The chilli trend is here to stay

It was Viraj Bahl who put it best. The two big rages in India right now, he told me, are wellness and chilli.

I am sure Viraj is right about wellness though I don’t know much about the subject. But he is certainly bang on when it comes to the chilli craze.

 

And he has put his money where his mouth is. Veeba, the condiment company he founded, has invested heavily in a new range of hot sauces and they are flying off the shelves.

 

   It’s a trend that has spread.

 

   Maggi, a well respected brand with no distinctive record of risky innovation in India, is also launching new products, most of which seem to include the word ‘spicy’ in the name: ‘Spicy garlic noodles,’ and Spicy Pepper noodles’ are just two examples.

 

   Viraj, who also runs a noodle brand, says that the formula for success in today’s market is to make it spicy. “India has fallen in love with chilli all over again,” he explains. “There is a new generation that just wants spice and chilli.”

 

   The trend is not restricted to India. In the UK some supermarkets report that sales of hot sauces are up by 20 percent. At the Tesco chain Sriracha is selling so well that sales are up by 65 per cent over last year. Ocado, the online UK retailer, says sales of chilli sauces have increased by 10 per cent and searches for Korean hot sauce are up by an astonishing 850 percent. The US is experiencing a similar boom with new hotter sauces being launched each year.

 

   You can tell when a market is red hot (in this case, literally) when celebrities want a piece of the action. Ed Sheeran had the UK press excited when he launched his Tingly Ted’s hot sauce in 2023 and now the trend has reached such a level that even Brooklyn Beckham has launched his own sauce. Oprah Winfrey has a sauce that combines spiciness with synthetic truffle flavour, a combination that sounds so disgusting that you can see why Kim Kardashian has invested in the product. The vintage rocker Alice Cooper has a whole range of hot sauces named after his greatest hits though it is not clear whether these sauces are best enjoyed when you are biting the head off a live chicken as Cooper was once rumoured to have done onstage during a concert. (He now denies the story.)

 

   While the global boom has many different origins Viraj is clear where the current Indian craze for spice has come from. “It’s because of the younger generation’s fascination with Korea,” he says. “Because of K-Pop, K-Drama and the rest, young people love anything that tastes like Korean food. And that means lots of spice. That’s how this boom took off.”

 

   He has a point. McDonald’s India has introduced a range of ‘Make It Korean’ burgers and products with a ‘Korean Spice Mix’ that you can add to all products. (I have no idea what they would make of the ‘Korean McSpicy Paneer Burger’ in Seoul though.) Burger King has its ‘Korean Spicy Fest’ featuring ‘Korean’ burgers and Dominos has a new Cheese Burst range featuring alleged Korean flavours.

 

"Ironically enough the impetus to add more chilli and call everything ‘spicy’ comes not from our own gastronomic heritage as the home of spice but from Korean popular culture."

   I would call it a Korean food boom except that despite the names none of the flavours is particularly Korean. Hardly anyone uses Korean chillis or gochugaru, the distinctive Korean chilli powder, or gochujang, the fermented red chilli paste that is characteristic of many Korean dishes.

 

   This is Korean food for people who have never eaten Korean food but have seen it on TV or the internet and are in love with the idea of Korean food rather than the cuisine itself. For Indian food companies that translates as adding lots more mirchi and it doesn’t matter if you use our local chillis for the tang.

 

   We have been here before. This is exactly how the Sichuan boom took off 40 years ago. Indians never really took to Mala, the mix of Sichuan pepper and chilli that epitomises Sichuan flavours or even to Sichuan pepper itself because it puckered the mouth and made it tingle.

 

   Even so we created a make-believe Sichuan flavour of our own with chilli and masala and it has become a staple of Indian Chinese restaurants and kiosks. Viraj’s Veeba makes Sichuan sauces and stir fry seasonings which sell well but my own sense is that younger consumers see them as flavours that belong to their parents’ generation and have no particular affection for so called Sichuan.

 

   The truth is that in today’s world, flavour trends move swiftly. Take the example of Huey Fong’s Sriracha, the American take on the Thai sauce, which became a global rage over a decade ago. It was hailed as the beginning of a new era of hot sauces that would transform the American palate. It is still around and still sells very well but it has lost its trendy cachet and is now routinely described as being very mild compared to today’s hot sauces.

 

   Sriracha damaged the market for Tabasco (a far superior sauce with a great heritage) that had to survive by launching product variants and even making its own Sriracha. (The name is generic; it’s not a brand so anyone can make Sriracha.)

 

 And something similar is now happening to Sriracha itself as newer sauces take over. At the top end of the market there are excellent small production sauces that put the industrial hot sauces to shame. The one I use at home is the Corn Yuzu Hot Sauce a blend of habanero chillis with roasted corn and yuzu made by Noma products (available on the net) that demonstrates how good a hot sauce can be if you put care and precision into its making.

 

   Even in India there are small production condiments that are outstanding. Varun Tuli of Yum Yum Cha makes an excellent chilli crisp and I have written before about the Pickle Shickle brand whose chilli products have been a staple of my kitchen for three years now.

 

   But regardless of which hot sauce you use, the chilli trend is here to stay. And ironically enough the impetus to add more chilli and call everything ‘spicy’ comes not from our own gastronomic heritage as the home of spice but from Korean popular culture.