Welcome to What's the Sauce, our food-culture series about what is actually happening in food. No sales pitch, just the stuff we find genuinely cool. First up: the flavour quietly taking over your favourite menus.
Swicy is the trend of the year
Sweet plus spicy, nicknamed swicy, is being called one of the defining flavours of 2026. Per Datassential's 2026 trends reporting, hot honey has grown sharply on North American menus over the last few years and is still climbing. Spicy is not niche anymore either: most restaurant menus now carry at least one spicy item, far more than a decade ago.
Why now?
A few things at once. Gochujang went mainstream and trained palates to love savoury-sweet-spicy. Tropical fruit paired with real heat, mango with habanero, scratches a more-than-one-note itch that plain heat never could. And food writers say we are all craving louder, more sensory eating. Nobody is chasing bland.
Try it at home in two minutes
The easiest on-ramp: hot honey over crispy fried chicken, or roasted cauliflower with a spoon of something fruity and spicy, finished with lime. Sweet, heat, acid. That is the whole trend in one bite. More swicy ideas live in our recipe vault.
The LITS footnote
Full honesty: this trend is basically our whole shelf. Burning Mango is a sweet-spicy mango habanero, and Bodhi is a sweet chilli heat. But the fun part is not us, it is that flavour over heat went from a fringe idea to the headline. Took the world long enough.
Sources: Datassential 2026 trends; IFT Top 10 Food Trends; Taste of Home. Stats change, so treat figures as a snapshot.