a sauceLemon pepper
also: lemon pepper seasoning · LP
An Atlanta counter says 'lemon pepper' and means the dry shake; say 'wet' and you have ordered something else.
A dry blend of granulated lemon zest and cracked black peppercorns. The zest is mashed into the pepper so citrus oil soaks in, then the mix is baked and dried. Commercial blends add salt, sugar, onion powder, garlic powder, citric acid, lemon flavouring, sometimes cayenne. It started as a seafood seasoning and became the wing seasoning Atlanta is known for.
The story Cited · wp-lemon-pepper
William Shoffeitt, a product engineer in Healdsburg, California, launched lemon pepper seasoning commercially in July 1967 through his company, Shoffeitt's Enhance Seasoners. It sold along the West Coast, went out at food trade shows, and reached the shelves of Sears and JCPenney.
Atlanta made it a wing. Cooks there began adding lemon pepper to Buffalo wings to cut the heat, and the dry wing became emblematic of the city's food. Its mid-2000s run has been attributed to its not marking clothes the way an orange sauce does — a point made about rappers then wearing white t-shirts. Keisha Lance Bottoms, later mayor of Atlanta, said in 2017 that "Lemon pepper wings are Atlanta". Eric Kim wrote in The New York Times in 2022 that "in Atlanta, lemon pepper is queen".
Inference — the blend's move from fish counter to wing counter is the whole story of its second life, and the label never changed to follow it.
How it is done Tradition
Shaken onto the wings straight out of the fryer, while the skin is hot enough to hold it. No sauce, no bowl — a dry wing stays crisp because nothing wet touches it. Some kitchens shake it over a wing that has already been through butter or Buffalo sauce, which is where wet begins.
Today Harvested · fdc-mccormick-lemon-pepper
On every supermarket spice shelf and behind every Atlanta wing counter. As of 16 September 2026 the USDA label panel for McCormick Lemon & Pepper Seasoning reads 180 mg sodium in a ¼-tablespoon serving — 720 mg in a whole tablespoon, which nobody eats. Salt is the first ingredient, ahead of the pepper; the lemon arrives as citric acid at 3 and lemon oil at 10.
The particulars
| base | citrus-pepper |
|---|---|
| heat | none |
| region | Atlanta, The United States |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
On the label
| what was read | bottle · McCormick & Company, Inc. · Hunt Valley, MD |
|---|---|
| pepper or chile | — |
| vinegar | — |
| butter or oil | — |
| tomato | — |
| sugar | #5 on the label |
| soy sauce | — |
| mustard | — |
| sodium per tablespoon | 720 mg (the FDA counts 2,300 mg as a day) |
| sugar per tablespoon | 0 g (a tablespoon of table sugar is about 12.6 g) |
| Scoville | nobody publishes one for this bottle |
| the label, in order | salt, black pepper, citric acid, onion, sugar, garlic, calcium stearate, silicon dioxide and calcium silicate (to make free flowing), celery seed, lemon oil, FD&C Yellow No. 5 Lake |
Read from this page, 2026-09-16. McCormick Lemon & Pepper Seasoning, 28 oz food-service jar. Label serving is ¼ Tbsp (0.9 g); label sodium 180 mg, so 180 × 4 = 720 mg per tablespoon. A tablespoon is an arithmetic unit here, not a portion. pepper_rank is 0 on purpose: the blend's pepper is black pepper at position 2, not a chile, and the ranks record chile heat. Sugar is a listed ingredient at 5 but the label declares 0 g sugar in a serving that small. No heat word and no Scoville number on the jar. Every bottle we have read is on the sauce page.
Recipes you can use
Old cookbooks are printed whole, spelling and all. Where a recipe is still somebody's copyright, you get the ingredient list and a link to the rest.
McCormick Lemon & Pepper Seasoning, as labelled
- salt
- black pepper
- citric acid
- onion
- sugar
- garlic
- calcium stearate
- silicon dioxide and calcium silicate (to make free flowing)
- celery seed
- lemon oil
- FD&C Yellow No. 5 Lake
Ingredients only, in label order, from the USDA branded-food panel. Salt leads; the lemon arrives as acid at 3 and oil at 10.
Lemon pepper, as described
- granulated lemon zest
- cracked black peppercorns
- salt
- sugar
- onion powder
- garlic powder
- citric acid
- natural or artificial lemon flavoring
- cayenne pepper
- other spices or preservatives
Ingredients only. The first two are the source's primary pair; the rest are what it says commercial and homemade variations may add. No quantities are given and none are added.
Not to be confused with
- Lemon pepper wet — Whether anything wet touched the wing. This record is the dry shake in the jar.
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
Where we got it
- Lemon pepper · link
- Lemon pepper wings · link
- McCormick Lemon & Pepper Seasoning — branded food label (FDC ID 2034704) · link
Where it came from: Cited a source we name · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Tradition what the tradition says, hedged · Inference this project's reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.