How Mike’s Hot Honey CEO transformed his team into a $ 60 million company

Mike’s hot honey, omnipresent in American grocery stores and pizza chains, has technically started in Brazil.

It was in 2003. Mike Kurtz was a junior at university, finishing a semester in Salvador. After a trip to the National Park, Kurtz and his friends stopped in a pizzeria for lunch. The store had an unusual condiment, the one he had never seen before: honey infused with whole peppers.

When Kurtz returned to America, he spent his last year shining with his own version, a more homogeneous mixture “with a very good heat level that could cross a slice of pizza,” Kurtz, now 43 years old, in Business Insider.

He started making hot honey pots for friends and family in Hobby. Kurtz liked to cook, often making homemade pizzas to accompany his honey creations.

It took Mike’s hot honey for six years to leave the hobby phase. Kurtz spent years working in the music industry and later, as a travel blogger. However, the idea of ​​transforming his hot honey bite into a stuck company: Kurtz finally started to sell pots in a popular Brooklyn pizzeria in 2010.

In 2025, more than 20 years since Kurtz first eaten this fateful tranche in Brazil, Mike’s hot honey is expected to win 60 million dollars, winning 60% of its retail income and the rest in the food service. Tracking the “Swicy” food trend, the brand recently announced collaborations with KFC, Dunkin ‘and Heineken, as well as with famous pizzerias like Lou Malnati from Chicago.

Kurtz has shared advice on how to stay attached to an idea, even when life is busy – or when you worry, it’s too late to take a career risk.

Stay curious

Kurtz spent his last year from college to UMASS to make frequent trips to New York. After doing online research, it was attracted to a unique place: the Hunty Products Market in the Bronx, where many restaurants in the city get their products.

Open from 10 p.m. to 10 a.m., the market was the best place to find the widest range of peppers, especially in the middle of the Ahites, when the options of his university city were limited to Jalapeños. “I was just curious, the first time I went there,” he said.

He found that it was “like a stock market for products” and went down the weekend with a half (half a whole milk in his backpack. He would take sips between the peppers with taste test on the market to clean his palate, then bring bags of peppers home.

Kurtz has tried different infusion techniques in his apartment, sprinkling each lot on slices of pizza. He said that a real interest in hot honey and pizza made it easier to find a recipe that worked.

Kurtz, who describes himself as a “generally curious person”, also found his future employer – and the official starting point for Mike hot honey – pushing on a pizza blog now disappeared called Slice.

He continued to see the same handle in the comments section. “I am like, who is this guy? He is a serial commentator on each post,” he said. Kurtz later read a profile of the commentator, Paul Giannone, known as Paulie Gee, who made fire pizzas in his Greenpoint apartment. Later, when Giannone opened her famous Pizza Brooklyn Paulie Gee’s restaurant, Kurtz followed as a pizza manufacturer, finally who sells his hot honey.

Get early comments

From the start, Kurtz received comments on his idea: he gave homemade jars as a holiday gifts to his loved ones. Some told him that hot honey was really good and could be a business one day, an idea that he had not continued at the time.

Nevertheless, knowing that people loved his product gave him emotional fuel to persevere. That was what pushed him to approach Giannone with his hot honey. It has become a central ingredient in the restaurant “Hellboy” of the restaurant, now its most popular pie.

Working in the restaurant’s open kitchen – which Paulie Gee’s staff called the “Pizza Theater” – Kurtz could look at people’s reactions while biting in the Hellboy. Little by little, he started making and selling Mike’s hot honey containers from the counter at Paulie Gee, a popularity by word of mouth. Finally, he found a distributor and sold Mike’s hot honey to his first retailer, Whole Foods, in 2014.

He said that spending early comments were crucial for his success because it had motivated him to continue. “Don’t be afraid to just launch something, as new and rough on the edges that,” Kurtz said. “It becomes much easier to make adjustments to an idea than to try to refine something in your own echo room.”

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Spend time with successful risk takers

At 29, Kurtz’s career in music was assigned by the 2008 recession. The industry was “not in a healthy place,” he said, and he shared his time between working in a reservation agency and the moonlight as a pizza manufacturer at Paulie Gee.

Kurtz had a dilemma: he liked to make pizza, and he wanted to kick his dream of hot honey by integrating it into the restaurant menu. At the same time, he was almost 30 years old and had invested almost his entire career in the supervision of music. In a difficult economic climate, he felt lucky to have his job as a booking agency.

“Even young people are in a way in their heads that it is too late for them to change speed and try something different,” said Kurtz.

Getting to know Giannone helped him make a decision. At 56, Giannone left her 30 -year -old computer career to open a restaurant – despite no official restaurant experience.

Seeing how the risk has borne fruit for Giannone influenced Kurtz’s jump of faith. Even at the start of Paulie’s gee, “you could see that he was so happy in the restaurant,” Kurtz said. “Paulie’s journey to open the pizzeria, which gave me the confidence I needed to really go with honey.”