Restaurants are bringing the heat as spicy dishes attract trend-chasing customers

Aashim Aggarwal late went on a culinary journeying in Mississauga, Ont., trying come out some of the Ontario city's spiciest poulet dishes.

Aggarwal is an online influencer or " solid food storyteller" with 64,000 followers on Instagram. As part of a paid promotion with the City of Mississauga, he visited five spots around the city's Lava Chicken Trail, part of a promotional tour for the Minecraft Experience event at Square One Shopping Centre. (For those without young kids, Steve's Lava Chicken is a song from A Minecraft Movie.)

Spicy foods have obviously been around for much longer than the latest movie/restaurant tie-in. But Aggarwal said he’s seeing more and more hot items in the Toronto area's restaurant scene, whether permanent or short term.

"I would challenge anybody to find any large restaurant chain or fast-food spot that doesn't have a spicy item on their menu," he said.

Market observers say that while spicy food items have long been a feature on the menus of restaurants and fast-food joints, a young, culturally diverse clientele is largely behind a recent explosion of capsicum-fuelled foods — where the easiest way to spice up a stale menu might be to slap some hot sauce on tried-and-true dishes.

Claire Conaghan, a trendologist at Chicago food and beverage data firm Datassential, said fast-food restaurants in the United States launched more than 75 new items named or marketed as spicy this past spring alone.

A recent report from the firm said it found that about 95 per cent of restaurants in the U.S. have at least one spicy menu item, up from about 91 per cent in 2015. Not only that, a growing number of restaurants offer multiple spicy items instead of just one.

Part of the reason for that, Conaghan said, is because fast-food chains in particular can get more new items simply by adding a versatile hot sauce onto several classic dishes.

"Have a fried chicken sandwich on the menu? Make it a spicy fried chicken sandwich. You got a burger? Turn it into a spicy burger," Aggarwal said. "You can get all this marketing buzz from launching this cool new spicy item, but you can do it fast and you can do it cheap."

What Conaghan called "purchase intent" among customers for those items has grown from about 44 per cent of people in 2016 to 51 per cent in 2025, according to figures from Datassential.

It's not just the obvious brands, like Chipotle or Taco Bell, that have spicy items on the menu. McDonald's is offering the Spicy McCrispy, and A&W has spicy piri-piri burgers.

More over-the-top examples include Wendy’s Takis Fuego cross-promotion meal, featuring a fried chicken sandwich smothered in crushed hot Takis chips, or the Popeyes x Hot Ones collaboration, featuring its own sandwich with hot sauces provided by the wildly popular online interview show.

"We may be famous for our cold winters, but Canadians have a real appetite for heat," Lisa Mazurkewich, head of marketing at Popeyes Canada, quipped in a press release.

Sara Hamdy, research analyst at Restaurants Canada, said the industry group hasn't gathered recent data about the specific appeal of spicy food items.

But she said it would likely fit with its findings that millennials and Generation Z eat out more often than Gen Xers or baby boomers.

Since Canadians are eating out less often due to the high cost of living, limited-time specials like a ghost pepper burrito are a way to reel them back in.

"So think Instagrammable moments, those are really what the younger generations are looking for," Hamdy said. "It's going to be a video, it's going to be a post."

Adam Brown, founder of the No Refund Hot Sauce company, said Canadians' tastes — including his own — are changing to be more accepting of hot, spicy and often multicultural flavours.

"I grew up not eating overly spicy, right? Kind of Canadian palate and meat and potatoes. And as I started to get more and more introduced to different, multi-culti kind of foods, I think that's where my palate grew into it," he said.

Younger Canadians are more adventurous eaters — but they may already be more familiar with international flavours that have more spice than a steak with sauce, Brown said.

"They don't just want to keep eating just for sustenance. They want to live and love what they're eating, and really enjoy that."

Conaghan said that's why you're likely to see things like Asian chili crisp, a chipotle pepper version of hot honey, or African or Middle Eastern flavours such as Moroccan harissa pepper sauces.

That didn’t stop food influencer Aggarwal from dipping his taste buds into the hottest dishes on Mississauga’s Lava Chicken Trail. But he said he’ll stick to the milder end of the spectrum for at least a little while.

“Eating spicy food back-to-back-to-back was definitely a challenge. My body is recovering,” he said. “The next day, it was rough.”

Audio produced by Jennifer Keene

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