The Sweet Sting of Success: How Mike’s Hot Honey Built a $60M Empire

After tasting a jar of chili-infused honey at a local pizzeria in Bahia, Brazil, the founder of Mike’s Hot Honey, Mike Kurtz, spent a year obsessively tinkering with batches to recreate that taste. Mike reveals the unglamorous “midnight hustle” of his early days, bottling honey by hand in a Brooklyn pizza kitchen while working a music industry day job.

Mike explains how he disrupted a “sleepy” grocery aisle, landed a massive Walmart deal from a small-town garage, and scaled his “sweet heat” into a household name found in 30,000 stores nationwide.