Hot Sauce Fun Fact - U.S. Hot Sauce Consumers
So, who's buying all the Hot Sauce anyway?
"Hot sauce is clearly part of the diet of many U.S. consumers, and it’s a food that crosses gender, age, ethnicity, and income,” says Annie Roberts, vice president, SupplyTrack, NPD Group’s monthly benchmarking tracking service for foodservice professionals.
NPD’s ongoing food and beverage market research reveals the following key hot sauce sales demographics:
- Females (ages 18 to 44 and 55 to 64) and males (ages 18 to 54 and 65 plus) eat more than the average amount of hot sauce over the course of a year.
- Dual-income, no-kids households eat more hot sauce than other household lifestyles.
- Consumers in the South eat more hot sauce than any other region of the country. But those in Central and Western U.S. eat an above average amount.
Consumers look for hot sauces when dining out as well. Cases of hot sauce shipped from foodservice distributors to restaurants and other foodservice outlets increased by double-digits over the past two years, according to NPD’s SupplyTrack data. While classic Louisiana-style hot sauce is still the leader in terms of case volume shipped from distributors to U.S. foodservice outlets, growth has tapered due to the wide variety of hot sauces now available. Case shipments of some habanero hot sauce flavors, particularly habanero with fruit flavors like mango, grew triple digits in the year ending December. Chipotle hot sauce flavors and Sriracha shipped double the cases than in the previous year.