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What is the Scoville Scale?
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Chris Whitehair
- Last Updated: August 17, 2025
The Scoville Scale – Explained.
The quest for the hottest pepper never ends, but people like Ed Currie are on the case.
His Carolina Reaper Pepper X is the current record holder for being the hottest in the world (more on that below).
Eating one hot pepper after another to see how hot they are might not sound fun (although many people might think so), but fortunately, that’s not necessary.
The Scoville Scale was created to judge how hot a pepper is without risking your taste buds.
How does the scale work? Let’s take a look.
Wilbur Scoville
Inventor of the Scoville Scale
A Brief History of the Scoville Heat Scale
The Scoville heat unit scale is a 1912 invention by a pharmacologist named Wilbur Scoville.
It measures the pepper’s pungency, which is related to its amount of capsaicin, which makes it hot.
Put, the more it contains, the hotter it is.
Scoville tested peppers by creating a solution with each pepper that he had five people test.
Then, he diluted the solution more and more until the heat was gone entirely.
The dilution for the heat to disappear was determined where the pepper scored on the scale.
Modern testing is a little more scientific than those early days.
Today, instead of getting five people’s opinions, peppers get measured using high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), which measures the amount of heat-producing chemicals in the pepper.
What the Numbers on the Scale Mean
The Scoville Scale is broken down into multiples of 100.
A pepper’s rating is determined by how many parts of water are necessary to dilute an equal number of parts of the pepper solution.
For example, if 100 teaspoons of water are needed to eliminate the heat in one teaspoon of the pepper solution, it would have a Scoville rating 100.
Two of the same types of peppers are never identical. Where they’re grown, the conditions they’re grown in, and their size can affect how much capsaicin they contain.
Therefore, they’re usually rated within a range of heat units.
Pure capsaicin is rated between 15 and 16 million Scoville heat units.
This is unbearably hot for anyone to eat. AKA…you will die. Seriously, please don’t do it.
Where Common Peppers Land on the Scale
Bell peppers are the mildest type of pepper, rated at 0 Scoville Heat Units (SHU).
Banana peppers aren’t much hotter. They are rated between 0 and 500 SHU (but an absolute favorite of mine).
As you move up from there, things start to heat up. Anaheim peppers range between 500 and 2,500 SHU.
You are probably most familiar with the jalapeño pepper.
The jalapeño is rated between 2,500 and 8,000 SHU.
That sounds like a lot, and if you’ve ever bitten into a fresh jalapeño, you might be able to attest to that being true.
However, the jalapeño is relatively lightweight.
Let’s move up the scale.
You’ll find cayenne peppers (30,000 to 50,000 SHU), Thai peppers (50,000 to 100,000 SHU), and habanero peppers (100,000 to 350,000 SHU).
Most people might have experienced the highest-rated ghost pepper at 800,000 to 1,000,000 SHU.
That’s a long way from the top of the scale, though.
How Do You Know if a Pepper Will be Hot?
Have you ever looked at a colorful pile of peppers in the supermarket and wondered how hot they would be?
A couple of things can give you an idea before you do a taste test.
First off, the size of the pepper is a good indication of how hot it will be.
The smaller the pepper, the hotter.
Smaller peppers tend to have a higher concentration of capsaicin, giving them more bang for the buck.
Second, another indication is how “bumpy” the pepper is outside.
However, this isn’t always true – plenty of smooth peppers pack plenty of heat.
But peppers with many bumps and ridges tend to be hotter than their smooth companions.
Look out if you find a small pepper resembling a wrinkled older man – it’s probably pretty hot—no offense to wrinkled, older men.
The World’s Hottest Pepper (For Now)
Pepper X from the Puckerbutt Pepper Company is the hottest pepper in the world and holds the Guinness World Record.
The creator, Ed Currie, has dedicated his life to making hotter and hotter peppers (and making me miserable at the NYC Hot Sauce Expo in 2019).
Did we mention it’s rated at an outrageous 2,693,000 Scoville Heat Units?!
Comparatively, standard pepper spray is rated between 2 million and 5 million SHU. Think twice before putting yourself in a situation where that could happen.
If you’re cooking with Carolina Reapers, wear gloves, and don’t get your hands near your eyes!
One spray and you’re South of the Border!
What About Hot Sauces?
Hot sauces follow the same process as peppers when using the Scoville Scale.
They’re rated based on how many dilutions are necessary to eliminate any trace of heat.
One of the most well-known hot sauces is Tabasco.
You’ve probably seen it at grocery stores and restaurants.
Tabasco is rated between 2,000 and 5,000 SHU, and while it’s reasonably hot, it’s far from the top.
If you want to move past Tabasco sauce and experience new tastes and levels of heat, there are many other brands to choose from.
Brands like Hellfire and Elijah’s Xtreme sauce bring the heat, and their sauces land way up the Scoville Scale.
Even the names sound hot!
Blair’s Mega Death Sauce, for example, contains cayenne (30,000 to 50,000 SHU), chipotle (5,000 to 10,000 SHU), and habanero (100,000 to 350,000 SHU) peppers, making it one of the hottest sauces you’ll find.
Hot Sauces at Every Step of the Scoville Scale
In conclusion, Flower City Flavor Company has you covered whether you only want a little bite of your hot sauce or something that will practically burn a hole in your tongue.
Remember, though, we are a flavor-first company.
As much as we enjoy the heat, first and foremost, it has to taste good.
We’ve got sauces at every step of the Scoville Heat Scale, from Mild to Extremely Hot!
Get in touch with us today to find the perfect flavor for you!
