What?! Have you ever had honey?? (that doesn’t come in a little packet?)
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More alternative names:
- “Honey inspired sauce”
- “Conceptual honey”
- “Not entirely honey”
- “Slightly less shitty corn syrup”
- “H.O.N.E.Y.”
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Honey adjacent
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Clearly not, not if they think there’s “no difference” between real honey and corn syrup.
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We have KFCs combined with A&Ws. In a moment of weakness we grabbed a couple burgers for lunch there this past weekend and they included these in the bag. For the fries, or the drinks or something.
I do believe that Popeye’s Fried Chicken does the same thing; fake honey.
For all of their many faults, Chic-fil-A provides real honey.
When I worked at a local movie theater as a teenager, 30+ years ago, we were not allowed to ask customers if they wanted butter on their popcorn, because it wasn’t butter. We had to call it “artificial butter flavoring”.
Either that is no longer the case, or they can just call it “butter” now, but either way I’m good without.
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At the theater I go to they always say “do you want movie theater butter”. Never just butter.
I’m pretty sure it’s licensed from pop secret or some other brand that sells “movie theater butter” microwavable popcorn.
Which also reminds me of the short stint I worked at Little Ceasars. They had an MSG powder they put on everything called “cheesey powder”. It was very important to dump cheesey powder on top of the pizza before it hit the oven. Without it the low quality ingredients had so little flavor that the whole thing tasted like ketchup on soggy cardboard.
About 90% of the flavor of a little Ceasars pizza is from cheesey powder.
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“I Can Believe It’s Not Honey!”
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That would be “Maple-Inspired Syrup-Like Sauce”.
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Is this in the days of the large square two-per-pack pizzas, or after they came back with the normal round pizzas?
I ask because, around here, at one point we had our share of Little Caesars, and then overnight all of them were “closed for remodeling.” Even the staff hadn’t been told. They were remodeled so hard that the one I used to go to turned into a Dutch Bros.
Then a few years later they started popping back up in new locations, but like a shadow of themselves. And the pizza was not good.
I heard the other day they are the 3rd largest pizza place in the country.
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Are you trying to cook those bees in a solar oven?
Oh gather round, children, it gets worse: Honey Laundering: A Primer.
tl;dr: Countries like China and India allow pesticides and adulterants in honey that US law does not, but they can ship their honey product to countries like Canada and Argentina that are more okay with it, where the product is relabeled and shipped to the US, where honey importers self-grade the stuff.
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Not my bees, not my hives.
Honey actually has more fructose.
I mean this sort of “sauce” tastes no more like actual honey than pancake syrup tastes like real maple syrup.
But either way its a tube of wet sugar.
I’ve seen vegans nearly come to blows over that question.
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On a strict technicality, yes; it is a liquid product intended to be poured over another food-like product, ergo “sauce”.
The thing is, though, that it is not by any reasonable definition a sauce in which honey is but one of the ingredients. It is trace amounts of honey padded out with the cheapest shit they could find, to the point where even KFC realise they can’t call it just ‘honey’ anymore, so they weasel-worded ‘sauce’ on the end there to cover their asses.
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A lot of vegans have zero clue about beekeeping.
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You’re probably wondering, why 3 different types of sugar? Aren’t they more or less the same?
It’s an artifact of the previous formula, back when honey was the number 1 ingredient in their ‘honey sauce’. It was followed by 3 types of sugar, so I’m sure the formula was something like this – guessing on the percentages – Honey (18%), High Fructose Corn Syrup (17%), Corn Syrup (17%), Sugar (17%), Water (17%), Some other chemicals (adding up to 14%). So it was sneaky – you look at the packet and think, ‘this is mostly honey’ when in fact it was almost certainly > 50% sugars and < 20% honey.
They didn’t yet realize our apathy for this kind of crap. Now the honey percentage has dropped down to 7% and there’s no reason for there to be 3 different kinds of sugar, but there still are.
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There’s a reason it’s packaged as Honey Sauce and not honey.
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I’d assume its a little more thought out than that. Different sugars and sugar syrups have diffedent viscosities, water levels, and properties. Some of these sugars (honey, “sugar” which is sucrose) have a tendency to crystalize over time or in certain situation. Realy honey is more viscose than sucrose in solution, or sucrose cooked to invert it. And so forth.
They’ve quite likely balanced the ratios of different sugars so that it still looks and tastes sort of like real honey. But is easier to pour without being too thin. And is unlikely to solidify in the package.
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There are many products on the grocery store shelves that pass themselves off as honey. Make sure you buy 100% pure honey. Preferably from Utah honey bees… they’re extra sweet. 
Better Honey Through Chemistry!
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