 | |
| Company type | Private |
|---|---|
| Industry | Honey |
| Founded | 2010 Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Founder | Mike Kurtz |
| Headquarters | Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
Key people | Matt Beaton (CEO) |
| Revenue | $40 million (2023) |
| Website | mikeshothoney |
Mike's Hot Honey is an American food company that specializes in honey infused with chili peppers. The company was founded in 2010 by Mike Kurtz in Brooklyn, New York. The leading brand of hot honey in the United States, Mike's Hot Honey has been described as a "cult favorite". [1] [2]
Mike Kurtz was first inspired to pursue hot honey in 2004 while studying abroad in Brazil, where he and his friends encountered a pizzeria stocked with jars of honey infused with chili peppers; as Kurtz recounted, "It was so delicious that I realized I wanted to try to make it for myself." [3] While in college at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Kurtz began making his own hot honey from his apartment. [3] [4] After experimenting with several different types of peppers and honey, Kurtz landed on the recipe for Mike's Hot Honey, which he says is "a lot hotter, more chili forward and has a much stronger kick than what I tasted in Brazil". [3]
Initially, Kurtz made hot honey for his own personal consumption, offering some to his family and friends as gifts. [3] Upon moving to Brooklyn after graduating college, he began working at Paulie Gee's pizzeria in Greenpoint in 2010. [3] [4] After Kurtz introduced Paulie Gee to his hot honey, Gee was immediately hooked, and the pizzeria began offering "The Hellboy", a soppressata pizza drizzled with Mike's Hot Honey, which has remained a best-seller at Paulie Gee's ever since its introduction. [3] [5]
Kurtz launched a distribution center in 2011 and landed Mike's Hot Honey in Whole Foods, the first grocery store to carry the product, in 2014. [3] After hiring Matt Beaton as CEO in 2015, the company raised three rounds of funding totaling $12 million. [3] As of 2024, Mike's Hot Honey was carried in over 3,000 restaurants and 30,000 retail establishments in the United States, with an estimated annual revenue of $40 million. [4]
In April 2023, Mike's Hot Honey collaborated with shoe brand Ewing Athletics, the signature brand of former basketball player Patrick Ewing, to release a line of Mike's Hot Honey–branded cross-training high-top sneakers, which are sold alongside jars of hot honey. [1] [6]
In 2023 and 2024, Mike's Hot Honey partnered with several restaurant chains to offer various hot honey dishes, including hot honey doughnuts at New York City chain Dough Doughnuts, [7] hot honey deep dish pizza at Lou Malnati's, [8] hot honey ice cream at Cold Stone Creamery, [9] and hot honey cookies at Insomnia Cookies. [10] Mike's Hot Honey has also partnered with DiGiorno and California Pizza Kitchen to release frozen pizza with hot honey. [2] [11]
In 2024, Mike's Hot Honey created a pizza-themed arcade game called Slice Hunter, which is available on the iOS App Store and as a one-off physical arcade cabinet at Scarr's Pizza in Manhattan. [12] [13] Kurtz said, "The idea behind Slice Hunter was to connect people back to memories of playing classic arcade games in their childhood pizzerias." [13]
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Pizza arrived in the United States in the early 20th century along with waves of Italian immigrants who settled primarily in the larger cities of the Northeast, such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore. After American soldiers stationed in Italy returned from World War II, pizza and pizzerias rapidly grew in popularity.
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