How Hot Ones Put Small-Batch Hot Sauce on the Map

In March 2015, a YouTube channel run by Complex's food and culture brand, First We Feast, launched an interview show with a simple premise. A host asks a celebrity real questions while they eat ten chicken wings, each coated in a hotter sauce than the last. That show, Hot Ones, now has about 400 episodes and its own line of sauces on supermarket shelves.

This article covers how the show started, how its sauce business works, what happened to small makers who landed a spot on the lineup, and what can and cannot be said about the show's effect on the wider industry.

Where it started

Hot Ones premiered on March 12, 2015. Sean Evans and Chris Schonberger created it, and Evans hosts. Schonberger ran First We Feast, and the idea came out of a brainstorm about a fresh take on the celebrity interview. Evans has recalled that Schonberger's pitch was an interview show built around "violently hot" chicken wings. The first season ran eight episodes between March and October 2015, and Tony Yayo was the first guest.

Evans has described the team as setting out to make a funny YouTube sideshow, with no idea how successful it would become. He has said an episode with Key and Peele was the first big breakthrough, reaching the front page of Reddit, trending on YouTube and passing millions of views.

The format has barely changed. Each season uses a different lineup of ten sauces, but some bottles recur. "The Classic" sits in spot one, "Los Calientes" in spot four or five, and "The Last Dab" is always last. Da' Bomb Beyond Insanity has held spot eight since Season 2.

The sauce business inside the show

The hot sauce side of Hot Ones runs through Heatonist, a Brooklyn company that began in 2013 as a push cart. Heatonist describes itself as the official hot sauce partner of Hot Ones since 2015 and says the two teams curate each season's lineup together and craft the official sauces, including Los Calientes and The Last Dab.

The Last Dab is the clearest example of what the partnership produced. Heatonist says it created the sauce with the Hot Ones team and "Smokin' Ed" Currie, the breeder behind the Carolina Reaper. Its first 1,000-bottle batch sold out quickly in September 2017, but accounts disagree on how quickly. One description of a First We Feast video says less than two minutes, and another outlet reported three minutes. Neither is a primary record, so we cannot say which is right. The sauce has since been reformulated several times, with versions named Reduxx, XXX, Apollo and Xperience.

The business numbers are mostly company-reported. In November 2018, Complex Networks CEO Rich Antoniello said the company was "on track to do more than $7 million in hot sauce sales in 2018." That is a projection from an executive, not an audited result. It covered the sauces then on sale plus others rotated in and out, and excluded other merchandise. Later retrospectives repeat a similar figure, but this is the original statement we could confirm.

Distribution has widened since. A Heatonist press release announced that its Hot Ones sauces would roll out to more than 8,000 retail stores, with Whole Foods following in June. The show itself has become a larger business. BuzzFeed sold First We Feast for $82.5 million in December 2024 to an investor group that included Evans. Hot Ones-branded Hot Pockets and Pringles have also been released, and in June 2026 Netflix ordered a spin-off.

What a lineup spot did for small makers

For a small producer, a place on the lineup puts the bottle in front of a very large audience at once. A few makers have described what happened next, though all the figures below come from the founders themselves or from local business coverage and have not been independently audited.

Dawson's Hot Sauce (Hamilton, Ontario)

Brodie Dawson founded the company in 2013. His Original Hot sauce was in the lineup for Season 5 in 2018, and Charlize Theron praised it on camera. Dawson says online sales rose 450 percent over the year and wholesale volume rose four to five times. He has also said overall sales were up roughly ten times from the same time the year before, while declining to give exact figures. Those are different measures from the same founder, so they should not be merged. Dawson also acknowledged that some of the growth was already underway. His Coffee Date sauce opened the Season 28 lineup.

Karma Sauce (Rochester, New York)

Gene Olczak, an optical engineer, started Karma Sauce in his garage in 2008. Extreme Karma appeared on Hot Ones in January 2018, and Olczak says the extra pallets he had in stock "flew out the door." He quit his engineering job, opened a new production facility in downtown Rochester and hired a sales manager. A few months after the first appearance, the show's creators and Heatonist invited him to make a sauce under the Hot Ones label. By February 2025, Karma's newest sauce, Lift Off, was in the Season 26 lineup, the company's fifth product appearance on the show. The company had 16 employees, and Olczak estimated 2025 sales could reach $5 million, about 15 percent above 2024. He named a growing wholesale business and a new food safety certification as key drivers of growth, alongside the show appearances and new products.

La Pimenterie (Montreal)

Julien Frechette started the company in 2016. During Season 21 in 2023, workers were filling the largest order for the green hot sauce ever placed, for the Curry Verde that was in the lineup. Frechette called a Hot Ones placement the "Grammy or Emmy of hot sauce."

High Desert Sauce Co. (Tucson, Arizona)

Founder Zac Perkins, who started the company in 2018, got his Tikk-Hot Masala on the show in 2021. He says a problem with a co-packer on the Hot Ones order means some customers may never buy the sauce again.

A pepper that debuted on a talk show

The show was also the debut stage for a new record-holding pepper. Currie first presented Pepper X to the world on Hot Ones. In October 2023, Guinness World Records named Pepper X the hottest chili pepper, with an average of 2.693 million Scoville Heat Units, based on tests at Winthrop University. The previous record holder, the Carolina Reaper, averaged about 1.64 million. "Pepper X" began as a placeholder name while trademark filings were completed, and it stuck when Heatonist needed to print labels. Heatonist says the pepper is currently sold only in sauce form, and the seed cannot be bought. That lack of seeds or fresh peppers available to the public led to some skepticism of the record among pepper enthusiasts.

Did Hot Ones change the industry?

The honest answer is that it clearly changed the show's corner of it, and that proving more is hard.

Retailers, a reporter and Evans himself make the broader claim. A hot sauce buyer at Jungle Jim's International Market in Ohio said people want to come and try the sauces they see on YouTube, and that it helped sales a lot. The reporter covering that story added, without data, that sauces which had been slow movers "took off" after appearing on the show and that most of the industry's growth over the prior three years was fueled by it. In a 2019 interview, Evans said he thinks Hot Ones sits near the center of the surge in spicy food. One 2025 retrospective argued the show turned Scoville units into dinner table conversation. A UK specialist shop, Hop Burns & Black, reported in its own press release that its sales rose 94 percent over 2023, and said it stocks the UK's most extensive Hot Ones lineup, with customers often buying with the intention of recreating the show's challenge at home. These are the views and sales claims of interested parties.

What the evidence does not show is how much of the category's growth the show caused. Estimates of the US hot sauce market vary widely by research firm, from about $1.45 billion to about $2.9 billion for US hot sauce production, which is a different measure, so no single figure here should be treated as settled. The most defensible claim is narrower. Hot Ones gave small makers a large audience.