Somewhere between the cayenne-dusted wings of a Shoreditch bar and the creamy pools of ají de gallina at Lima Fitzrovia, a pepper native to the Peruvian Andes has staged a quiet coup on British tables. The ají amarillo – whose name translates, somewhat misleadingly, as “yellow chili pepper” – has become the most consequential ingredient to cross the Atlantic in recent memory, and its ascent tells us less about a single trend than about a fundamental shift in how Britain eats.
In January 2025, McCormick, the Maryland-based spice conglomerate whose annual Flavour Forecast has defined culinary direction for a quarter-century, named ají amarillo its Flavour of the Year. The 25th edition of the report saw a global team of roughly 50 chefs, food technologists, and trend analysts track the pepper’s appearances across restaurant menus in London, Sydney, Toronto, and beyond before concluding that this Capsicum baccatum cultivar – cultivated in Peru for over 4,000 years – had crossed a threshold from regional staple to global player.
The data underpinning that conclusion is striking. Datassential, the food industry analytics firm, projects a 59 per cent increase in ají amarillo’s presence on menus worldwide within four years. McCormick’s own forecasting suggests a 44 per cent rise. These are structural predictions about what British diners will encounter on plates from Mayfair to Manchester.
A Pepper Older Than the Inca Empire
To understand why ají amarillo matters, one must reckon with its antiquity. Archaeological evidence from Huaca Prieta in northern Peru’s Chicama Valley confirms cultivation as early as 2500 BC – millennia before the Inca Empire formalised ají farming. The Moche civilisation rendered these peppers in ceramic with devotional precision: this was symbol, medicine, and currency.
The pepper belongs to Capsicum baccatum, one of only five domesticated chili species, registering 30,000 to 50,000 Scoville heat units – comparable to cayenne and four to six times hotter than a jalapeño. But the Scoville number obscures what makes it distinctive. Its flavour profile – fruity, tropical, with pronounced notes of passion fruit and mango – operates on a different axis from the blunt capsaicin assault of a habanero. It heats, but it also sings.
“The balance of sweetness and heat that it brings makes it a very flavorful and balanced pepper that can be added to many different dishes,” Hadar Cohen Aviram, McCormick’s executive chef and senior manager of culinary development, told CNN in January 2025. “It amplifies both sweet and tangy flavors and adds dimension to smoked or charred items.”
This duality is precisely what has made ají amarillo the standard-bearer for the “swicy” movement.
The Swicy Revolution and Britain’s New Palate
The portmanteau “swicy” – sweet plus spicy – has become one of the most persistent neologisms in food discourse. As BBC Good Food noted in its 2026 trends report, “sweet plus something else will be everywhere,” placing swicy alongside swavoury and swalty as defining flavour directions. Global launches of spice-flavoured products have climbed approximately 5 per cent annually since 2018. Hot honey alone has seen a 61 per cent average annual growth rate in new product launches over the past five years.
In the United States, sweet-spicy items on menus surged 38 per cent in 2023, with a further 9 to 10 per cent increase projected. British consumers have followed with characteristic caution. “The rise of swicy flavours plays nicely to the ongoing consumer movement towards more diverse, exciting taste experiences – experiences that often have roots in globally inspired cuisines,” Tom Gatehouse, senior trends strategist at Egg Soldiers, told Speciality Food Magazine.
Ají amarillo’s brilliance in this context is its naturalness as a swicy ingredient. It does not require the addition of sugar or honey to achieve sweetness; the sweetness is inherent, woven into the pepper’s fruity flesh. This makes it a more honest expression of the sweet-spice balance than many engineered alternatives.
At Lyla Lila in Atlanta, chef and owner Craig Richards keeps ají amarillo permanently in his pantry. “When I sampled it, I found it had an arresting flavour, very spicy right up front,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He uses it sparingly – in a snapper crudo with dulse – appreciating its ability to modulate heat rather than dominate a dish. Julio Delgado, chef and owner of Fogon and Lions, takes a deliberately restrained approach: “Like most of my customers, I don’t like when there’s so much heat in a dish that it overpowers the food.”
From Lima’s Markets to London’s Pubs
The migration from Peruvian kitchens to British ones has accelerated rapidly. Data compiled by Rentech Digital in April 2026 recorded 45 Peruvian restaurants operating in the United Kingdom, a 7 per cent increase from 2023. A separate count by PoiData in June 2026 placed the figure at 74. Either number represents a category that barely existed a decade ago.
Lima, the restaurant group that first introduced authentic Peruvian cuisine to the UK when it opened in Fitzrovia in 2012, has been the most visible catalyst. Under co-founder Gabriel Gonzalez, the group now operates three London sites. The Shoreditch partnership with Bespoke Hotels has doubled the hotel’s food and beverage revenue since taking over from the previous Modern British restaurant, according to The Caterer. Gonzalez is now looking north: “Manchester could be one option because the F&B scene there is quite dynamic. Edinburgh potentially could be another,” he told The Caterer in May 2026, outlining plans for approximately five sites over three to five years.
But the pepper’s influence extends far beyond dedicated Peruvian restaurants. A Bidfood Food and Beverage Trends Report for 2026, produced with CGA by NielsenIQ, identified South American flavours as one of three defining cuisines shaping British dining, alongside Malaysian and Indonesian influences. The report, based on surveys of 2,000 UK consumers and 100 chefs, named Brazilian, Venezuelan, Peruvian, and Colombian flavours as the ones gaining traction fastest, citing ceviche, arepas, and feijoada alongside condiments like chimichurri and ají amarillo.
The mechanism of this infiltration has been the British pub. “Few other menu adjustments can address that issue like sauces can,” The Belle Isle reported in June 2026. “They are inexpensive, adaptable, and enable a kitchen to offer something truly novel without altering the fundamentals of what customers currently order.”
The Visual Argument
Beyond flavour, ají amarillo possesses an advantage previous trending ingredients lacked: it is photogenic. The pepper’s distinctive hue – between goldenrod and amber, intensifying to deep orange as it matures – carries outsized weight in an era when food photography drives consumer behaviour.
“People fall in love with its flavour, but also with its look,” Miguel Guerra, chef and co-owner of Mita, a vegetarian restaurant in Washington, DC, told CNN. This visual dimension explains one of the more unexpected manifestations of ají amarillo’s rise: its adoption in cocktail culture. At Ayllu, the Nikkei restaurant in London’s Paddington, the pepper appears alongside pisco-led cocktails and tropical fruit infusions. The restaurant, blending Japanese technique with Peruvian flavour – the Nikkei tradition born from Japanese migration to Peru – has become one of west London’s most talked-about openings, its tasting menus built around the precise, balanced heat that ají amarillo exemplifies.
The Supply Question
The pepper’s growing popularity raises a question the food industry has been slow to address: can supply keep pace with demand? Ají amarillo is grown primarily along Peru’s coastal valleys, from Lambayeque in the north to Tacna in the south, with intensive cultivation concentrated in the North Chico region of Lima. It is sold fresh, frozen, in paste form, and dried – when sun-dried, it becomes ají mirasol, a more concentrated seasoning. Scaling production to meet global demand while maintaining quality is a logistical challenge without easy answers.
The cultural dimension is equally complex. As ají amarillo moves from Peruvian heritage kitchens to multinational seasoning blends, questions of attribution become unavoidable. McCormick’s blend – combining dried ají amarillo with garlic, sea salt, onion, Demerara sugar, turmeric, paprika, parsley, tomato powder, mango powder, citric acid, and natural oak smoke flavouring – is a commercial interpretation, not an emulation of Peruvian tradition. Whether that interpretation enriches or flattens the pepper’s cultural story depends on where one draws the line between celebration and extraction.
A Flavour for the Future
What ají amarillo’s rise reveals is not the triumph of a single ingredient but the maturation of British eating habits. The UK palate, once resistant to anything hotter than a mild curry, has developed a sophistication that would have seemed improbable a generation ago. Consumers now expect a complexity of flavour that transcends simple heat: sweetness with their spice, visual beauty alongside gustatory pleasure, and the story of where their food comes from.
Ají amarillo delivers on all three counts. It connects 4,500 years of Andean agricultural knowledge to a Paddington cocktail bar, bridges the gap between a Peruvian grandmother’s kitchen and a British pub’s Saturday lunch menu, and does so without sacrificing the essential character that made it extraordinary in the first place.
The golden pepper has not merely arrived in Britain. It has, in the quietly persistent manner of all great culinary migrations, made itself at home.
