Hot Honey: the new American food obsession is taking over menus

The condiment’s origins were swirling it on pepperoni pizza. But it’s also popular as a side with chicken: Sweetgreen offers a Hot Honey Chicken Protein Bowl, Cava sells Honey Harissa Chicken, and KFC serves Sriracha Honey Chips.

You can mix it with desserts or alcohol. At Starbucks’ upscale Reserve stores, you can enjoy hot honey in an affogato or espresso martini.

Mike’s Hot Honey was inspired by a student’s travels through Brazil

Hot honey isn’t a brand new flavor, but it’s only recently become very popular.

Brooklyn pizzeria Roberta’s began selling its famous Bee Sting pizza topped with spicy soppressata salami and honey in 2009, according to the New York Times.

But it was Mike’s Hot Honey that really brought this ingredient to the masses.

It all dates back to 2003, when Mike Kurtz was a student studying Portuguese in Brazil.

“On a weekend in a national park, I hiked in a small valley with friends and found a little pizza place that had jars of honey with whole chili peppers dipped in it to drizzle over a pizza,” Kurtz told Business Insider in a statement. interview at the National Restaurant Show. “I was blown away by the flavor and kept thinking about it.”

So Kurtz began experimenting with chili-infused honey in his college apartment, where he created Mike’s Hot Honey in 2004.

“And for six years, it was just a hobby,” Kurtz said. “I was doing it for myself, for my friends and my family.”

Fast forward to 2010, and Kurtz introduced his concoction to Paul Giannone of Paulie Gee’s while working as an apprentice at the Brooklyn pizzeria.

“He tried it, he loved it on pizza,” Kurtz told BI. Paulie Gee’s has started drizzling honey on its pepperoni pizzas.

“People started asking me where they could buy bottles and I started selling them at the bar in November 2010,” Kurtz said.

Over the years, he began working with other restaurants and specialty retailers. Whole Foods was the first major grocery store to begin selling honey in 2014.

Now, Mike’s Hot Honey is available in 30,000 to 40,000 retail stores and more than 3,000 restaurants, Kurtz said. The company’s revenue is about 60% retail and 40% foodservice, he said.

Warm Honey Has Seemingly Endless Applications

Hot honey is “kind of like peanut butter and jelly,” Matt Wessel, owner of the Milwaukee Pretzel Company, which sells a hot honey mustard, told BI by phone. “It’s just one of those things that, when you put them together, makes a lot of sense… It’s a really tasty food pairing.”

Hot honey is part of the “swicy” trend for sweet and spicy foods. And its versatility means it can be used in seemingly endless combinations, encouraging chefs to get creative in the kitchen.

“Because honey is so versatile as a sweetener, but also as a topping…it’s a great base for adding heat,” Wessel said. “It can be used in many different applications.” In restaurants, grocery store aisles, and home kitchens, hot honey is added to tacos, chicken waffles, chips, and ice cream.

“Hot honey has become the new American flavor,” said Jacob Hadjigeorgis, owner of Maison Pickle, a bar and restaurant in Manhattan that began serving hot honey chicken French toast in 2019. He told BI via email that it was America’s answer to the sweet and spicy sauces of other cuisines.

At Zalat Pizza, a Dallas-based pizza chain, sales of its pizzas with salami, bacon, onion and hot honey jam have increased recently, added to its menu for the first time in 2022, said CEO Khanh Nguyen to BI via email.

Customers can also pay $2 to add a hot honey swirl to Zalat’s other pizzas, which Nguyen said were especially popular with its pepperoni and mixed meat pizzas.

British canned and bottled cocktail company Tom Savano Cocktails has been experimenting with mulled honey in its drinks department. He launched a hot honey margarita earlier this month — he also sells a spicy mezcal margarita with Scotch Bonnet peppers and agave.

Sweet cocktails are always in high demand and spicy flavors are very popular at the moment. “So you mix something spicy and sweet and it was always going to be a home run,” founder James Kerslake told BI by phone. The company developed two versions of the cocktail to test with consumers and ultimately settled on the spicier version, although Kerslake acknowledged that it could polarize people with low spice tolerance.

Cooking magazines and TikTokers have been scrambling to find new ways to incorporate hot honey into dishes. But as for Kurtz, the man behind the most famous brand of hot honey, his favorite ways to serve it are drizzling it on pepperoni pizza, using it as a glaze for salmon, and pairing it with goat cheese.