Hot honey is the sweet and spicy flavor on everyone's lips, from pizza to co*cktails. Here's why it's America's newest food obsession. (2024)

The condiment's origins saw it being swirled on pepperoni pizza. But it's popular to pair with chicken, too: Sweetgreen has a hot honey chicken protein bowl, Cava sells harissa honey chicken, and KFC serves Sriracha honey nuggets.

You can mix it with desserts or alcohol. At Starbucks' upmarket Reserve locations, you can get hot honey in an affogato or espresso martini.

Mike's Hot Honey was inspired by a college student's travels around Brazil

Hot honey isn't a brand-new flavor, but it's only recently that it's become super popular.

Brooklyn pizzeria Roberta's started selling its famous Bee Sting pizza topped with spicy soppressata salami and honey back in 2009, according to The New York Times.

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

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

"On a weekend trip to a national park, I hiked into a little valley with some friends and there I found a tiny pizzeria that had jars of honey with whole chili peppers steeping in it for drizzling on pizza," Kurtz told Business Insider in an interview at the National Restaurant Show. "I just was blown away by the flavor and I kept on thinking about it."

So Kurtz started 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 making it for myself, for friends and 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 the pizza," Kurtz told BI. Paulie Gee's began drizzling the honey on its pepperoni pizzas.

"People started asking me where they could buy bottles and I started selling it off the bar there in November 2010," Kurtz said.

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

Now, Mike's Hot Honey is available in between 30,000 and 40,000 retail stores and more than 3,000 restaurants, Kurtz said. The business's revenue is roughly 60% retail and 40% food service, he said.

Hot honey has seemingly endless applications

Hot honey is "kind of like a peanut butter and jelly thing," Matt Wessel, owner of the Milwaukee Pretzel Company, which sells a hot honey mustard, told BI over the phone. "It's just one of those things that when you pair them together, it makes a lot of sense … It's a really palatable food pairing."

Hot honey feeds into the "swicy" trend for sweet and spicy food. 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 to add the heat to," Wessel said. "It can be used in so many different applications." Across restaurants, grocery store shelves, and home kitchens, hot honey is being added to tacos, chicken waffles, potato 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 started serving a hot honey chicken French toast in 2019. He told BI over email that it was the US's answer to other cuisines' sweet and spicy sauces.

At Zalat Pizza, a Dallas-based pizza chain, there's been a recent rise in sales of its pizza with salami, bacon-onion jam, and hot honey, first added to its menu in 2022, CEO Khanh Nguyen told BI via email.

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

UK canned and bottled co*cktail company Tom Savano co*cktails has been experimenting with hot honey in the drinks department. It launched a hot honey margarita earlier this month — it also sells a spicy mezcal margarita with Scotch Bonnet chilies and agave.

Sweet co*cktails are always in demand, and spicy flavors are very popular at the moment. "So you throw anything spicy and sweet together and that was always going to be a home run," founder James Kerslake told BI over the phone. The company developed two versions of the co*cktail for consumer testing, and ended up deciding on the spicier version, even though Kerslake acknowledged it may polarize people with a low-spice tolerance.

Cooking magazines and TikTokers alike have been scrambling to find new ways to incorporate hot honey into dishes. But as for Kurtz, the man behind the best-known hot honey brand, his favorite ways to serve it are drizzled on a pepperoni pizza, used as a glaze for salmon, and paired with goats' cheese.