Pepper X Pepper will be on display in Fort Mill, South Carolina, earlier this month.
Jeffrey Collins/Associated Press
hide caption
toggle caption
Jeffrey Collins/Associated Press
Pepper X Pepper will be on display in Fort Mill, South Carolina, earlier this month.
Jeffrey Collins/Associated Press
According to Guinness World Records, the small, wrinkled, yellow-green chili pepper known as Pepper X is now officially the world’s hottest chili pepper.
Ed Currie, founder of South Carolina’s Packerbutt Pepper Company, appears on YouTube show hot ones Won a Guinness Award and announced a new spicy variety to the world.
To measure Pepper X’s strength, Guinness officials turned to what’s known as the Scoville Scale. Developed in 1912, this scale measures the spiciness of peppers by measuring the concentration of heat-producing compounds called capsaicinoids.
Pepper X measures an average of 2.693 million Scoville heat units. By comparison, a jalapeño is only 2,000 to 8,000 SHU, while a serrano can land you between 10,000 and 23,000 SHU.
The previous record holder, the Carolina Reaper, also developed by Curry, averaged 1.64 million SHU.
“But the scale is logarithmic, so it’s about three times hotter than the Reaper,” Curry said on the show.
An employee wearing a Carolina Reaper shirt looks out at one of Ed Currie’s greenhouses on October 10, 2023 in Fort Mill, South Carolina.
Jeffrey Collins/Associated Press
hide caption
toggle caption
Jeffrey Collins/Associated Press
Curry described the feeling of eating a whole Pepper X: “You get a really intense burn right away, and then your head is like, ‘Oh, what’s going on?’ Then your body starts reacting. You feel it in your arms, you feel it in your chest. ” he said.
“There’s no actual throat burn like in the Reaper, but it happens later when there’s pain.”
Ed Currie has a handful of Pepper X Peppers.
Jeffrey Collins/Associated Press
hide caption
toggle caption
Jeffrey Collins/Associated Press
Much of a pepper’s heat is concentrated not in the seeds, but in the white placenta inside that holds them. According to Guinness, the bumps on the outside of Pepper X create more space for the placenta to grow.
Curry said his team stabilized Pepper
