a sauceSweet chili sauce
also: sweet Thai chili sauce · nam chim kai · น้ำจิ้มไก่
Nam chim kai (น้ำจิ้มไก่) is Thai for dipping sauce for chicken. The name says what it is for.
A clear, thickened red sauce of chillies, rice wine vinegar and sugar, often with garlic and sometimes fish sauce. Red chilli peppers — Fresno, Thai or red jalapeños — give it its flecks. Known in Thailand as nam chim kai, a dipping sauce for chicken, and used across Thai, Afghan, Malaysian and Western cooking. In European Chinese restaurants it is the dip for prawn toast, egg rolls, lettuce wraps, spring rolls and chicken wings.
The story Cited · wp-sweet-chili-sauce
It arrived on American wing boards through the takeaway counter rather than the wing bar. In Australia, New Zealand, Europe, Canada and the United States it is stocked as a condiment in takeaway shops and supermarkets, and it is sold bottled everywhere.
The wing board made room for it. As the wing market grew, restaurants created and used sauces beyond Buffalo, some of them drawn from Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Caribbean and Indian cooking.
Inference — sweet chili is the sauce that taught American wing menus that sweet and chile could sit in the same bottle without tomato between them. Hot honey and mango habanero both work the same seam.
How it is done Tradition
Straight from the bottle. It is already thickened, so it coats a fried wing without warming and does not need butter or oil to carry it. Toss, or serve in a cup as a dip. A kitchen after more heat adds sriracha or fresh chilli, and a kitchen after more bite adds lime.
Today Harvested · fdc-ka-me-sweet-chili
On supermarket shelves and takeaway counters across the country, and on wing boards as a standing flavour. As of 16 September 2026 the USDA label panel for Ka-Me Sweet Chili Sauce reads 220 mg sodium and 6 g sugar in a 1-tablespoon serving, with water first, cane sugar second and pickled chili third. No Scoville number is published — usual for this shelf.
The particulars
| base | other |
|---|---|
| heat | mild |
| region | The United States |
| confidence | high · updated 2026-09-16 |
On the label
| what was read | bottle · PANOS Brands LLC (Ka-Me) |
|---|---|
| pepper or chile | #3 on the label |
| vinegar | #7 on the label |
| butter or oil | — |
| tomato | — |
| sugar | #2 on the label |
| soy sauce | — |
| mustard | — |
| sodium per tablespoon | 220 mg (the FDA counts 2,300 mg as a day) |
| sugar per tablespoon | 6 g (a tablespoon of table sugar is about 12.6 g) |
| Scoville | nobody publishes one for this bottle |
| the label, in order | water, cane sugar, pickled chili (chili, salt, vinegar), pickled garlic (garlic salt, vinegar), modified corn starch, salt, white vinegar, xanthan gum, citric acid |
Read from this page, 2026-09-16. Ka-Me Sweet Chili Sauce, 7 fl oz. Label serving is 1 Tbsp (15 mL), so the per-tablespoon figures are the label's own. The USDA transcription runs 'SALT WHITE VINEGAR' with no comma; read here as two ingredients, salt at 6 and white vinegar at 7, with vinegar also inside the pickled chili and pickled garlic at 3 and 4. The chile is named only as 'chili', with no variety, so no Scoville figure follows. 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.
Sweet chili sauce, as described
- red chili peppers (Fresno chile, Thai or red jalapeños)
- rice wine vinegar
- garlic (sometimes)
- fish sauce (sometimes)
- a sweetening ingredient such as fruit, refined sugar or honey
Ingredients only, in the source's order, with its own 'sometimes' kept. No quantities are given and none are added.
Not to be confused with
- Mango habanero — Fruit. Mango habanero leads with corn syrup and mango puree; sweet chili is sugar, chilli and vinegar with nothing else sweet in it.
Who it runs with
Who talks about it
Where we got it
- Sweet chili sauce · link
- Buffalo wing · link
- Sriracha · link
- Ka-Me Sweet Chili Sauce — branded food label (FDC ID 2523929) · 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.