People put it on pizza, add it to chicken sandwiches, and even mix it into cocktails.
The ingredient is “basically everywhere on the menu now,” Lizzy Fryer, director of menu research and analysis at restaurant analytics firm Technomic, said during a panel discussion at the National Restaurant Show in May.
The condiment was originally sprinkled on pepperoni pizza, but it’s also popular with chicken: Sweetgreen offers its Hot Honey Chicken Protein Bowl, Kava offers its Harissa Honey Chicken, and KFC offers its Sriracha Honey Nuggets.
It can also be mixed with desserts or alcohol: At Starbucks’ premium Reserve locations, you can add hot honey to your affogato or espresso martini.
At a Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Chicago, you can add hot honey to sandwiches, pizzas, and avocado toast for $2. It’s also available in cocktails. Grace Dean/Business Insider
Mike’s Hot Honey was inspired by a college trip to Brazil.
Hot honey is not a new flavor, but it has recently become very popular.
According to The New York Times, Brooklyn pizzeria Roberta’s began selling its famous Beasting pizza, topped with spicy soppressata salami and honey, in 2009.
But it was Mike’s Hot Honey that really brought the ingredient to the masses.
Mike’s Hot Honey is the original and best known brand. Grace Dean/Business Insider
It all began back in 2003, when Mike Kurtz was a college student studying Portuguese in Brazil.
“I was on a weekend trip to a national park and I was hiking in a little valley with some friends and we came across this little pizza place and they had jars of honey with whole chili peppers in it to put on the pizza,” Kurtz told Business Insider during an interview at the National Restaurant Show. “I was blown away by the taste and I kept thinking about it.”
So Kurtz began experimenting with chili-flavored honey in his college apartment, and in 2004 he created Mike’s Hot Honey.
“And for six years it was just a hobby,” Kurtz said. “I made them for myself, for friends and family.”
Fast forward to 2010, when Kurtz was working as an apprentice at a Brooklyn pizza place when he introduced his creation to Paul Giannone of Paulie Gee’s.
“He tried it and loved it on pizza,” Kurtz told BI. Paulie Gees started putting honey on pepperoni pizza.
“People started asking where they could buy bottles, so in November 2010 we started selling them at our bar,” Kurtz said.
Over the years, he began working with other restaurants and specialty retailers, with Whole Foods becoming the first major grocer to start selling the honey in 2014.
Today, Mike’s Hot Honey is sold in 30,000 to 40,000 retail stores and more than 3,000 restaurants, Kurtz said, with roughly 60 percent of the business’s revenue coming from retail and 40 percent from the restaurant industry.
The uses for hot honey seem endless.
Hot honey is “kind of like peanut butter and jelly,” Matt Wessel, owner of Milwaukee Pretzel Company, which sells Hot Honey Mustard, told BI in a phone interview. “When you put those two things together, it just makes sense. It’s a really tasty combination.”
Hot honey fuels the “swissy” trend of sweet and spicy cuisine, and its versatility means it can be used in seemingly endless combinations, encouraging chefs to get creative in the kitchen.
“Honey is versatile not only as a sweetener but also as a topping, making it a great base for adding tang,” Wessel says. “It can be used in a variety of ways.” In restaurants, on grocery store shelves, and in home kitchens, hot honey is added to tacos, chicken and waffles, potato chips, and ice cream.
Maison Pickle launched its Hot Honey Chicken French Toast in 2019. Emilia Agamirzai/Maison Pickle
“Hot honey has become a new American flavor,” says Jacob Hadjigeorgios, owner of Maison Pickle, a Manhattan bar and restaurant that began serving hot honey chicken French toast in 2019. He told BI in an email that it’s America’s answer to other cuisines’ sweet and spicy sauces.
Dallas-based pizza chain ZaRat Pizza has seen a recent uptick in sales of pizzas with salami, bacon onion jam and hot honey, which were added to the menu for the first time in 2022, CEO Khanh Nguyen told BI in an email.
Customers can also pay $2 to add a swirl of hot honey to any of ZaRutto’s other pizzas, which Nguyen said is especially popular on the pepperoni and mixed meat pizzas.
Zalat Pizza
British canned and bottled cocktail company Tom Savano Cocktails has been experimenting with hot honey in its drinks division, launching a Hot Honey Margarita earlier this month as well as a spicy mezcal margarita made with Scotch bonnet chilli and agave.
Sweet cocktails are always in demand, and spicy flavors are super popular right now, “so if you put something spicy and something sweet together, it’s bound to be a big hit,” founder James Kerslake told BI in a phone interview. The company developed two cocktails for consumer testing, ultimately choosing the spicier version, though Kerslake acknowledged that those who don’t like heat might find it divisive.
Cooking magazines and TikTok users are desperately trying new ways to incorporate hot honey into dishes, but for Kurtz, the man behind the best-known hot honey brand, his favorite ways to eat it are on pepperoni pizza, as a salmon glaze, and paired with goat cheese.
