How this swicy condiment has taken over the UK (and TikTok too)

Ask any teenager, ‘What’s the coolest fast-food place?’ and they’ll say ‘Popeyes’, which has 85 outlets in the UK. Ask them why, and they’ll say because of its ‘swicy’ sandwiches – and show you TikTok clips, some with three million views, of people tucking into the chicken burger doused with hot honey. Popeyes sold 250,000 of them in eight weeks when it launched and last month the chain brought out an entire line of hot-honey snacks to take advantage of what it calls ‘a viral trend that shows no sign of letting up’.

What was once a curious cult condiment has become the culinary equivalent of a Netflix reboot: cloyingly familiar, algorithm-approved and mass-manufactured in pursuit of virality.

How did we get here? And what does it say about our relationship to food? Hot honey is exactly what it sounds like: chilli-infused honey, typically drizzled over pizza or fried chicken – and, increasingly, anything that sits still long enough. It hits the so-called ‘swicy’ flavour profile – a portmanteau of sweet and spicy. It’s a flavour combination as old as cooking itself and one we Brits have fallen for before: remember when there was sweet chilli everything back in the early noughties?

At the time of writing, the hashtag #hothoney has over a billion views on TikTok. Google searches are up 300 per cent since 2021. The UK market is growing by a quarter annually. It is a stalwart on hip British menus. Supermarket shelves groan with variations. It is no longer a trend, it’s a takeover.

The hot honey craze began in 2010, in Brooklyn. Mike Kurtz, a young college student, had just come back from Brazil where he’d tried it on a pizza. He became obsessed, so began bottling his own and selling it under the brand Mike’s Hot Honey, from Paulie Gee’s slice shop in Greenpoint in Brooklyn – the epicentre of pizza hipsterdom – to rapturous acclaim. Today, buzzy restaurants like Carmela’s in Islington sling hot honey over burrata pizzas with a straight-faced nod to the New York joints that birthed them.

It was made for the social-media era where visuality is key. And honey, let’s face it, is almost indecent. It glistens, clings, pours. These characteristics make it perfect for the growing underbelly of food influencers.

There are the breathy West London chefboys – filming in Daddy’s garden, pulling a ‘banging’ pizza out of their Gozney oven, silver rings and bracelets clinking, before finishing with a ‘cheeky’ drizzle of hot honey. One has even made a brand, Dr Sting’s, that mimics New York deli cool – cartoon bee label, Lower East Side swagger – upsold to Instagram followers hungry for a slice of cultural cachet. It’s a condiment and an identity rolled into one.

Then there are the fast-food pornographers. Theatrical, moaning, faux-gasmic: grunting into their ring lights as they collapse over hot honey chicken wings. Their food isn’t for eating, it’s for looping. Greasy, decadent, click-baiting. What matters isn’t flavour but performance.

Let’s not forget the secret-spot hustlers, the ‘come-with-me-let-me-show-you-this-hidden-gem’ guys – while in a queue with 50 other influencers in Shoreditch. They peddle a curated kind of fake scarcity. And recently, it seems, the hot honey bottle is always there.

Social media didn’t invent food trends, but it did supercharge them. The result is short-form crazes driven by content creators who aren’t chefs, and chefs who behave like content creators.

Restaurants are not immune. The food critic Jimi Famurewa wrote a brilliant piece earlier this year about how even the noblest spots must now produce base-level content to survive. It’s no longer enough to serve good food. You must sizzle it, drip it, snap it. You don’t run a kitchen any more; you run a channel. One chef told me that they now have a tripod on the pass. In this environment, you don’t need a food critic, you need likes, influencers and a drizzle cam.

It was only a matter of time before supermarkets and big brands started getting in on the hot honey action. Tesco kicked it off in 2024 with a Hilltop Hot Honey. Then came Aldi, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Iceland. Hot honey olives, pasta, sausage rolls. There’s even a hot honey lip balm.

Why do supermarkets love it so much? Because it’s innovation with zero risk. It gives these traditional, staid stores the illusion of edge. In reality, they’ve picked a flavour already blessed by the algorithm, with a ready-made audience primed to squeal, ‘Oooh, I’ve heard of that!’ and toss

it into the basket. The result? Culinary monoculture. The same few safe flavours, endlessly recycled in slightly different disguises. Innovation isn’t about taste these days, it’s about timing: jumping on the loop while it’s still looping.

This speaks to a broader issue: that food is converging, not evolving. We are sliding towards a groupthink-sanctioned, mediocre norm. Once, dishes were seasonal, regional, full of character. Now menus flatten into the same few safe options. There’s a slide toward consensus food, where your dinner says not ‘this is who I am’, but ‘this is who I follow on social media’. You didn’t choose hot honey, it chose you – via TikTok, the BBC Good Food website, some supermarket test kitchen. And we are fed these trends like foie gras geese.

We used to say you are what you eat. Now, you eat what you’re told.