Across cuisines, seasons, menus, and demographics, hot honey just keeps on building buzz. This sweet and spicy scene-stealer combines pure honey with a touch of heat, usually from chili peppers, chili flakes, or hot sauce. Hot honey is bold, but not overpowering; premium, but not overly decadent; and it remains one of the most influential flavor trends in today’s foodservice scene, per Technomic.
Why? Food industry trends show that consumers, particularly younger foodies, want to go bold, and hot honey has the perfect balance of excitement and familiarity. As a sauce, drizzle, or dip, it combines two universally loved flavor profiles: sweet and spicy. And, as we know, sweet heat remains one of the strongest macro flavor trends on today’s market.
It’s no wonder, then, that hot honey menu mentions have soared across restaurant categories (Datassential). Below, we’ll dig into hot honey’s speedy growth and explain how your brand can harness the heat.
Why Is Hot Honey So Successful?
To understand how to tap into hot honey’s unending appeal, we first have to determine why it remains so strong, year after year:
- Flavor: Let’s start with the obvious. It tastes fantastic. Enough said.
- Universal appeal: Hot honey is a great equalizer, unlike some of the more extreme spicy trends. Maybe you’re a heat hound, but your dining companions prefer to keep things on the milder side. Hot honey has enough spice to jazz things up, but not too much to reduce its broad appeal.
- Versatility: Like we mentioned above, hot honey menu mentions are surging. This has a lot to do with its versatility across dayparts and menu categories. How many other condiments can serve as a tasty breakfast sandwich sauce, a premium pizza drizzle, and an indulgent chicken tender dipping sauce LTO? That versatility makes hot honey an easy, low-risk way to modernize existing menu items without having to overhaul your SKUs.
Now that we know the why, let’s dive into the how. The following are some of the top applications driving hot honey growth.
Chicken and Wings
Poultry may be hot honey’s strongest application. As a condiment, it complements crispy coatings, balances savory proteins, and enhances craveability. Format-wise, hot honey also offers serious flexibility. Try incorporating this crowd-pleaser as a limited-time chicken sandwich topper, a wing marinade, or a dipping sauce for chicken tenders. It’s hard to go wrong.
Pizza
Pizza is one of the fastest-growing hot honey applications. One bite, and it’s not hard to see why. A simple, easy-to-execute hot honey drizzle can transform a familiar pizza into a premium menu item, providing a welcome contrast to salty meats and rich cheeses. Not only can it dress up a standard pepperoni slice, but it can also serve as a premium accompaniment to upscale pies with specialty meats and cheeses.
Sandwiches and Burgers
Hot honey is an easy upgrade for core menu items like sandwiches and burgers. It adds differentiation and taps into seasonality, but it requires very few operational changes. Plus, it’s shelf-stable. Capture the spice of summer with hot honey BBQ burgers or fried chicken sandwiches. Get creative with breakfast sandwiches or even plant-based sandwiches. Either way, hot honey is an easy way to level up your menu.
Snacks and Apps
Like we mentioned above, hot honey is known for its versatility across menu categories. Sweet heat can spark those ever-important moments of incremental menu excitement, driving more impulse purchases to support your brand’s bottom line. Hot honey is also an easy win in the shareables department. On the plant-based side, we’re fans of hot honey cauliflower bites. For something more indulgent, it’s an unexpected but delightful addition to shareables like loaded fries and pretzel bites.
Breakfast and Brunch
Today’s consumers, especially those on the younger end, want to start their day with a bit of an adventure. Hot honey offers operators an opportunity to innovate beyond traditional menus. It adds a dash of flair to chicken and waffles. It dresses up breakfast biscuits. It even pairs well with bacon-based dishes. Trust us on that one.
Make It Work Long-Term
When our team of experts evaluates food industry trends, we have to ask the hard questions. For example: Is a buzzy product a passing fad or a long-term opportunity? With hot honey, the answer’s easy.
Unlike a lot of niche flavor trends, hot honey’s versatility and universal appeal give it long-term relevance. At this point, it’s more than a trend. It’s a flavor platform that supports premiumization and menu differentiation.
Below, we’ve outlined a few ways for operators, manufacturers, and retailers to leverage the hot honey craze:
- QSR operators: Hot honey is a low-risk way to refresh QSR menus without investing in completely transformed SKUs. This versatile favorite can add some much-needed excitement to existing menu items – the chicken sandwich topper we mentioned above, for example – and support seasonal promotions for relatively little overhead. Hot honey-infused summer barbecue, anyone?
- Value-added protein manufacturers: Hot honey works beautifully as a marinade or bulk custom sauce for pre-sauced protein offerings. Tapping into the universal, evergreen excitement around sweet heat is a speedy way to differentiate private-label products without investing too heavily in passing fads.
- Retail and HMR: Hot honey is shelf-stable, which makes it an excellent candidate for finishing sauces and meal-kit components. If premiumization is a focus for your brand, we highly recommend incorporating hot honey into ready meals or prepared foods as a private label sauce.
Hot honey is turning up the heat across foodservice and retail, earning its place as one of the industry’s most dynamic flavor platforms. Its irresistible sweet-spicy profile brings broad consumer appeal while effortlessly elevating meals across menu sectors, including pizzas, sandwiches, breakfast items, and apps.
Hot honey is also proof that, for brands looking to spark menu innovation, the answer doesn’t always require launching an entirely new item. Sometimes a single, strategic flavor is enough. When you’re ready to explore this standout differentiator, the flavor experts at Giraffe Foods are here to talk about how you might leverage this bold, craveable custom sauce to capture consumers’ attention.
