By Charlie Pogacar
The world of pizza is full of murky origin stories. For example, nobody really knows who first put pepperoni slices on a pizza. You want to know the first person to use tomato sauce as a pizza ingredient? Good luck figuring that out—or which country it occurred in.
Hot honey, and its massive influence on the pizza segment in the U.S., has a comparatively clear-cut history, albeit one that contains some folklore-like elements. In November 2003, Mike Kurtz was studying abroad in Brazil. He and some friends were in a remote valley when they came across a small pizzeria that had jars of chili-infused honey on each table. Kurtz drizzled it on his pizza and was blown away. He couldn’t have known it at the time, but that meal would eventually lead to the founding of Mike’s Hot Honey in 2010 and alter the course of pizza history.
But, as Kurtz explained on the latest episode of Peel: A PMQ Pizza Podcast, progress isn’t always linear. When Kurtz returned home, he began creating his own hot honey in his dorm room at UMass-Amherst. He gave it away as gifts to friends and family for years prior to ever selling it for money. When, several years later, he landed a job working the kitchen at Paulie Gee’s in Brooklyn, his hobby became a menu item. And then his menu item became a product.
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Scott Wiener, founder of Scott’s Pizza Tours and a close observer of New York’s pizza scene, remembers the early days vividly. “I remember when Mike started selling the honey [out of Paulie Gee’s] in one-gallon jugs,” Wiener said. “I think that’s when it went from being this funky side product to like—oh, we’re doing foodservice sizes now. This thing has legs.”
In 2025, Kurtz and the Mike’s Hot Honey team are celebrating the company’s 15th anniversary. In that time span, hot honey has gone from something that did not exist on American menus to one of the fastest-growing ingredients in the U.S. According to Datassential, hot honey is now featured on 7.7% of U.S. restaurant menus across different categories—a number that is projected to more than double by 2029.
For Kurtz, the journey from passion project to pantry staple has been anything but simple. He describes the process of scaling up his product for commercial production as “the hardest step” of his 22-year journey. Finding a way to maintain the perfect consistency without the honey separating—or losing its kick—was a multi-year science project. “Honey is heavy, chili peppers are intense, and it wasn’t like anyone had a blueprint for bottling something like this,” Kurtz said. “It took me almost three-and-a-half years to figure it out.”
A breakthrough moment came in the form of a chance encounter at UMass-Amherst campus, years after Kurtz had graduated. Visiting his hometown and desperate for answers, Kurtz wandered the university’s food science department and struck up a conversation with a professor grading papers. “He didn’t give me the answer,” Kurtz said, “but he gave me the clue that led to the answer.”
The secret? Wouldn’t you like to know? On the podcast, Kurtz declined to share what, exactly, the breakthrough was, citing proprietary trade knowledge. But he was more than happy to walk PMQ Pizza through the early days of his hot-honey business.
Foundations
Considering its founder is named Mike, it probably seems fairly obvious how the name “Mike’s Hot Honey” came to be. But, for Kurtz, the name was a moment of subconscious intervention—at a time when his honey-making hobby took on a life of its own. It was during the phase when he was in college UMass-Amherst, creating early versions of the product in his kitchen. When a roommate asked what he was eating, Kurtz responded instinctively: “It’s Mike’s hot honey.”
Even if it would be more than five more years before the company was formed, the offhand comment became a foundation of the brand—one that Mike has always been the face of. Even in the early days at Paulie Gee’s, customers associated Kurtz with the product and vice versa—he was always around. Kurtz quickly established a persona around New York City, riding around on “Mike’s Trike,” visiting pizzerias and establishing relationships with operators in a grassroots fashion.
“I think a huge part of the reason [the product blew up] is because Mike is cool and his whole brand is slick,” Wiener said. “The whole thing is organic. It doesn’t feel corporate. And now we’re at a time when bucking tradition in the pizza industry is not only acceptable, it’s appreciated.”
Perhaps part of the reason Kurtz became a popular figure across the New York City food scene was because of his restaurant experience. That experience transcended his time at Paulie Gee’s, too—his first-ever job was as a dishwasher in a restaurant. It shaped the way he approached making rounds at restaurants and introducing them to Mike’s Hot Honey.
“[Even today], when we visit a restaurant or we’re shooting content somewhere, we’re not just trying to meet the owner of the restaurant,” Kurtz said. “We want to meet everybody who is working there, from the dishwasher to the line cooks to the prep cooks to the people working the pizza ovens. And that is something I definitely got from working in restaurants.”
Collaborative Growth
As the company has grown, Kurtz’s passion for the product, and the pizza industry as a whole, has never dwindled. He spends a lot of his time traveling around the country, checking in with pizzerias and introducing others to the product. He still plays an integral role in the slew of collaborations the brand does with an array of different types of restaurants—from independent pizzerias to massive quick-service chains like Taco Bell.
“The honey has just become this excuse to meet all these people from different walks of life and different places that I otherwise would never get a chance to [visit and] meet,” Kurtz said. “So that’s what excites me about the partnerships—getting to travel to see parts of the country I would otherwise never get a chance to see.”
Perhaps the biggest expansion for the brand over the past several years, though, has been in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) segment. Mike’s Hot Honey has collaborated with Utz, Bush’s Beans and even Burt’s Bees (on a honey-infused lip balm). And while Mike’s almost never says “no” to a collab with a restaurant or pizzeria, the company has learned that the CPG game is a whole different animal.
“With the CPG stuff, it’s a little bit different because we’re licensing the brand for a package product collaboration,” Kurtz said. “Most of the time, partner brands are looking for exclusivity in the category. So when we’re choosing a specific category, it’s a big decision because it likely means we’re not going to work with anybody else in that category.”
Team Growth
From 2010 to 2015, Mike’s Hot Honey remained largely a one-man operation. Kurtz would make the product overnight in Paulie Gee’s kitchen after hours, from midnight to 8 a.m., in what he referred to as his “monk phase.” He compared the endless cycle of orders and production to a scene out of Breaking Bad—a show that happened to be airing during the time period when he was singlehandedly taking care of orders that would come in. “I started to identify with Walter White,” he said. “Every new order was exciting, but it also meant another marathon production night.”
Eventually, Kurtz brought Matt Beaton on as CEO, and the two began to tackle the industry together as sales ballooned. It wasn’t until 2017—when the company raised capital for the first time—that Kurtz and Beaton were able to hire a real team of experts. “We went from a two-man crew to being able to bring in people who were smarter than us,” Kurtz said, citing it as the biggest turning point for the brand.
Trend to Fixture
Claire Conaghan, a trendologist with Datassential, says Mike’s Hot Honey is following a trajectory similar to that of sriracha. “Hot honey’s rapid growth is thanks to its ease of adding to a wide variety of dishes,” she said. “Its balance of heat and sweet, and its ability to be offered as an additional topping, help it continue to trend.”
And while Mike’s Hot Honey is not the only hot honey out there—and plenty of pizzerias and restaurants make their own in-house—the brand still dominates the market. “Mike’s is still the one people know,” Wiener said. “It’s the only condiment in recent memory that’s become synonymous with a single brand.”
So how did they do it? It goes back to Kurtz riding Mike’s Trike around Brooklyn. To the thousands of miles logged on planes, on the road, at local pizza shops and at quick-service brands’ headquarters. For Kurtz, it’s always been about forming those relationships that don’t happen via email or Zoom.
“People ask how we built our foodservice business,” Kurtz said. “There’s no shortcut to do it. Our team, we’ve done so many customer visits all over the country—big customers, small customers, distributors, trade shows in every corner of the country…It’s not like it just happened. It took a lot of time on the road, seeing people in person, working through different challenges.”
To listen to the podcast with Kurtz:
Charlie Pogacar is PMQ Pizza’s senior editor.
