The hottest chilli is Smokin Ed’s ‘Carolina Reaper’, grown by The PuckerButt Pepper Company (USA), which rates at an average of 1,569,300 Scoville Heat Units (SHU), according to tests conducted by Winthrop University in South Carolina, USA, throughout 2012.
The Scoville Unit (SHU) scale is a method of quantifying a substance’s ‘spiciness’, through determining the concentration of the chemical compounds responsible for the sensation, which are named capsaicinoids.