‘Like eating battery acid’: British tongues on fire as sales of hot sauce soar

In March this year, Florence Pugh, Oscar-nominated actor, 2019 winner of the Trophée Chopard at Cannes, was on a chat show to promote her new movie in which she co-starred with Morgan Freeman.

She appeared flustered, before things quickly went downhill. “This is like eating battery acid,” she told host Sean Evans. Tears rolled down her face and she started dribbling, then she was sweating from her eyebrows.

Pugh, like a growing number of British celebrities, was a guest on Hot Ones, a YouTube chat show that has got 385m views on TikTok so far this year. It attracts a bafflingly high calibre of A-list guests to eat increasingly spicy chicken wings, perform tasks and answer interview questions. Like many others from the UK and Ireland, these stars, who have included Lewis Capaldi, Harry Kane, Idris Elba, Niall Horan and Colin Farrell, have succumbed to the delights of hot sauce.

The traditional British aversion to spicy food seems to have finally been allayed as sales for hot sauces increased significantly in the last year. According to Waitrose, sales of hot sauces are up 55% year on year. Sales of sriracha are particularly strong with a rise of 22%. The Thai chilli sauce has become a bona fide social media star – #sriracha has over 550m views on TikTok. Ongoing shortages of Huy Fong sriracha have made headlines in the US.

Waitrose now stocks more than 20 different hot sauces ranging from mild chipotle to a habanero sauce with a rating of 30,000-50,000 heat units on the Scoville scale, which measures chilli heat. The number of small-batch hot sauce producers has been growing in the UK for a while.

Meanwhile, Nando’s has replaced HP – famous for its brown sauce – as the third biggest name in table sauces in the UK. Nando’s BBQ sauces, sold in supermarkets, have grown 9.5% this year with sales of £22.4m, while traditional British condiments have declined in unit sales. Brown sauce is down 8.1%, but mayonnaise is also down 2.2% and ketchup has dipped by 4.5%.

The UK is not just embracing the taste of chilli but an accompanying cultural scene is growing too. Bauce Brothers is a subscription hot sauce club founded in 2018 by Jess Karia and Ben Uraszewski. The club started annual awards for the best sauces in 2021. Karia was introduced to hot food by his father, who carried a box of green chillies around with him so he could add them to sandwiches and burgers. Uraszewski’s entry point was Caribbean food flavoured with the scotch bonnet pepper.

“We’ve shared a love of hot sauce for many years, but found it difficult to easily discover great UK ones,” says Uraszewski. “Buying sauces online was challenging as there’s a huge amount of choice, and many focused on extreme heat rather than flavour. We started the club to help hot-sauce heads like ourselves find great sauces made in the UK, that put flavour first.”

The pair also saw a parallel between the hot sauce market and craft beer scene, particularly in terms of growing customer interest in small-batch producers and independent manufacturing.

“Small-batch sauces, to us, are those that you can’t find in your supermarket, contain all natural ingredients and are often recipes passed down through family. Each batch might be slightly different and this, we feel, adds to the charm.”

These artisanal spicy sauces are a key feature of the chilli festivals that are now a part of British summer time. Over the last 10 years these events have sprung up around the country. While eating competitions are often a staple, they have become important for sauce makers too. Event producer Allie Behr runs the Hot Sauce Society, London’s largest hot sauce festival, which in May had its biggest audience to date and they’re running a pop-up shop in Shepherds Bush at the end of August.

“The hot-sauce community are such lovely people,” says Behr. “It’s not hairy blokes like you get with craft beer. It’s very diverse and the sauce makers are often selling family recipes and they share their stories with each other. It’s so nice.” UK based sauce maker Pat Hinds’ sells a Guyanese pepper sauce, Pat & Pinky’s, flavoured with the wiri wiri chilli and inspired by his mother, Pinky, and her cooking. The wiri wiri is not well known outside Guyana but Hinds believes it’s a great introduction to the country’s culture. “We’re bringing our national chilli to the world,” he says. “Guyanese cuisine is amazing – it’s the glue that brings people together.”

Hinds worked in marketing for 25 years before launching Pat & Pinky’s. He first saw the rise of hot sauces in the US, particularly New York. Then the trend arrived in the UK. “Street food has become massive and it’s a great way to experience food from other countries. People’s taste buds have definitely gotten more adventurous with foods from around the world.”

He says that social media and YouTube have also changed the game as it means you can experience and see different food long before you actually eat it. He does advise people who are still scared of hot sauce to give it a try.

”We’ve found events really work as people can sample sauces and we can take people on a journey. They just have to jump in and have a go.”

As Uraszewski from Bauce Brothers points out: “Hot sauce is a sure fire way to transform any bland meal into something more magical.”