Hot honey trend fuels growth for NJ’s Stiles Honey
With the hot honey food trend continuing to stick around, a commercial beekeeper from Middlesex County is helping meet demand for all things spicy and sweet.
Infused with dried chili peppers, the honey variation can be used to heat up a variety of dishes from fried chicken to ice cream. While the “swicy” combination has been around since at least the late 1980s, social media is credited with turning up the heat on the trend in recent years as users share recipes, ideas and inspiration.
As a result, more and more restaurant chains, like KFC, Dunkin’ and Jersey Mike’s Subs, and at-home brands, such as Ritz crackers and Hidden Valley Ranch dressing, have embraced hot honey.
As the founder and owner of Stiles Honey, one of the largest hot honey co-packers in the U.S., Grant Stiles couldn’t be happier about the sweet-heat trend. The Fords-based company has partnerships to produce hot honey for national brands, foodservice operators and grocery store chains. It also offers its own hot honey brand, Ol’ Stiles.
“It’s not just about the heat – it’s about the sweetness of the honey,” said Stiles. “People like to have something different besides I guess ketchup and mustard and mayonnaise on their food products. And it certainly does enhance the flavor of a lot of foods. It is now just starting to get a foothold where it’s a recognizable product that people are wanting or desiring, I think.”
One of the most familiar names that Stiles works with its Mike’s Hot Honey, a Brooklyn-born venture that has become the leading brand of hot honey in the U.S. As of 2024, over 3,000 restaurants and over 30,000 retailers nationally carry the Mike’s Hot Honey brand, and it boasts an estimated annual revenue of $40 million.
It has also partnered with numerous chains to offer hot honey dishes, like Jersey Mike’s, Cold Stone Creamery, Insomnia Cookies, Dunkin’, Moe’s Southwest Grill, California Pizza Kitchen and First Watch. On the retail side, Mike’s Hot Honey has had product collaborations with Ute Brands, Bush’s Baked Beans and DiGiorno.
Stiles’ relationship with the company began 14 years ago, when it was still a side-hustle for founder Mike Kurtz. During college, Kurtz began making hot honey for friends and family after encountering a pizzeria in Brazil stocked with jars of honey tinged with dried chili peppers.
Following graduation, Kurtz began working at a pizza shop in Brooklyn and introduced hot honey to the owner. After that, a soppressata pizza drizzled with his hot honey made its way onto the menu and remains a bestseller.
When demand grew, Kurtz turned to Stiles Honey to expand production beyond the pizzeria’s kitchen. As the largest honey producer and packer in New Jersey, Stiles Honey was well positioned to help Kurtz scale Mike’s Hot Honey to become the fan-favorite brand it is today.
Catching a buzz
Since Stiles started his business in 1995, he has evolved it into one of the most successful apiaries on the East Coast, managing over 10,000 bee colonies from North Carolina to New Jersey to New York that produce high-quality, locally sourced honey. By using locally raised honeybees that gather nectar from a variety of wildflowers blooming throughout the area, Stiles Honey said it results in a superior-tasting honey made up of a range of flavors that are naturally blended.
The idea for the venture was inspired by Stiles’ lifelong passion for honeybees, as well as his dedication to the art of beekeeping. His fascination with the hobby began in 1977, when his father captured a swam and set up a hive in their backyard. From that point, Stiles was hooked on honeybees and beekeeping.
While pursuing a degree in entomology from Penn State University, Stiles paid for much of his education by selling beeswax candles and hand-painted beeswax ornaments. In 1992, he began a 10-year stint as the New Jersey State Apiarist, a role that Stiles said taught him much about the commercial beekeeping industry and gave him the tools necessary to turn his pastime into a professional pursuit.
Stiles said, “I had already started my business prior to that very small scale, but once I got started here in New Jersey, that’s where things kind of just started to grow very slowly.” He added that the decision to go all in was partially motivated by “a little bit of insanity.”
“Beekeeping is kind of an addictive type of thing. Some people are cut out to do it as a business,” he said. “I’ve always enjoyed the chase of the honey crop. It’s something that has kind of got this sweet reward – no pun intended. At the end of the year after you put all the work in, you see what you’ve got and hopefully it’s successful.”
The company started out focused on honey production, which involves the collection, storage and processing of nectar into honey by bees, and then took on pollination.
Stiles described the growth of the venture as slow but steady and noted that most of its partnerships have come from word of mouth. The company’s reach has also expanded over the years through acquisitions of businesses that were either downsizing or closing due to retirements, he said.
In addition to making honey and honey products for local and national brands, Stiles Honey has its own namesake line that comes in a variety of forms, including liquid, creamed, honeycomb, sticks, candy, honeycomb and raw beeswax.
Within the past year, Stiles Honey also launched its own take on hot honey – Ol’ Stiles.
“Stiles is a very local honey brand distributed throughout the New Jersey and New York markets,” Stiles said. “And, Ol’ Stiles is a brand we developed to go more national. It consists of more unique types of products, like rubs used for cooking and glazing.”
Both brands are all natural, free of artificial ingredients, fillers or preservatives and can found at Stiles Honey’s retail store in Fords, on Amazon.com and Walmart.com. They are also sold at stileshoney.com and olstiles.com.
Busy as a bee
In the Northeast, honeybees typically produce the most honey during the spring and early summer months, when nectar-producing plants are in bloom.
Since Stiles Honey is also in the packing business, it is focused on that year-round.
“We produce honey for a period of time in a year and then we harvest that crop and continue to spread that goodness throughout the year until the next crop,” he said, noting that Stiles Honey packs about 5 million pounds of honey annually.
“In the wintertime, there’s a lot of maintenance work for commercial beekeepers, such as getting ready for spring and work on the trucks, trailers, equipment, boxes for bees, and getting everything ready and moved around to where it needs to be,” Stiles explained. “So, you may have stuff up north and you have to get it down south, etc. Or you need to feed the bees to get them to build up so that they’re ready to go in the spring when you need them. It doesn’t stop because it gets cold.”
When it comes to challenges, Stiles said, “Certainly labor is a big issue, but in the beekeeping side, it is the common pest, which is the varroa mite on the production side of that, of the B side. That is the biggest issue. That’s a continuing invasive pest that becomes a continuing problem, which is very devastating to bees.”
“A lot of it is management detailed and a lot of labor … And a lot of effort goes into managing that pest. Sometimes you win it and sometimes you don’t. But in general, if you do what you need to do on a timely basis, you are able to come out on the better side of things,” he said.
Given the popularity of amateur beekeeping in New Jersey, Stiles Honey also serves as a one-stop shop for bees, beekeeping equipment and honey packaging supplies. Each spring, Stiles Honey also supplies local beekeepers with quality bees to start a new hive – or replace any winter losses.
Known as The Honey Place, the 2,000-square-foot retail space is located at Stiles Honey’s 18,000-square-foot headquarters on New Brunswick Avenue.
“And then we also do a lot of educational outreach with beekeeping and beekeeping organizations, and we hold classes here to teach beekeepers about beekeeping,” Stiles said.
Presented in partnership with Tim Schuler, owner of Schuler’s Bees and Honey in Richland and former state apiarist, “Next-Level Beekeeping” offers the following classes:
- Beekeeping 101-Novice Level (May 31)
- My Bees Made Honey – Now What?: Honey harvest, food safety and packaging (June 13)
- Fall Is On Our Heels and Winter is Right Behind It – Dearth, mites and feeding (July 11)
- Culling the Herd – Combining, fall feeding and winter prep (Sept. 12)
- I Want to Sell My Products – Marketing, regulations and checklists (Oct. 17)
- I Have Beeswax – Making products and gifts (Nov. 14)
The courses are especially valuable given the increasing interest in products made with natural ingredients over artificial alternatives. In the U.S., the honey market is expected to grow from $3 billion in 2024 to $4.79 billion by 2033, according to an estimate by ResearchAndMarkets.com.
The growth is fueled by rising health consciousness among consumers and the growing application of honey across multiple industries. In addition to its use as a natural sweetener in food and beverages, honey is increasingly being adopted in skincare and haircare products for its moisturizing and antibacterial properties. It’s also being used in traditional medicine and therapeutic formulations for its antibacterial and healing attributes.
Stiles also noted the many non-food uses of beeswax.
“Beeswax is used to make a lot of candles and soaps,” he said. “It’s very easy. You can make all kinds of lip balms and soaps at a very small scale for yourself and your family. And it’s a fun, great family activity. There is a science behind all of these things. But it isn’t like you need a laboratory. You need some basic equipment and you need to follow a recipe and guidelines, but it is something you can kind of make in an evening.”
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