You might say that Mike Kostyo of the Chicago-based Datassential can see the future.

As a trendologist at the data-driven research group, Kostyo works with food and beverage industry folks to help them maximize their menu offerings based on consumer preferences and predilections, which can be famously fickle.

Trends often start on a local level before spreading across the country, says Kostyo. Take, for example, Old Bay Goldfish Crackers. Released by Pepperidge Farm and Maryland-based McCormick & Co. in May of this year, the crunchy snack coated in the regional spice has gained traction outside the Old Line State.

“Old Bay is the best example of a Baltimore trend that has moved to national recognition,” says Kostyo. “Old Bay is nearly 40 times more likely to show up on menus in the Baltimore metro area than national menus, but it has grown steadily on national menus over the past decade. Today over half of the country says they have tried it.” (In fact, the limited-edition summer snack sold out online within nine hours of its release.)

In 2022, the fastest-growing trends in our region included tres leches cake (sold at Clavel in Remington and Dulceology in Mt. Vernon, among other restaurants), Tajín (a mildly spicy chili pepper-lime seasoning), oat milk, and Hazy IPAs.

Probably the biggest trend was birria tacos—a pan-fried taco dipped in a consommé broth found at such spots as Cocina Luchadoras (pictured above) in Fells Point and San Pablo Street Tacos in Mt. Vernon—which is seemingly on every area menu.

“We didn’t think we’d see it grow because it traditionally uses goat, which is not something that the average consumer eats,” says Kostyo. “But now you mostly see it on menus using other proteins that consumers are familiar with, like chicken or beef—and even the chains are doing it.”

Nationally, the single-biggest growing flavor profile is Ranch Water, a margarita-like cocktail with Topo Chico, lime, and tequila, that is believed to have originated in Mexico and brought to Texas from Mexican workers and immigrants. It recently hit the menu at Wet City Brewing in Midtown.

“For the longest time, when we were tracking trends, we would track the coasts and then we’d track Chicago,” says Kostyo. “It would start there, then slowly filter to nearby locations to those secondary markets. Now, we’ve seen chefs who priced out of those cities, and they moved to what we might have called second-tier cities—now that’s where a lot of the cool stuff is happening.”

As for what the future holds, when Kostyo looks into his crystal ball, he predicts that tacos will loom large. According to Kostyo, while boomers favor Italian cuisine, millennials prefer Mexican fare, and Gen Z is the first generation to prefer Mexican and Chinese cuisine over Italian.

“When you look at foods and flavors growing on menus, they’re almost all coming from Latin and Asian cuisine, and that’s only going to continue,” he says. “It’s a good way to see what’s going to happen as these consumers get older and purchasing power increases. In the way that you might put pizza on the menu as the go-to comfort food, I don’t think there’s any doubt that tacos will replace pizza in the future.”

For Marylanders, the mere mention of Old Bay elicits an almost Pavlovian response. The state’s beloved McCormick & Co. seafood seasoning has inspired tons of hometown merchandise, made its way into local beers and desserts, and even become one of the most common tattoos inked onto passionate Baltimoreans.

And on Wednesday, when McCormick announced what was supposed to be a gradual month-long rollout of its new limited-edition Old Bay Hot Sauce, that loyalty was on display once again, as the company’s website crashed in the midst of selling out its entire online supply.

“I feel like we took down the Internet,” says Laurie Harrsen, senior director of public relations and consumer communications at McCormick & Co., which is based in Hunt Valley. “Old Bay fans are incredibly passionate. Anytime they can show their love for it—and in this case get their hands on something that’s limited edition—they will go to the ends of the Earth.”

By the afternoon, a resale market had popped up on eBay, with some listings selling the sauce for more than $100. “It’s a compliment, but we don’t want people to have to to get their hands on it,” Harrsen says.

Because of this, the team is quickly working to restock the online store as soon as possible—you can even sign up for stock updates. In addition to buying online, beginning in February, 10 oz. bottles of the hot sauce at a suggested retail price of $3.49 will appear at local retailers including Acme, Giant, Food Lion, Martin’s, Safeway, Wegmans, and Weis. It will also be featured at to-be-determined restaurants across town. Though, in the midst of the mania that surrounded the Wednesday launch, McCormick might have to reconsider supply and strategy.

“We might have a different conversation moving forward,” Harrsen says. “When we planned everything out, everything was going to be moving forward over the course of the next month or so.”

For McCormick, this is obviously a good problem to have. As for what to expect next, Harrsen says to watch Old Bay’s social channels, assuring that the hot sauce—which McCormick experts say pairs well chicken wings, nachos, dips, and Bloody Marys—supply will meet its demand.

“The Internet works so well for when people are passionate about something and they want to share and talk about it—it’s the sweet spot,” Harrsen says. “We understand that everyone is passionate about Old Bay and the hot sauce, and we’re going to do everything we can to fill that need.”

Terrence Nelson, TV producer: It’s all about the aroma and the music . . . and maybe a little wine.

Nichele Benton, administrative officer: Keep the bugs away so people can enjoy their meals. Cover the food with food nets, keep fans blowing to prevent mosquitoes from landing, check for beehives, and keep the smell of mint and citronella candles blowing.

Jay Garrett, program analyst: Do as much the day—or days—before the cookout as possible, like preparing sides or marinating the meat.

Rachel Grier, risk analytics consultant: Wrap corn-on-the-cob in aluminum foil with butter and Old Bay. Then throw it on the grill. A Baltimore staple!

Emily Martin, advertising account director: Kabobs are popular at our house because they don’t require constant attention. Plus, your guests get a variety of veggies and protein—all skewered and grilled to perfection at once.

Tapping into the trend toward foods that titillate the tongue, McCormick & Co. has launched Old Bay Hot Seasoning, the company’s first new Old Bay spice spinoff in a decade. With its iconic blue, red, and yellow color scheme, the design of the tin looks much the same as the original, which has more than 530,000 “likes” on Facebook. But what’s inside yields a fierier flavor, with pinches of black and chili peppers to create heat. “There’s been a lot of interest in spicy flavors over the past few years, with consumers wanting bolder flavors such as sriracha sauce,” says Laurie Harrsen, director of consumer communications and public relations at McCormick & Co. “Up and down the grocery store shelves, people are looking for spicier flavors—so it was time for us to come up with something, too.” Whether hot or classic, the seafood seasoning, named for a steamship line that traveled the Chesapeake, is practically our state spice. “When you’re from this area, you grow up eating the bounty from the bay,” says Harrsen. “Here, we are more attuned to eating seafood than any other food, and with Old Bay being more than 75 years old, it’s considered part of the flavoring that comes from the bay.”

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CRABBY CHOCOLATES

It’s a truism that Marylanders use Old Bay in just about every food, from pasta to beer to Cheetos—and now chocolate. These crabby confections, made by Pick of the Bay, include cocoa butter, dark chocolate, a house-made caramel filling, and the Land of Pleasant Living’s favorite condiment. “With the Old Bay in these chocolates,” says Pick of the Bay founder Tom Nigro, “we offer a little taste of Maryland.” Available at the Baltimore, Catonsville, and Towson farmers’ markets.

Ooey Gooey: This caramel is made by an alum of the famed Le Cordon Bleu in Paris and uses only sugar, butter, and cream, with an infusion of Old Bay.

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Old Bay is the blend that has launched a thousand products. Here are a few of our favorite Bay-inspired inventions: PICK OF THE BAY CRAB MARINARA Pick of the Bay uses True Blue-certified lump and backfin crabmeat from J.M. Clayton and Old Bay-style seasoning as key elements in its sauce. One taste and you’ll wonder why you ever bothered to crack a crab. Available at the Baltimore, Catonsville, and Towson farmers’ markets. CARAMEL SAUCE WITH OLD BAY This luscious caramel sauce can be drizzled on apples or eaten out of the jar. “I grew up with Old Bay,” says Tom Nigro. “One day I tried a Marylander’s version of salted-caramel ice cream using vanilla ice cream, caramel sauce, and Old Bay. The flavors were perfect together.” pickofthebay.com. CRABANERO With its bright citrus notes and a good kick of heat, Crabanero founder Charles Parkhill says his product is, “great on raw clams and oysters, drier than a sriracha sauce, and not as acidic as a lot of hot sauce. It also has a touch of sugar to round out the edges. Coming up with this,” Parkhill adds, “was my eureka moment.” Available through crabanero.com.

Back in the early 1960s, the folks at McCormick & Company were sure they had a hit on their hands. The homegrown spice and flavoring giant was launching a powdered, effervescent, children’s drink in foil packs they cleverly called “Fun.”

Charles “Buzz” McCormick Jr. was a company product manager at the time (he retired as CEO in 1999) and remembers the Fun days well. It seems Emerson Drug, Baltimore’s maker of Bromo-Seltzer, was having some success with Fizzies, a tablet that turned water into a bubbly soft drink—kind of like a fruit-flavored Alka-Seltzer. The spice guys decided to beat the Bromo boys.

“We came up with a granular product, which we thought was better,” the 85-year-old retiree says by phone from his Florida home. “We actually did a lot of TV advertising on it in three test markets [10 more the second year] and we did absolutely great.”

The Mad Men-era ad copy practically wrote itself: laughing, eager-eyed kids yelling, “We’re going to have Fun!” Buzz McCormick even recalls witnessing a boy having a full-on temper tantrum in a Baltimore grocery store after his mother refused to put Fun in their shopping cart.

A major, multi-state rollout was launched and McCormick execs sat back waiting for Fun sales to explode. But instead, the product did. Literally. The foil packaging technology of the day wasn’t up to the crushing production demands and many Fun packets leaked, allowing moisture to seep in. Water is what made Fun bubbly in a glass. And water in the foil packet is what made Fun a ticking time bomb on the warehouse shelf.

“The packets swelled up and burst so loud,” Buzz McCormick explains. “I remember a sales call with a [supermarket] broker in Florida one day, and he happened to put a couple packs on the floor in front of his foot and, by mistake, he stepped on one and it blew up like a balloon.

“Oh Lord, it was a disaster,” especially so in the South’s humid air, he concludes with a chuckle.

Buzz McCormick can laugh about the blunder now that it’s decades behind him. But perhaps his ready mirth is also born of the knowledge that such product flops—or busts, in this case—have been few at McCormick. How else to explain how the company his great Uncle Willoughby founded 125 years ago, peddling root beer extract door-to-door out of a Baltimore cellar, grew into the world’s largest spice maker, with more than $4 billion in annual sales and some 10,000 employees around the world?

In fact, the international business has flourished well beyond the spice rack into a global food giant, with its flavor concoctions now found in most grocery aisles—from baked goods to frozen foods—and in some 125 countries. Huge food chains use them, too. Kentucky Fried Chicken’s 11 herbs and spices? Yes, McCormick supplies some of those. Of course, there’s a certain crab seasoning they produce, too—all part of the company’s compelling history.

Old Bay, the spice most closely associated with McCormick today—at least for Baltimoreans—is celebrating two-dozen years as part of the company’s product line. McCormick, however, didn’t invent the beloved summertime spice, which was the work of one Gustav Brunn, a German Jew who escaped the Nazis and set up the Baltimore Spice Company in 1939. Over time, the unusual spice blend in the yellow tin has even made its way beyond the Mid-Atlantic and across the country, into Canada, and even parts of Europe. “I know I have personally seen it on the menu in the Netherlands,” says Old Bay brand manager Jessica Schatz. “The popular flavor profile of Old Bay is the one people have loved for 75 years. It’s classic, and we would never change that.”

The folks at McCormick also say Oprah lent a hand in broadening the Old Bay fan base when a multi-million selling 1994 cookbook she co-authored called for it in a couple of recipes. (Remember, before she was a one-woman media juggernaut, she was an ambitious young TV personality at WJZ.) Beyond the crab pot, the salty-hot mix is showing up in all kinds of places, possessing a near cult following. The Charmery ice cream parlor in Hampden has a popular Old Bay caramel flavor, while Frederick’s Flying Dog Brewery recently released its Old Bay beer, Dead Rise.

And, although McCormick & Company didn’t give Old Bay its name, Buzz knows how it came about, and it takes him back to his days working at the company’s plant on the Inner Harbor. “Right across the street, the Old Bay Line and Chesapeake Line sent ships to Norfolk every evening at 6 and 6:30,” he says. These passenger steamers sailed into the sunset in the 1960s, but what was initially called Delicious Brand Shrimp and Crab Seasoning, he notes, didn’t take off until Brunn renamed it in honor of these boats.

Still, long before the acquisition of Baltimore’s favorite crab seasoning, as the Fortune 1000 company was cutting a wide swath through the food world, McCormick was leaving a substantial mark on its hometown as well. And it all started with a hard-bitten Virginian armed with borrowed cash and big dreams.

Buzz McCormick was a tyke of four when great uncle Willoughby McCormick died in 1932 at age 68, but he has distinct memories of his ancestor. “He lived two blocks away from us in the Warrenton Apartments on Charles Street,” he says. “I remember being up in his apartment and seeing him and his wife, and she played Chinese checkers with me.

“He had an electric car in those days, and a chauffeur, and he used to go down to the plant in his electric car,” he adds. “How many years has it taken to get back to that?”

Owning the Prius of its day might have been a nod to modernity, but the founder was largely an old-school, autocratic industrialist of the high-collared, 19th-century variety. Or, in his great-nephew’s words: “He was a tight-fisted Scotsman who never threw away a used envelope so long as it still had room for additional writing.” Willoughby McCormick was born in Northern Virginia and developed an interest in the food trade while working at a family general store in Texas. He birthed his business in Baltimore in 1889 because the port city was well positioned as a distribution center. (Coincidentally, the same year that he began peddling root beer in Baltimore, a man named Emile Zatarain began doing the exact same thing down in New Orleans; his effort grew into the bulging Zatarain’s brand of Cajun and Creole food products that McCormick bought 11 years ago for $180 million.)

Along with extracts and juices initially sold door-to-door, there were curious non-food items, including Uncle Sam’s Nerve and Bone Liniment “fit for man or beast” and the smelly, fish-based Iron Glue that “sticks everything but the buyer.” Spices didn’t join the fold until Willoughby McCormick bought the F. G. Emmett Spice Company of Philadelphia in 1896—growth by acquisition eventually becoming a McCormick & Company hallmark.

The business had already emerged from its initial year in a glorified cellar to reside in a series of ever-larger downtown locations. But don’t look for any of these old buildings today, because in the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, you’ll recall, some 80 blocks of the city went up in smoke. “We lost everything but our books, which we got out at about 3 o’clock this morning,” Willoughby wrote in a letter home to his mother. “We had to run for our lives.” The tenacious McCormick had a spanking new five-story factory erected on the ashes of the old before the year was even out. The company soon added tea to its line and helped pioneer the manufacturing of tea bags. (Before machinery was developed to stitch them, the tea bags were handsewn by local church groups as piecework fundraisers.)

The building Baltimoreans of a certain age will most associate with McCormick is the aromatic, cream-colored, nine-story leviathan that loomed over Light Street and the Inner Harbor for nearly seven decades. Erected in 1921, it competed with the Bromo-Seltzer tower’s spinning blue bottle with a giant rooftop pepper tin and vanilla bottle. Documents of the day gush over the sheer enormity of place—over 12 acres of daylight floor space and some 37,000 windowpanes. Business was booming.

And then it wasn’t. By 1932, the Depression had delivered the company years of red ink. Willoughby McCormick made a desperate trip to New York to secure new loans. Instead, he died of a sudden heart attack. He didn’t have any children, but there were relatives in the business, most prominently his vice president, nephew Charles McCormick Sr.—Buzz’s father, known by all as C.P. And so, at the ripe age of 36, he was the lucky one to assume the helm of the beleaguered business. Previously, the company’s response to the Depression had been hard-handed austerity: Wages were cut multiple times, work hours were increased. The new McCormick in the corner office charted a different course.

“What C.P did was rather incredible,” Buzz McCormick says. “He held a meeting with employees and told them that he was not going to cut wages again but was going to give everybody a 10-percent increase.” Some in the Baltimore business community branded him a communist for his liberal personnel policies, which included profit sharing and free turkeys for workers at Thanksgiving—a practice the company continues to this day via vouchers for the cost of a full holiday bird. His benevolent moves, designed to foster teamwork, were actually the concepts of a shrewd capitalist. This carrot-instead-of-the-stick approach had the business back in the black by 1933. His progressive policies also included something he branded “multiple management,” wherein workers of all ranks were invited to form junior boards with a say in corporate governance. (Well, all male employees—things weren’t that progressive yet.)

McCormick became a coast-to-coast company in 1947 when it acquired San Francisco’s A. Schilling and Company, the largest spice company west of the Mississippi. It, too, dated to the 1880s and also had overcome catastrophe after the 1907 earthquake leveled its facilities. Buzz calls it “the world’s perfect merger,” and the Schilling name didn’t begin to be phased out in the western U.S. until the 1990s.

The second-generation McCormick brought some whimsy to the work as well, most colorfully through the construction of Friendship Court, a detailed recreation of an Elizabethan village—timbered frames, leaded widows, thatch-and-slate roofs—rambling through the Light Street building’s 7th floor. A centerpiece was the Ye Olde McCormick Tea House where, as late as the 1980s, women in hooped skirts and petticoats distributed free tea and cookies to tourists beneath a beamed ceiling.

Although McCormick is a public company, not a family one, there have always been namesake employees in the business. John McCormick, Buzz’s half brother, is presently vice president of government affairs and community relations, though slated to retire in December after 45 years. He, too, started as a teen on Light Street.

“My worst memory was getting inside of a steel container we used to make mayonnaise to clean it out,” he recalls. In the summer of 1976, an armada of tall ships arrived at a pre-Harborplace Inner Harbor for a four-day celebration, and he remembers this, too. “Mayor Schaefer called [us] and asked, ‘What can you do to make the harbor smell good?’” John McCormick says. “Of course, we always tried to do everything to keep odors to a minimum. But, we scheduled all our cinnamon to be processed on those four days, and we allowed more of the cinnamon dust to get out than would normally be the case. I won’t go into how, but the harbor smelled great.”

The harbor also smelled great on a more somber occasion—during the weeks it took to knock down McCormick’s cement behemoth factory in 1988. Each blast of demolition equipment ushered up decades’ worth of spilt spice dust—a scented swan song.

McCormick had begun the piecemeal relocation of operations to the Hunt Valley area in the early 1960s. Eventually, only a bit of spice milling was left on Light Street, where the railroad tracks and cobblestones had been replaced with carloads of daytrippers flocking to Harborplace. The empty structure was sold to the Rouse Company, which demolished it over the ardent cries of preservationists, who lamented losing such a landmark of industrial heritage. Plans have come and gone for the parcel, which has remained a parking lot to this day, and proposals are again afoot to erect a skyscraper there.

Two years ago, McCormick opened its World of Flavors “retailtainment” center in Harborplace, returning, if on a much smaller scale, some scent of spice to the Inner Harbor. But now that McCormick HQ is tucked away in a leafy suburban office park, rather than perfuming downtown from a mammoth building topped with an oversized pepper tin, it’s safe to say the company has a much lower local profile. (There are concerns, as McCormick looks to consolidate more of its office workers under one roof, that some local jobs could potentially move to nearby Pennsylvania, but the search for new office space has just begun, according to a company official.) Parts of Friendship Court were moved and rebuilt in the new building, though it’s no longer open for public tours. Also not open to casual visitation is what they call the “global market” tucked in the headquarter’s fourth floor. On a recent workday, corporate communications director Jim Lynn led a reporter on a small tour around the sprawling mock store where shelves are lined with McCormick goods from around the world.

The familiar McCormick spice display from your local Giant or Safeway is herewith its red-capped wares, as are some of the ethnic lines geared to the domestic market, such as Thai Kitchen and Simply Asia. But most of the shelf space is given over to a polyglot of foreign brands the company has acquired through the years: Club House (Canada, 1959), Schwartz (UK, 1984), Aeroplane (Australia, 1994), El Guapo (Latin America, 1999), Margão (Portugal, 2000), Vahiné and Ducros (France, 2000), Silvo (Holland, 2004) Kamis (Poland, 2011), and Kohinoor (India, 2011). Business with China began in the late 1980s, and McCormick China was founded in 1998 and two additional Chinese food brands were bought just last year.

“These retail consumer products represent about 60 percent of McCormick’s business today,” Lynn says. “About 40 percent of the business is selling to food manufacturers and restaurants. And it’s more than them just saying, ‘Hey, back up a truck-load of cinnamon,’ our R&D department actual helps them develop the products.”

As far back as World War II, when access to spices such as pepper and cinnamon were severed, McCormick has explored the natural and chemical components of flavor in the lab. Now, an army of white-coated scientists go at it like gangbusters here. It’s a safe bet that the flavor profile of the latest bag of chipotle cilantro chips, or what have you, was born in the Baltimore suburbs off of I-83.

In 1998, The New York Times ran an article on McCormick, “Trouble in Spice World,” and quoted a Goldman Sachs analyst’s warning that the business “does not have a lot growth in it.” People were cooking from scratch less and eating out more, the analyst figured. Oops. McCormick’s net sales and profits have nearly doubled in the last decade alone. Globalization is part of that. And so are the Food Network celebrity chefs and Martha Stewarts of the world engendering renewed interest in cookery. And if people do opt to dine out? Chances are they will eat McCormick there as well, at the drive thru or the white tablecloth restaurant. There is even a special “McCormick for Chefs” line.

“Make the best—someone will buy it” is the old McCormick motto carved into the Ye Olde Tea House mantelpiece—long said to be Willoughby’s words. But in his 1993 corporate memoir, Pepper People, Buzz McCormick came clean, reporting that his father created the quote and attributed it to his uncle (who was probably too busy squirreling away used envelopes and conjuring up new goods to go in for much sloganeering).

A less formal saying now floating around the corporate offices goes like this: “On any given day, the odds are you consume a McCormick product.”

Even flinty old Uncle W. would probably crack a smile at the thought of that.

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Brennen Jensen is a contributing writer for Baltimore.