Review: Taco Bell Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce Makes Good Nuggets Better

Let's go on a little time-traveling journey to one decade ago. It's 2015: You're rockin' a shiny-new first-generation Apple Watch on your wrist, your iPhone 6 is playing "Uptown Funk," and you've pulled up to a Taco Bell drive-thru. After ordering a burrito, you ask for the newest hot sauce freshly added to the lineup: Diablo. After five long years, there's finally a new sauce in town, and you're obviously eager to try it. 

All right, let's come back to the present day. Stretch your back, loosen those knees, and get ready, because Diablo Sauce just got an upgrade: Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce. Oddly enough, this sauce isn't for tacos and burritos. It's for chicken nuggets. That's right: 2025 brought about the debut of Taco Bell Crispy Chicken Nuggets — and they're good, but will the Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce make them even better? There was just one way to find out, and it meant I had a lunch date with a new Taco Bell sauce. 

The menu at Taco Bell frequently changes. The 2025 Taco Bell Live Más extravaganza unveiled a flurry of new menu additions, and chicken nuggets and novel sauces were among them. The newest sauce in the collection is Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce. This sauce comes in a little cup that you can dunk your nuggets in, or it can be drizzled right on top.

This new sauce collab is bringing some sweet heat to Taco Bell. The pairing pulls together Mike's Hot Honey — a condiment that I've seen nearly everywhere — and Taco Bell's Diablo Sauce. Many Taco Bell sauces come in small packets, known for their funny or charming phrases written on the packaging. These little pouches are ideal for drizzling into burritos and tacos, but Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce comes in different packaging. It's a variation from the typical sauce containers at Taco Bell, but it works well for the intended nugget-dunking purpose. 

Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce became available at Taco Bell locations nationwide on May 22. Taco Bell management isn't being terribly specific about how long this sauce will be on the menu, other than for a limited time. However, it seems that Taco Bell has taken note of the extreme popularity of chicken nuggets these days, so combining this offer with the fire of Mike's Hot Honey seems like a winning duo that might just inspire its permanent inclusion on the menu someday. 

For the time being, if you simply must try this sauce, you'll probably want to get to a Taco Bell sooner rather than later. I can imagine the combination of taco sauce and hot honey could become something of a viral sensation, leaving these sauce containers hard to come by, and you may end up high and dry without this sweetly spicy condiment. So, without specifics on how limited this limited-time offering may be, stopping by Taco Bell in the very near future might be the best course of action to increase your chances of trying it.

Taking a look at the ingredients of this new sauce, it's fascinating to see how the two components come together. Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce is primarily composed of water, and after that, sugar. Corn syrup follows, before a bit of vinegar and chipotle purée provide some bite. After those initial ingredients, you get into the honey aspect, with both honey and Mike's Hot Honey included in the sauce. The mixture also includes items like lime juice, chili powder, and paprika, along with the usual preservatives.

Sugar is the item that stood out to me, being one of the primary elements included among the ingredients. I would have imagined that honey would have provided the majority of the sweetness, but it seems that sugar is there as a necessary addition to help balance the flavor. 

Looking at the ingredients for Taco Bell's regular Diablo Sauce, and comparing them to those in Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce, it's clear that the sauce's makeup isn't simply a combination of hot honey and Diablo Sauce. The original Diablo sauce uses some sugar, but it's not a primary ingredient, while Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce leans into the sweet. The Diablo Sauce ingredients list begins with a tomato purée, but the hot honey collab sauce features a chipotle purée, which includes tomato paste as one element. This chipotle purée certainly lends a smoky element to the sauce. 

Tasting the new Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce all on its own, without any chicken, a smokiness came through nice and strong. It tasted sweet, but certainly not overpowering. In fact, I would say it was more smoky than sweet. Granted, I am very sensitive to smoky flavors, so the fact that I detected that smoky flavor right away is in no way surprising. Ordinarily being averse to foods featuring smoky flavors, I didn't find this sauce to be too strong, which was probably the sugar and honey going to work.

I was expecting the spiciness to be pretty intense, given that Diablo Sauce is the hottest of all the Taco Bell sauces. However, I didn't find this to be the case. Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce did not leave much lingering heat, and I thought the hot honey and sweetness really helped to mellow out any ingredients that would be overly spicy. I enjoyed the sauce but, predictably, it got better when enjoyed with the chicken nuggets. 

This tasting was my first experience with Taco Bell's Crispy Chicken Nuggets. I ordered a five-piece nugget meal. It came with seasoned fries, a cup of nacho cheese, a drink (of course, I got Mountain Dew's iconic Baja Blast), the nuggets, and my choice of sauce. When contemplating this combo, I must admit that I was skeptical at best, and pessimistic at worst. My expectations were low going in. Then, I dipped a nugget into the new sauce — and I was very pleasantly surprised.

When I added a chicken nugget to the sauce, it became sweeter. Any lingering hotness fell away even more, and the sweetness was increasingly able to come through. As for the appearance of this sauce, I enjoyed its deep scarlet color, and found it was an enjoyable sauce to dunk nuggets right into. Rather than overpowering the flavor of the chicken, it worked with the meat to create a better nugget. 

Simply put, yes, Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce is worthy of your Taco Bell Crispy Chicken Nuggets. Not only that, but if you haven't given the nuggets from Taco Bell a try yet, I heartily recommend them. Even though mine looked a little overcooked (or possibly freezer burned) and a little too dark, they were still great. 

Rather than being a congealed chunk of chicken matter — like what you get with McDonald's nuggets — these are pieces of chicken white meat that are breaded and fried. The breading itself is a little thick, and the shape of the nuggets actually looked closer to a smaller version of chicken tenders. They are rather unique in the fast food nugget world, and I think it works.

After my initial taste, I also tried the Diablo Sauce with the seasoned french fries, and this was good, too. I believe that one mark of an excellent condiment is that it can be used in multiple ways, and Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce is certainly worthy of this status. The only thing I would've changed about my meal would be to ask for more cups of this sauce, and getting a larger order of chicken. The meal was a little small with the five pieces that I ordered. 

Having never sampled Taco Bell's Crispy Chicken Nuggets prior to this taste test, I was eager to see how they would compare to the chicken nuggets of other chains, and whether Mike's Hot Honey Diablo Sauce would improve them. Ultimately, I decided that if the sauce improved the nugget experience, it's worth my recommendation. My verdict was ultimately based on the flavor and texture that the sauce added to the nuggets. I looked for it to be enjoyable with the chicken, but not distracting from the meat. It should enhance the bite and experience.