What Is The World's Hottest Pepper?

Peppers come in a wide range of shapes, colors, and sizes. Another big difference between peppers is their pungency — aka spiciness. You've got milder ones, like jalapeños, to fiery ones that pack a punch, like Thai bird's eye chilis. However, one pepper amps up the heat to a whole new level. Literally bred to be spicy, Pepper X is the current title holder of the world's spiciest pepper.  

Pepper X ranks highest on the Scoville Heat Units (SHU), which is the standard measurement for the potency of chili peppers. The Scoville scale ranges from zero to several million, and Pepper X has a staggering average of 2,693,000 SHU. To put that into perspective, cayenne pepper, which is spicy enough to keep pests out of your garden, packs only 30,000 to 50,000 SHU. Don't get us wrong; in the chili world, this still counts as hot. But if that's considered hot, Pepper X exists in a league of its own — even compared to the other hottest peppers in the world.

Pepper X hit the scene in 2023. By no means is it natural, but rather, it was intentionally created to be the world's spiciest pepper. It was developed by spice legend Ed Currie, who created it over a decade of selective crossbreeding of peppers with desirable traits. This was done by transferring pollen from one pepper flower to another in order to combine preferred characteristics. In the case of Pepper X, the desired result was to maximize the number of capsaicinoids – the compounds that make the pepper spicy.

If you're the adventurous type (or just dangerously curious), and you want to see if you can handle the Pepper X, we hate to be the bearers of bad news, but it's near-impossible to get your hands on it. Currently, you cannot buy raw Pepper X or its seeds, which are exclusively owned by Ed Currie's PuckerButt Pepper Company. This is to prevent people from infringing on his products, which famously happened with his previous invention, the infamous Carolina Reaper — the former title holder of the world's hottest pepper.

PuckerButt Pepper Company is one of the only places you can buy exclusive Pepper X products, which include hot sauces ranging in spice level from medium-hot to a lesser-known category of spiciness: "painful hot." Currie has also partnered with brands to release products containing Pepper X.  

Luckily, it doesn't seem like you're missing out on not being able to eat a Pepper X. In an interview with Scientific American, Currie described the intense experience as such: "[T]he flavor lasts only for a millisecond, and then the heat is just taking off. And it's not a very pleasant experience. I wouldn't recommend eating it raw to anybody, and if somebody wants me to do it again, they're going to have to pay me a lot of money ... Pepper X took me five to six hours [to recover from]." Yeah, if the pepper's actual creator recommends not eating it raw, it's probably smart to heed that advice — by the looks of it, it would take a lot more than milk to soothe that kind of burn.