For decades, the roster of classic pizza toppings has
remained the same.
There's pepperoni, sausage and peppers, olives,
anchovies and, for some people, pineapple.
But in recent years, one topping has quickly made
itself a mainstay at pizza shops across the country.
Hot honey.
Mike's Hot Honey is unique because of the kick that you
get on the back of your palate. I really had no idea
that this would become a business eventually.
I just was a fan of the combination of honey and
chili peppers on pizza, and was excited to share it with
my friends. Once bottles got out into the world and
people started tasting it, I very quickly realized that
I did have a viable business on my hands.
After being introduced to customers in 2010, Mike's
Hot Honey quickly found an opening in the $2.5 billion
US honey market.
The product is currently sold in 30,000 retail and
food service locations across the country, and the
company is on track to bring in more than $40
million in 2023.
We think the key of building a brand that's going to
stand the test of time is to build it around a strong
core product, and we've done that.
I think it's really rare for a business of this size
to just sell one thing.
This is the story of how one man turned his hobby of
making hot honey into a $40 million a year company.
Even in college, Mike aspired to work in the
condiment industry.
I had a chance run in with Larry Raymond from Sweet
Baby Ray's, and it really inspired me.
And I thought it would be great to be a condiment man.
And I thought, you know what?
This might be the life for me.
While studying Portuguese in Brazil in the fall of 2003,
inspiration struck.
I was hiking with some friends and on the last day
of our hike, we descended into a little valley and
found a pizzeria there, and there were jars of honey
with chili peppers on the tables for drizzling on the
pizza. The first time I tasted the combination of
honey and chili peppers on pizza, it blew my mind.
I just couldn't shake the memory of it and kept on
thinking about it. It was something that I realized I
wanted to try to make for myself, and maybe share with
friends and family.
Over the next six years, just for fun.
Mike tested new ways of infusing the three
ingredients honey, chili peppers, and vinegar.
He jarred hot honey at home and gifted it to his friends
and family. He moved to New York and started a job in
the music business, but in his spare time, he worked to
perfect the hot honey recipe.
Dialing in the flavor profile of the product was a
long process.
It required a lot of chili pepper consumption, which
was quite painful at times.
I used to go to the Bronx Terminal Market and taste
different varietals of chili pepper, and I'd bring
a carton of whole milk with me to sip on in between
tastes, which was a recipe for a stomachache.
Then in early 2010, while browsing the pizza blog
Slice, Mike noticed a handle that kept popping up
Paulie Gee.
So I was thinking to myself, who is this Paulie Gee guy?
And eventually Slice blog profiled Paulie and they
said that he was going to be opening his own pizzeria
in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
So when he first opened the pizzeria, I went there to
try it and met him.
I started peppering him with questions about his
process for making dough and how the oven worked.
And by the end of the conversation, he could tell
that I was really into making pizza, and he asked
if I would be interested in coming in as a pizza
apprentice.
Early on in his apprenticeship, Mike brought
Paulie the honey he had been working on for years.
And brought it in for Paulie to try.
He tasted it.
He started drizzling it on a hot soppressata pizza,
which we later called the Hellboy, and asked me if I
could make it for the restaurant to drizzle on the
pizzas.
Soon customers were asking to purchase bottles of
Mike's Hot Honey.
At this time, I was making Mike's Hot Honey in small
batches, one gallon at a time in the back of the
pizzeria. I was using the restaurant for production on
Mondays when they were closed, so I'd go there on
Monday and spend a full day in the kitchen just making
batches of Mike's Hot Honey and bottling.
I started selling bottles off the bar in November of
2010, and shortly thereafter I was lucky to
have some press.
It was something that people really loved to
drizzle on their pizza, but they also loved to share it
with their friends. So I just wanted to get the
product out into the world, and I was selling it at
virtually no margin.
So I was selling it for $6 a bottle.
Very quickly I raised the price, realizing that was
not sustainable at all.
Pretty soon, I had orders coming in from other
restaurants, from specialty retailers around the city
and beyond.
As his business grew, Mike began driving around New
York City delivering bottles of honey out of his
car. Then in 2014, a buyer from Whole Foods said that
they wanted to bring Mike's product into their store.
At that time, there had been very little innovation in
the honey aisle. It had been pretty much the same
for 50 years.
We brought something new to the honey aisle, which
hadn't seen anything exciting in quite a long
time.
In late 2014, Mike reconnected with his college
friend Matt Beaton, who had just moved to the East
Coast.
Mike had something really special with his hot honey,
and so I reached out to him and told him if he ever
needed help as a friend, I'd be happy to help him
write a business plan, set up QuickBooks, all those
things you do in the early years of the company.
So I think we both just realized that we would have
a lot of fun if we gave this a go.
His skill set really complemented mine, and I
thought he was a great fit to help me build the
business.
Matt became the company's CEO, and the pair quickly
realized that they needed outside investment to scale
their business.
It was in 2017 when we started to get some interest
from some big customers that required us to carry a
bit more inventory, to be able to service them on time
and in full. And to to have that inventory, we needed
capital. And so it was about that time that we
started looking for investors. The most good
things don't come easily.
And raising money is not for the faint of heart.
We heard no hundreds of times, which can be
discouraging because you know you have something
really special.
Eventually, those no's turned into yeses.
Since 2017, Matt and Mike have been able to raise
around $12 million through three rounds of funding.
Mike's Hot Honey not only expanded with financial
partners, but also with brand collaborations.
We recently launched a potato chip with Utz, a
mustard with Maille, the French Dijon company, and a
frozen pizza with California Pizza Kitchen.
For brand awareness, the company has provided neon
signs of its logo for restaurant partners to hang
in store. Mike and Matt carefully select which
restaurants and shops they choose to supply signs with.
Partial to tastemakers, they want the customers to
see the neon signs as badges that the stores wear
with pride.
We realized that our food service customers made up
the biggest drivers of brand awareness for the
brand. They see the brand in the restaurant from that
signage and then remember us on shelf at retail when
they're walking through the honey aisle.
It's a marker of quality.
This is very similar to the same strategy that lots of
beer brands use in bars.
There are roughly 50 neon signs scattered around the
country at key restaurant partners, and we've got
quite a long waitlist of people who are waiting to
have a sign installed at their shop.
As sales have grown, so has the size of the Mike's Hot
Honey team.
Once we were able to secure capital, we were able to
start to build a team around us.
Our sales team has done a terrific job to make Mike's
Hot Honey broadly available across the country, across
retail, across restaurants.
You can find us in approximately 30,000
locations.
On Amazon, Mike's Hot Honey is the number one selling
hot sauce at any given time .
On our product, There's less than 1% household
penetration right now, so we have a lot of consumers
in this country that we still need to reach.
The company sells Mike's Hot Honey and squeeze packs and
dip cups, 1.5oz mini jars, 12 ounce squeeze bottles, 24
ounce chefs bottles, and one gallon jugs.
In July of 2020, ten years after Mike started selling
his hot honey, the company released another product.
An extra hot version of the hot honey.
There's a lot of temptation to grow brands through
flavor innovation and new flavor profiles, but what we
realized is that Mike's Hot Honey was a very novel
product that many people had never tasted, and we
realized that there was a lot of room for growth just
on that core product.
So instead of extending into other flavor profiles,
we grew the brand by price and pack innovation, and we
made it available in as many different pack sizes
for as many different usage occasions as possible.
That doesn't mean, though, that in the future there
won't be other things under our brand halo that come to
market. But for now, our focus continues to be on
that core product because we know the ceiling is still
really high.
We created a category.
It's used on everything from pizza to fried chicken
to cocktails to charcuterie and cheese boards to salads,
barbecue. You can brush your teeth with it.
There's virtually nothing that it can't, it can't go
on.