What started as a hobby nearly 20 years ago has turned into the hottest product in restaurants and honey aisles across the country.
The crimson Franzen case is the same model as the iconic briefcase from Quentin Tarantino's film "Pulp Fiction". But unlike in the 1994 film, everyone knows exactly what's inside.Indeed, the reason Kurtz brings the suitcase with him while he travels is so that he can spread the gospel ofHe loads the briefcase up with five 12-ounce bottles before every trip.
"I realized that condiments truly elevate food," Kurtz tells CNBC Make It. "And I've always been into cooking. I saw Larry and how much fun he was having selling barbecue sauce and I thought: 'You know what? This might be the life for me." Eventually, he settled on the recipe that would one day be sold at more than 30,000 retailers and restaurants across the nation.
He would spend hours exchanging tips with fellow pizza aficionados on a blog called Slice, where he first encountered a pizza maker named Paulie Gee who would soon be opening a pizzeria in Greenpoint, Brooklyn close to where Kurtz lived at the time."I started peppering him with questions about his process for making dough and how the oven worked," Kurtz says.
"I'd be in front of the oven stretching dough, and I could see people's reactions to tasting Mike's Hot Honey on their pizza," Kurtz says. "It was like 'Holy s--t, this is incredible.' And people started coming up to me asking if I was the honey guy and where they could buy it."Kurtz began his apprenticeship in August of 2010.
Word of the spicy topping at Brooklyn's hot new pizzeria quickly spread. Soon, Kurtz was fielding orders from restaurants and specialty retailers around the city. Kurtz's burgeoning business got its big break in 2014 when a local Whole Foods buyer contacted him about selling Mike's Hot Honey at one of its New York locations. At the time, it was the first supermarket to carry the product.
One of Beaton's biggest tasks was spearheading the process of raising the millions of dollars in investment necessary for Mike's Hot Honey to be able to take on the large orders it was receiving from big customers. We remind ourselves every day that we have lightning in a bottle. And the vast majority of this country still has yet to try it."I think marketers and brand builders oftentimes lose focus and start to go on to what's next before they get the full potential out of what makes their brand special," Beaton tells CNBC Make It, noting that less than one percent of U.S. shoppers have ever bought Mike's Hot Honey.
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