In a world gone mad for condiments, hot honey is king.
You can taste it in a Sweetgreen bowl and KFC chicken nuggets, crunch on it in Utz potato chips and pretzels, and savor it in limited-edition ice cream pints. You can buy bottles of it in bulk at Costco, relish it on ricotta toast in Williamsburg wine bars and wear it — sort of. Mike’s Hot Honey, the leading producer of the condiment, even collaborated on a branded sneaker last year.
As of last week, you can go so far as to drink hot honey in an affogato or espresso martini at a Starbucks Reserve, the deluxe locations where the company introduces new flavors and products.
Sweet-and-spicy is not a surprising combination, especially in the South, where honey and hot sauce have long kept company with breakfast biscuits. And sweetened heat has long been a beloved flavor profile across cultures: Thai nam jim gai, sweet chile sauce; ancient Rome’s honey and black pepper wine; Central European gingersnaps; Nashville hot chicken.
Introduced as a pizza topping to the American palate a little more than decade ago, hot honey has quickly gone from a drizzle to a deluge. Google searches for it have increased tenfold in the past 10 years, peaking in February. Hot honey has now joined the ranks of pumpkin spice, ranch and chile crisp as flavors that made the leap from cult classic to mainstream darling.
According to many rapturous TikTok videos, its affinity for charcuterie and cheese boards, not to mention chicken tenders and pepperoni pizza, has helped drive the trend — and inspire recipes.
We have Brooklyn, a cradle of pizza tradition and trends, to thank for hot honey’s ascent. In 2009, the innovative pizzeria Roberta’s introduced New Yorkers to its Bee Sting pie, topped with spicy soppressata and honey. The pizza’s runaway popularity helped Roberta’s grow into an empire, with outposts in Los Angeles and a presence in the frozen aisle of grocery stores.
In 2010, Mike Kurtz, a pizza apprentice who had spent years tinkering with a combination of honey, chiles and vinegar, began selling his concoction out of Paulie Gee’s in Greenpoint. His story goes like this: 20 years ago, while hiking in Brazil as a college student, he descended, hot and hungry, into a green valley where a lone pizzeria stood. There, he encountered a condiment unknown to him: jars of red chiles macerating in honey.
The slice was transcendent, the flavor combination haunting. Unaware that this condiment would one day become a national obsession (and a $40 million annual business), Mr. Kurtz didn’t ask for the recipe. “All I remember is that it was run by a Swiss guy,” he said.
Hot honey is not a traditional condiment in Brazil, according to multiple Brazilian food experts. “I grew up with pepper jelly, and lots and lots of pepper sauces, but not hot honey,” said Leticia Moreinos Schwartz, a food writer who grew up in Rio de Janeiro. In São Paulo, Brazil’s unofficial pizza capital, sweet toppings like guava paste with white cheese are popular, but honey — hot or not — isn’t a traditional offering.
Mr. Kurtz soon began experimenting with a recipe, first in his dorm room and later in the kitchen of Paulie Gee’s. As soon as he drizzled the hot honey over the famed pizzaiolo Paul Giannone’s renowned pepperoni slice, the Hellboy, a menu mainstay, was born.
Many honey purveyors have produced chile-infused versions to capitalize on the surging interest. Savannah Bee Company, which supplies hot honey to Starbucks and Costco, introduced its version in 2022. Mike’s is the top-selling hot sauce on Amazon, despite Mr. Kurtz’s insistence that the product is not a hot sauce. Instead of having to push its way onto crowded hot sauce shelves in supermarkets, the product was lucky to land in the sleepy honey aisle, where “nothing had changed for decades,” he said.
Last year, as part of its rapidly expanding packaged foods line, Momofuku introduced a hot honey version of its popular chile crunch. Last month, when the company began trying to enforce its trademark of the phrase “chile crunch,” it ignited a fierce debate over whether a sauce’s name, especially one that consists of commonly used words, can be cornered by a single producer.
Mr. Kurtz said his company did, at one point, look into trademarking “hot honey.”
“The lawyers said it wouldn’t fly.”
