Open your fridge. How many sauces are in there? There’s probably ketchup and mustard, but maybe also mayonnaise, hot sauce, green and red salsas, queso, sriracha, vinaigrette dressings, and if you’re a true Midwesterner, at least several types of ranch. If you’re passionate about food, it’s hard to keep sauces — or the rest of their larger product category of condiments, including dips, dressings, and more — from slowly taking over your kitchen.
It can be surprisingly hard to pin down what exactly counts as a sauce versus, say, a dressing (one distinction people use is that a sauce is cooked), but one thing’s for sure: People adore soaking solid foods in something wet. In 2023, sales of sauces worldwide generated almost $200 billion in revenue, up from about $150 billion in 2019. The average volume of sauces and condiments consumed per person is increasing globally too. Between 2017 and 2022, the market research firm Mintel estimates that over 14,000 new sauces, dips, and condiments were introduced into the US market.
In the US, there’s a sauce that can go with practically everything, in a truly dazzling number of flavor combos, whether it’s bacon ranch or root beer mustard. Consider the number of craft hot sauce brands that have popped up in the past decade, with entire stores dedicated just to selling hot sauces. (Some declare their hot sauce lifestyle by getting it tattooed on their bodies.) People panic at the idea of yet another sriracha shortage on the horizon. It’s a food commercial trope to home in on delicious morsels being drenched in rich, gluttonous sauces to emphasize how mouth-watering it is. While people around the world use sauces, few cultures are as voracious in consuming such a variety of them as Americans are.
In Sauces: A Global History, Maryann Tebben describes a sauce as “a food enhancer, sometimes complementary and sometimes purposely counteractive; it is not a main dish and is never essential to eating.” You wouldn’t know sauces were non-essential from the way some of us swear by them, adding a dash or a tureenful to most of our meals. But just why do we love sauce so much, and why have sauces seemingly exploded in recent years?
Humans have been pairing dishes with sauces from time immemorial. We know that the ancient Greeks enjoyed a fish sauce that may have been pretty similar to what we have today. What’s different now is that most of us aren’t regularly making sauces at home. “Americans were sold this idea of convenience, and we were told that if you try to make something yourself, you’re probably going to mess it up, so you better rely on us,” says Ken Albala, a food historian and professor at the University of the Pacific. The sauces many of us know and love today aren’t Grandma’s recipes but the processed products of industrialized food manufacturing that have been insistently advertised to us.
Take ketchup, a quintessential American condiment found in virtually every household, whether in bottle form or as a hodgepodge of packets stuffed into a kitchen drawer, and inseparable from classic American fare like hot dogs. Yet the commercial version of ketchup in grocery stores all over the world is practically unrecognizable from its original form, which came from Asia, probably ancient China. Older ketchups were often a fermented, sweet-yet-tangy sauce sometimes made with fish, and later even mushrooms and walnuts. Tomato ketchups blew up toward the end of the 19th century, with a big boost from Heinz, which introduced its tomato ketchup in 1876. Unlike its predecessors, this ketchup wasn’t homemade but meant to be bought at the store — and that was a huge plus for consumers. “There was an idea that industrial food was safer,” Tebben tells Vox. “It’s not true, but that’s what the thought was: This is science and technology, and it makes food safer.”
“Hot sauce became a thing that was daring and adventuresome and gave you a quick thrill”
Store-bought sauces are a cheap and convenient way to feel cultured — an easy way to tour a world of flavors. Spice has become something of a cult among American foodies in a relatively short period of time, particularly as the hot sauce scene boomed in earnest in the 2000s. “Hot sauce became a thing that was daring and adventuresome and gave you a quick thrill, but wasn’t really dangerous,” says Albala. “And it became a macho thing, too.” As of last year, just 5 percent of Americans surveyed by Mintel hadn’t heard of sriracha. According to Datassential, which analyzes food and beverage industry trends, American consumer awareness of fusion condiments combining spice with either sweetness or creaminess — like hot honey or spicy ranch — has also shot up in recent years. Chile crisp in particular has quickly gained ground on restaurant menus since 2020. While none of these flavors are new, in a short time they’ve undergone a distinct mainstream-ification. Heinz even sells a pre-mixed sriracha-honey combo sauce.
Americans “don’t have one food culture, and we don’t have rules,” says Tebben. “We’re sort of proud of that.”
The change is apparent when we look at what Americans of different ages say their favorite cuisine is. In a 2022 Statista survey, Italian was the most popular cuisine among Americans 55 years and older. For every other age group, Mexican was the most popular; cuisines like Japanese were also a lot more appetizing to the youngest age groups, showing growing exposure to foreign cuisines outside of Europe and the Americas. Beyond the growth of restaurants and food markets opened by immigrants in the latter half of the 20th century, Americans today also live in the birthplace of Amazon.com: With the accessibility of the online marketplace, it’s no sweat to have any kind of condiment delivered right to your door.
Americans are also sauce fiends because there are so many kinds sold to them. The US isn’t the world leader when it comes to eating the most amount of sauce. On average, per capita consumption was much higher in Asia than in the Americas; the average volume per person in Japan was about 60 kilograms in 2023, compared to about 12kg in the US. What stands out here is the sheer variety in commercial offerings – not just different ingredients and flavors, but no-sugar or low-fat versions, chunky or creamy, variants that are organic, gluten-free, vegan, and much more. In just the hot sauce category there are hundreds of disparate brands making hundreds of varieties with a wide range of ingredients — like mango or bourbon — and Scoville heat levels. Just look at the tableau of hot sauces featured on the celebrity interview show Hot Ones, with the hottest exceeding 2 million Scoville heat units. For comparison, Tabasco’s Original Red hot sauce ranges between 2,500 and 5,000 Scoville units.
In the late 1800s, Heinz claimed to make 57 varieties of sauces
Much like the familiar tale of foreign tourists being shocked at the mind-numbing variety available in the cereal aisle of an American supermarket, for condiments too the name of the game is an excess of options. (That variety is also arguably an illusion since just a few food conglomerates produce the majority of the cereal brands.) In the late 1800s, Heinz claimed to make 57 varieties of sauces; it wasn’t true, but it sounded good to market it that way.
“The companies that made this stuff realized that if they had one variety of sauce, then people might buy it, but they might buy their competitors,” says Albala. “If they came out with 20 and stuffed the shelves with them, they knew that chances are someone’s going to buy one of theirs.”
Certain brands have also managed to create indelible associations between foods and sauces. It’s not just ketchup on hot dogs but barbecue sauce for Chicken McNuggets (or the famous honey mustard-esque sauce for Chick-fil-A nuggets), A1 sauce for steak, garlic sauce for your Papa John’s pizza crusts, white sauce for your Halal Guys chicken and rice platter. Tortilla chips, many would argue, are merely a vessel for delivering a flight of salsas and dips into your mouth.
Unfamiliar, unusual sauces — often a fusion of a few different flavors — are also an opportunity to pique consumer curiosity. Today, flavorful condiments are treated like a novelty, with people going for unusual pairings that offer a contrast, whether it’s hot honey on pizza or vinegary wings drenched first in buffalo sauce and then in creamy ranch. An industry trend report from Mintel last year showed Gen Z and millennials showing much higher interest in trying spicy sauces like sriracha, peri-peri, and chile crisp. Rolling out new limited-edition sauces (or old fan favorites, like the McDonald’s Szechuan sauce) is how fast food chains get customers to keep coming back. There are some truly unholy concoctions out there, seemingly invented more for headlines and reactions than anything else: a Mtn Dew Baja Blast sauce or the Pepsi Colachup. Take the “pink sauce” that went viral on TikTok a few years ago made by a Florida chef. Viewers were drawn by the shockingly saturated color and the mystery of what exactly was in it (apparently, ingredients such as garlic and dragon fruit). The unusualness of it was the selling point.
To many, a sauce is also a relatively cheap accessory that can improve any meal. Heinz has a tongue-in-cheek line of commercials where ketchup aficionados bring personal Heinz bottles to fine-dining restaurants, much to the dismay of chefs and waiters. Sauces are “one of those affordable luxuries,” says Claire Conaghan, an associate director at Datassential. People, especially in an era of high food price inflation, might feel they don’t have the money to dine out at a restaurant, or even buy the expensive protein at the grocery store. “But you can definitely buy a new sauce,” Conaghan says. A store-bought sauce lasts a long time and is also versatile; thanks to FoodTok and the ubiquity of recipes on the internet, you can find a million different uses for a single bottle.
The American sauce obsession may just be a symptom of what a lot of people, hard-pressed for time and money, eat today: fare that’s cheap and convenient. If the quick dinner you threw together or the frozen meal you microwaved is a little disappointing, fear not. Just slather it in hot sauce.
Source: vox.com
