The Hot Sauce Bar has been a Firehouse Subs staple almost from the brand’s beginning, letting guests customize their heat level with an array of sauces and intensify their sandwiches just the way they like. But in early 2020, the pandemic forced Firehouse to remove the popular feature, and almost immediately, fans began asking when it would return.
“I was getting handwritten letters that were sent to the office to please bring back the Hot Sauce Bar,” says CMO Dena vonWerssowetz. “Every time we posted something on social media about anything, guests would be saying, ‘Oh, I love this. I’m glad you’re doing it. But when’s the hot sauce bar coming back?’”
Responding to the public outcry, Firehouse reintroduced the Hot Sauce Bar last fall, marking its return after a four-year hiatus. Today, it offers 13 unique sauces, each labeled on a heat scale from 1 to 10. Whether guests are just looking to enhance their sub with a hint of flavor or put their spice tolerance to the test, the Hot Sauce Bar has a selection for everyone, all available at no extra charge for in-restaurant diners or those picking up online or app orders.
“You can tell that people really hone in on what they think their own personal heat tolerance is,” vonWerssowetz says. “Then, within those different levels, you can customize based on flavor profiles.”
Customers who prefer milder spice around a heat level of 2 can choose from sauces like the Bee Sting Honey n’ Habanero Pepper Sauce, which balances honey’s floral sweetness with a subtle habanero kick, or the Fat Cat Peach Maple Bourbon Hot Sauce, which blends ripe peaches, maple syrup, and bourbon into a mild yet flavorful option. For more daring spice seekers, options like the Deep Canyon Co. Sizzlin’ Scorpion Scorching Hot Sauce feature bolder flavors with a powerful heat level of 8, thanks to scorpion and habanero peppers, balanced with savory spices.
When reintroducing the Hot Sauce Bar, Firehouse didn’t just re-stock the old lineup—it revamped it. The team reviewed previous sauces and noticed that evolving taste preferences and rising spice tolerances meant that some older heat rankings no longer matched today’s standards. To better reflect current trends, Firehouse adjusted the heat levels of some returning sauces and added new selections, like the Scorpion Scorching Hot Sauce, to keep pace with modern palates while still leaving room to push the boundaries on heat in the future.
But according to vonWerssowetz, the Hot Sauce Bar is about more than just setting guests’ mouths ablaze.
“We know that people are liking even hotter things,” she says. “But the most important thing to us is that when a guest tries their sub, they absolutely love it, and they want to eat the whole thing. It’s not a dare. So, the process that we go through to select these sauces is very intense and isn’t just based on heat levels. We want to make sure that even those really hot sauces are super flavorful. Sometimes, people can create hot sauces that just have a lot of heat, but if they don’t have the flavor with them. For us, that’s not a win.”
Church’s Chicken is also diving headfirst into the spicy scene, bringing even more heat to its menu with its first-ever signature hot sauce, launched last spring. Known for its long-standing spicy chicken option—which it revamped last year for enhanced flavor—the company saw an opportunity to broaden its appeal by adding a hot sauce that would resonate with the shifting preferences for bolder heat.
While younger consumers are often credited with driving the trend toward spicier foods, CMO Natalia Franco says the appetite for heat spans across demographic lines.
“While Gen Z is partial to spicy flavors, the Hispanic and African American communities are known to embrace bold and spicy notes in their cooking,” she says. “Our target audience is predominately comprised of these two demographics, and we have featured spicy chicken on our menu for years, so we have proven there is a demand and desire for more heat options.”
The company knew that a new hot sauce would be a great addition to its menu and that it wanted to do something different in the development process, Franco adds. So, it dove into the world of spice to find the perfect pepper for its signature offering as part of Hulu’s documentary series “Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People.” In Church’s feature episode, head chefs Kevin Houston and Eric Stein worked closely with two independent pepper growers and hot sauce aficionados to create a unique flavor profile. The result is a combination of heat and sweetness with notes of habanero peppers, red chilies, roasted garlic, and spices.
“It has a creamy, dippable style sauce that is more complex than what you would typically see from a QSR,” Franco explains. “It has a slow build and just the right amount of sweetness to balance out the heat. While it pairs well with our chicken, guests have also noted how it works well with anything that you dip into it.”
WaBa Grill’s new WaBlaze Sauce takes the brand’s signature WaBa Sauce up a notch, blending spicy red peppers and chili extract with soy sauce, pineapple, ginger, onion, and garlic. CMO Mark Finnegan says the brand launched the sauce in response to customer demand for a hotter option, especially from Gen Z, a group known for embracing bold flavors.
“They’ve grown up in this new era where there are restaurants with spice meters,” he says. “There’s more of a dialogue people in that generation have with each other about how much spice they can take, so there’s a big social aspect to it as well.”
WaBa Grill was intentional about tapping into this generational energy, but demand for WaBlaze still exceeded expectations, with the initial supply selling out in less than 30 days.
“There’s so much consumer energy with that younger demographic group,” Finnegan says. “Yes, the sauces are available and it’s communicated that they’re available, but then there’s a whole different experiential marketing that gets created by the end users challenging each other and making it sort of a gamification of spice.”
WaBa Grill leaned into this social phenomenon with a unique launch strategy that was intentionally subtle. Rather than using traditional advertising or clear in-store promotions, the brand introduced WaBlaze with a cryptic, flaming smile icon on the menu to spark curiosity. Finnegan notes that this element of mystery encouraged guests to explore the new flavor for themselves, heightening the sense of adventure around the sauce.
Following the sauce’s breakout success, WaBa Grill has enhanced the branding with bold graphics and brighter colors on the packaging, treating WaBlaze as a sub-brand with its own distinct identity.
“That’s the expectation of the marketplace,” Finnegan says. “There’s the brand itself, and then their spicy food has its own positioning, its own look and feel, within that.”
