Food and trends come and go with regularity, making it difficult for restaurant owners to keep up. And right now, Americans are craving spicy food. The hotter the better.
This new craving comes at a time when restaurant traffic is down. According to Nation’s Restaurant News (NRN), “Restaurant traffic remains down across most of the industry, and if there’s a light at the end of this tunnel, it sure is dim.” NRN further explains that “lingering inflation” is resulting in “eroding [consumer] confidence. In July, for instance, menu prices continued to outpace the overall Consumer Price Index, and by quite a bit—the CPI rose 2.7% year-over-year while food-away-from-home prices rose 3.9%.”
Some like it hot!
“America is setting its mouth on fire.” So says a recent article in The Atlantic, which notes an analysis from Datassential, a food and beverage industry consultancy, reveals that over half of consumers “are likely to buy an item described as spicy, up from 39% 10 years ago.”
Spicy food is not only attracting new spice lovers, but current spice-eaters want more. Datassential reports that as of 2025, “more than 19 out of every 20 restaurants in the United States offer at least one spicy item.” Those restaurants include ice-cream stores, bakeries, and coffee shops.
The embrace of spicy has even invaded our grocery aisles. According to The Atlantic, “Frito-Lay now sells 26 different Flamin’ Hot products,” the sales of which grew by 31% in only one year (2022 to 2023).
Why the sudden love for spicy foods? The Atlantic attributes it to Gen Z, citing a survey from NCSolutions showing that 51% of this generation “consider themselves hot-sauce connoisseurs, and 35% have signed a waiver before eating something spicy.”
NRN says, to attract customers, restaurants need to “double down on both innovation and experience.” And unusually spicy foods can help you do just that—and drive customers into your restaurants. Even better, The Atlantic notes that “spice can be a cheap way to produce flavor, get consumer attention, and mask less-expensive ingredients such as corn and chicken.” And it adds that new techniques have made it easier to inject “spice into just about any mass-produced food, such as ice cream, lemonade, and sandwich bread.”
This trend may be a keeper. As The Atlantic explains, our bodies adapt to eating spicy food, so the more we eat, the more we crave food that’s even spicier. And for food entrepreneurs, the good news is, “spicy food is easier to make, easier to find, and easier to love than it was just a few decades ago.”
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Rieva Lesonsky is President of Small Business Currents, LLC, a content company focusing on small businesses and entrepreneurship. You can find her on Twitter @Rieva, Bluesky @Rieva.bsky.social, and LinkedIn. Or email her at Rieva@SmallBusinessCurrents.com.
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