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A few weeks ago, I got a press release for Mike’s Hot Honey Bacon, a partnership with Smithfield (the ham people) that promised to be an “irresistible balance of smoky and sweet, with a kick of heat.” This is after Mike’s Hot Honey announced a collaboration with Bush’s beans, and Austin Eastciders, and Utz chips, and Taco Bell. You can get Mike’s Hot Honey on your KFC order, or on pizza and wings from Pizza Hut. And despite partnerships with national corporations and fast food, you can also still probably find it on a pizza at whatever wood-fired Neapolitan-ish place showed up in your neighborhood a decade ago.
Americans love a condiment trend, especially a spicy one. “Two hundred years ago, black pepper was considered hot; now a jalapeno hot sauce is universally loved,” wrote Sarah Lohman in her book, Eight Flavors, in 2016, referring to the then-ubiquity of Sriracha. We love to argue about the superiority of various hot sauces (Crystal or die), “buffalo” things, which have hence never been buffaloed, and now, ladle chile crisp on just about anything.
But unlike Sriracha, whose trend has peaked, or gochujang, which is hitting its stride, hot honey—and specifically, Mike’s Hot Honey—appears to be in a perpetual state of emergence. Food & Wine asked why it was “everywhere” this year, while back in 2022, Mashed declared hot honey was “heating up like never before.” In 2021, Nation’s Restaurant News made note of the sweet heat trend sweeping the nation, while in 2020, Yahoo said hot honey was the hot trend to try on everything. Even back in 2015, CBS said the product was creating a “condiment craze.”
After over a decade of hot honey becoming a trend, we can perhaps just say that it is one. Or that it has moved past trend into staple, finding space in the American pantry with the ketchup and ranch dressing. But how does a condiment move from trend to necessity? In this case, through the dovetailing of a generation of American foodies developing new tastes and the glory of the internet.
The Mike’s Hot Honey origin story is, at least in certain corners of the food world, as well worn as Batman’s at this point, but founder Mike Kurtz rehashed it to me again. In 2003, he was studying abroad in Brazil, and he and some friends decided to go hiking in a national park in Bahia. They descended into a valley where they found a pizzeria. There, sitting on each table, was a jar of honey infused with chile peppers. “Just to be totally clear about it, this is not a Brazilian thing,” he said. This was the only place he ever saw it. But when he returned to UMass, he couldn’t stop thinking about the taste of spicy honey on his pizza, and he started experimenting with his own mix in his apartment.
Then Kurtz moved to New York, where he began apprenticing at Paulie Gee’s Pizza in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, after it opened in 2010. He brought in a batch of his honey, and pizzaiolo Paul Giannone liked it so much he used it on a pepperoni pie he named the Hellboy. Customers began asking for bottles of the stuff to take home. Boom, Mike’s Hot Honey was born. He began bottling the hot honey and selling it to pizzerias around the country. Soon, it felt impossible to go into a wood-fired pizzeria and not find a Mike’s Hot Honey–drizzled pie on the menu. Or a pie with honey and chile obviously inspired by his creation.
It’s not quite true that hot honey on pizza wasn’t a Brazilian thing. Or more accurately, when Kurtz was there, it so happened that he was witnessing the birth of something. “Since the arrival of Italian immigrants in the late 19th century (around 1874), the pizza made [in Brazil] was always adapted to what ingredients were available,” says Rafael Tonon, a food writer covering trends in Brazil and Portugal. The lack of traditional Italian ingredients gave Brazilian pizza-makers the imperative to experiment, which has created an “anything goes” culture of pizza, says Tonon. For instance, in 2017 he covered a guy putting birthday cake on pies.
Specifically, “the thing with honey started in the early 2000s, when it began appearing alongside what were then seen as ‘fancy’ ingredients—like Parma ham (which had just started being imported more widely) or figs.” A whole charcuterie board on a pizza, which hit especially well with younger eaters interested in imported, “exotic” toppings. And if pizza is largely cheese and bread, why wouldn’t it go well with the jams and honeys found on a cheese plate?
At the time, a similar appetite (sorry) was growing in North America. Kurtz was mixing his first batches of hot honey in his apartment during the nascent “foodie” era, when it seemed everyone was primed to geek out over new-to-them flavors and culinary experiences. That included a wave of wood-fired “neo-Neapolitan” fusion emerging in New York City, as places like Roberta’s, Motorino, and Una Pizza Napoletana were shifting tastes toward traditional technique paired with cheffy innovation, like putting kale or brussels sprouts on a pie.
Part of this foodie era also involved a taste for heat, and for the combination of sweet and hot (“swicy” as some call it). “The reason that sweet heat or swicy is sort of everlasting is that it’s a key component of traditional global cuisines like Mexican, like Thai, like Korean, that a lot of people of those ancestries and heritages are familiar with. Then it gets introduced and repackaged,” trend watcher Kara Nielsen told CNBC. A 2023 survey noted that while Italian food was the most popular cuisine among Americans 55 and older, Mexican was the most popular for every other age group. And with the U.S. more diverse than it’s ever been, there’s a higher likelihood that diners grew up with these flavors, instead of having to “discover” them in adulthood.
So the tastes were there. But a crucial part of the foodie era was the use of the internet to build community around food. Which is exactly what Kurtz was doing. “I was a pizza nerd. I was making a lot of pizza at home and I was an avid reader of Slice,” he says. Slice was the blog dedicated to all things NYC pizza, created by Adam Kuban in 2003. The internet at the time was booming with recipe blogs and forums, but as Kuban writes, “I was surprised there was no dedicated ‘fan page’ for NYC pizza—there seemed to be weird little fan webpages for bands, celebs, etc.” He had originally conceived of Slice as a zine, but after seeing the success of local blogs like Gothamist and Gawker, he decided to go online.
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It was on Slice that the city’s pizza obsessives gathered, learning about hidden gems in the tristate area, trading tips on developing dough and tricking out home ovens in the comment sections, and even hosting IRL meetups. And crucially, it was a place that was championing this new wave of pizzerias, not just pointing them out but saying that what they were doing was cool.
“I kept on seeing the same handle in the comments as Paulie Gee, and he was like a serial commenter,” says Kurtz. “He was commenting on every post, so I was like, who is this guy?” Kuban had the same curiosity, and eventually went to Paul Giannone’s New Jersey home to interview him about his backyard pizza setup. Giannone went on to open Paulie Gee’s, partially due to the following he had gained online. Without the comment section of Slice, Kurtz may never have sought him out.
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Kurtz says other pizzerias were quick to put Mike’s Hot Honey on the menu because they saw him as a kindred spirit. “A lot of these pizza people really saw the brand as one of their own, like a brand that is truly of the pizza community,” he said. But that community was built online, in the Slice comment sections, on Yelp (which launched in 2004), and on a nascent Instagram, where one could share a dining experience in real time. The internet is where you learned about a new thing like a pizza pie with hot honey on it, even if you lived nowhere near Paulie Gee’s. And it’s where you could buy it yourself, shipped directly to your door.
Mike’s Hot Honey both created and rode the wave, repackaging a Brazilian trend for heat-seeking American tastes, and making it essential to the online pizza fandom, all while the American palate was changing to favor exactly that flavor profile. It’s funny now to see something that was once completely new become as common as pepperoni on a pizzeria menu, a sticky bottle in the door of every pantry. But there was a moment like that for ketchup once. Our tastes have changed. It’s only natural our condiments should too.
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