Hormel Foods' SPAM brand is adding SPAM® Hot Honey as a permanent variety — expanding its canned-meat lineup to more than 10 SKUs — and pairing the retail launch with a short-run foodservice collaboration at Win Son Bakery, the Taiwanese-American café with locations in Brooklyn and Manhattan's East Village.

The new SKU hits select grocery retailers nationwide immediately, positioning Hormel to capture shelf space in the sweet-heat condiment and flavor adjacency that has moved from specialty delis into mainstream grocery aisles over the past three years. Hot honey has become one of the more durable condiment crossover trends in packaged food, appearing on everything from frozen pizza to premium charcuterie — and SPAM's entry signals the format has reached mass-market maturity.

The Foodservice Hook

From Sept. 14 through Sept. 20, Win Son Bakery is serving two limited-edition items built around the new variety: a breakfast sandwich of SPAM® Hot Honey, egg and cheese on the restaurant's signature scallion pancake, and a fan tuan — a Taiwanese sticky rice roll — also featuring the product. The activation spans both Win Son locations, giving Hormel a foodservice trial moment in a high-foot-traffic urban market without the overhead of a standalone pop-up.

"SPAM® Hot Honey taps into one of today's fastest-growing flavor trends, giving longtime fans and new audiences alike another reason to reach for the iconic blue can," said Stephanie Swift, brand manager of the SPAM brand at Hormel. "The SPAM® brand has an enduring, decades-long connection with Asian American and Pacific Islander communities and cuisine, and partnering with Win Son Bakery to introduce this flavor felt like a natural, authentic way to get out of the can and into the kitchen."

Trigg Brown, co-owner and chef of Win Son Bakery, framed the deal as culturally grounded rather than purely transactional. "This SPAM® collaboration felt like a genuine extension of the food we grew up with and the food we serve every day," Brown said. "Building a breakfast sandwich and a fan tuan around SPAM® Hot Honey gave us a fun new way to put our own spin on that connection."

Merch and Distribution

Beyond the menu activation, the two brands released a co-branded merchandise capsule — T-shirt, hat and tote bag — available through Win Son Bakery's website and in-store at both locations. Streetwear-adjacent brand collaborations have become a standard amplification tactic for CPG launches targeting younger urban consumers, and the capsule follows a playbook that brands including Heinz and Hidden Valley Ranch have used to generate earned media around new-product cycles.

For Hormel, which reported over $12 billion in annual revenue across its broader portfolio, the SPAM launch is a category-level move as much as a product one. Shelf-stable protein has seen renewed interest from value-conscious shoppers amid persistent grocery inflation, and adding a premium-feeling flavor variant allows the brand to hold pricing power without exiting its core price tier. The hot-honey positioning also lets SPAM compete in the better-for-flavor segment that has attracted investment from both legacy food companies and emerging brands.

The breakfast sandwich recipe is also published on SPAM's website, extending the activation's reach beyond the seven-day New York window and giving retail buyers a consumer-facing reason to stock the new SKU year-round. Food & Beverage Magazine (fb101.com) has tracked similar launch architectures — foodservice trial paired with national retail rollout — as increasingly common among legacy CPG brands seeking cultural relevance with millennial and Gen Z grocery shoppers.

Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.