The Hot Honey Trend and What Comes After It

If you’ve been paying attention to American food culture over the past few years, you’ve noticed hot honey. It’s on pizza menus, in grocery stores, in every food publication that covers condiments. Honey with chilli. It sounds simple. It turned out to be a phenomenon.

But hot honey’s real contribution to the food landscape wasn’t the heat. It was the idea. It made a broad audience realise that honey doesn’t have to be the mild, anonymous sweetener in a plastic bear. Honey can have character. Honey can be the point.

That idea points somewhere interesting.

Hot honey built a category around premium honey that hadn’t existed at this scale in the US before.

It created a buyer who is willing to pay more for honey that tastes like something specific. It built a consumer base that understands honey as an ingredient with personality rather than just a sweetener. It moved honey from a background condiment to a deliberate choice.

For brands like Mike’s Hot Honey — which started selling out of a Brooklyn pizzeria and grew into a national brand — the lesson was that American consumers were ready for honey with a story and a strong flavour profile. They just needed an introduction.

That introduction has happened. Tens of millions of American households have now experienced what it means to choose a specific honey intentionally.

Hot honey is a flavour addition. The honey in most hot honey products is relatively mild and generic — the experience comes from the chilli. The honey is the vehicle.

Manuka honey flips that relationship. The honey is the experience.

For people who discovered through hot honey that honey can be interesting, Manuka is the natural progression. It’s a honey with a specific origin, a certifiable composition, and a flavour that’s genuinely distinctive — earthy, complex, and rich in a way that depends on the plant, the place, and the season, not on what was added to it.

The shift from hot honey to Manuka honey is the shift from enhancement to origin. From adding to a product to choosing a product that stands on its own.

US honey imports have grown by more than 400% over the past three decades. American consumers buy more premium honey than ever before, and that appetite for quality continues to grow.

Manuka honey’s market share in the US is still relatively small compared to its profile. New Zealand produces roughly the same volume of certified export-grade Manuka each year, with limited capacity to scale — because the Mānuka bush flowers for only two to six weeks a year, and hive placements are constrained by geography and access.

That supply constraint is part of the story. Manuka honey isn’t something that can simply be produced in larger quantities because demand increases. The scarcity is structural. Which means that people who discover it now are discovering it before it reaches the mainstream US market penetration that premium olive oil or artisanal cheese already has.

Hot honey is a product of flavour engineering. The appeal is in the contrast — sweet heat, simple and immediate.

Manuka honey is a product of geography, biology, and certification. The appeal is in the origin — a specific plant, a specific country, a short season, independently verified composition. The flavour is complex and earthy rather than sharp, and it deepens as the grade increases.

They satisfy different desires. Hot honey is a condiment. Manuka honey is something you keep on the bench and use deliberately.

If hot honey was your entry point into premium honey, here’s where to start with Manuka:

Try UMF 10+. It’s the most widely available everyday grade, the flavour is noticeably distinct from regular honey without being overwhelming, and it’s the grade most people use daily.

Use it straight. Manuka honey doesn’t need additions to be interesting. The most common way people use it — a teaspoon in the morning, stirred into warm water, drizzled over food — is also the most direct way to understand what makes it different.

Look for UMF™ certification. Not all Manuka honey is what it claims to be. The UMF™ mark means the batch has been independently tested and the grade verified. It’s the clearest sign that you’re buying the real thing.

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