Jonathan Peppar
Feb 24 '21

How was the Scoville scale developed for peppers?

Drag a photo here– or –
Don't have an account?
Join now
J.E. Luebering

Encyclopedia Britannica Editor

Feb 24 '21

Wilbur Scoville was a pharmacist who, in 1912, published a paper that described a process for putting a number on a pepper’s pungency. It was the first time that spiciness had been systematically quantified.

As FiveThirtyEight summarizes what became the Scoville Organoleptic Test:


For Scoville, using human testers was the best path forward. Yes, we all have variations in the number of heat receptors in our mouths, we suffer from tasting fatigue, and none of us are exactly the same in describing how something tastes – but, in Scoville’s time, pepper-measuring technology was significantly lacking, and he saw humans as the best solution. So too, he was, at that time, researching the use of capsaicin in a painkiller being sold by the drugmaker Parke-Davis, so the same humans who would be buying that painkiller would be useful assessors of one of its ingredients.

It turns out that capsaicin ultimately was not a solution for that painkiller. But Scoville’s scale proved to be so useful as a measurement of spiciness that it lived on. And even when technology finally did exceed the power of humans, the scale persisted: nowadays high-performance liquid chromatography is used to identify the many different types of capsaicinoids found in peppers, and the results of that type of analysis are stated in pungency units as defined by the American Spice Trade Association, but these units are (reasonably, with a few shortcomings) translatable into Scoville heat units. And, in any case, claiming a pepper is 2,200,000 SHU is a lot more impressive than its ASTA equivalent.