their upper-deck seats to the stand on the first floor midway through the game, confident they wouldn’t miss too much since the score remained stubbornly 0–0.

Dessert in hand, they watched the game finally pick up, with the opposing Blue Jays notching a run in the sixth and the Yankees racking up two more in the following innings. “They started scoring, like, the second we sat back down in our seats,” Parker says. And, not to give the tiramisu too much credit, just as Parker scraped the last creamy spoonfuls out of her cap, the Jays pulled ahead to win the game. “That was, timing-wise, pretty incredible.”