First came tequila. Then rosé. Now the latest celebrity-backed brand isn’t booze but a hot sauce.
Recently, Brooklyn Beckham made his debut into the spicy market with Cloud 23.
The £15 bottles of sauce, consisting of two flavours, Hot Habanero and Sweet Jalapeño, and labels adorned with kissing cherubim are more akin to a luxury perfume brand.
The 25-year-old’s sauces come hot on the heels of the singer Ed Sheeran who has an offering called Tingly Ted’s. The musician Alice Cooper has a line named after his greatest hits, including Poison Reaper, and Kim Kardashian has invested in Oprah Winfrey’s favourite truffle-infused hot sauce, Truff.
However, it’s not just A-listers who are getting fired up. Consumers have developed an insatiable appetite for hot sauces too, with Ocado reporting a 10% sales increase year on year.
The online retailer stocks more than 100 hot sauces with searches for Korean and chipotle versions up 850% and 292% respectively.
But it’s the craft hot sauce brands that come in Instagrammable bottles and feature everything from ghost peppers to yuzu that are really gaining traction.
James Nicolian, the co-founder of Some Like It Hot, an online store that specialises in imported and rare versions, describes hot sauce as “the closest thing to magic. It makes everything better.”
Nicolian tries every flavour before stocking it. “My current tally is 2,500. I have an extra fridge in my house and one in the garage just for my own bottles.”
The rise in popularity can be partly attributed to the YouTube show Hot Ones, where celebrities attempt to answer questions while eating 10 chicken wings with increasing levels of spice. Idris Elba swore his way through the challenge, Jennifer Lawrence cried and Ricky Gervais failed to complete it.
Jen Ferguson, the co-founder of the bottle shop Hop Burns and Black, which sells hot sauces alongside craft beers, says a box featuring sauces from the show is one of its bestsellers. “It costs over £100 but we sell hundreds and hundreds of packs. People want to recreate the challenge.”
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Elsewhere, there are hot sauce festivals, TikTok tours of hot sauce collections and forums dedicated to building up a tolerance. Nicolian is preparing to launch the UK’s first certified “hot sauce sommelier” course.
The spiciness of a hot sauce is captured using the Scoville scale, which measures the amount of capsaicin in a pepper. While Da’ Bomb Beyond Insanity, a hot sauce that measures more than 135,000 Scovillle units (60 times hotter than a Jalapeño), is popular, most of Ferguson’s customers want “something full of flavour that they can chuck over meals rather than something that is going to destroy them after a couple of drops”.
With Christmas approaching Nicolian is seeing demand for hot sauces for cheese boards and says “there really is a hot sauce for everything”. He sprinkles it in coffee, on ice-cream and when he eats out brings his own selection.
Once when a chef took offence, Nicolian sent them a box. “They messaged a couple of weeks later to ask if they could get some more.”