Viral hot sauce challenges have fueled a $100 million chile pepper arms race

• From extreme hot sauces to online spice challenges, Americans have long had a fascination with spice.
• Chile pepper production has consistently grown in the US, and diners increasingly expect more spice in their foods.
• Spice experts say the obsession may be shifting — and our taste buds will thank us.

On a Friday at Doherty Memorial High School in Worcester, Massachusetts, 14-year-old Harris Wolobah was handed a small coffin-shaped box, emblazoned with a skull and snake, that contains a single spicy tortilla chip called the One Chip Challenge.

Paqui, a Hershey company-owned brand that makes the chip, doesn't have a measurement for how spicy its product is or a Scoville Heat Unit (SHU) rating that shows the level of pungency of a pepper.

But the chip is made with the Carolina Reaper and Naga Viper peppers, which are rated at about 1.6 million and 1.4 million SHU, respectively. Jalapeno peppers, in comparison, range from 2,500 to 8,000 SHU.

The "challenge" is simple: Eat the whole chip in one sitting, and see how long you can last without desperately grabbing a glass of milk or water.

Health experts have already warned about the potential side effects of participating in the One Chip Challenge: vomiting, stomach pain, difficulty breathing, and even cardiac arrest. But Wolobah, like so many others, most likely either had no clue about the warnings or brushed it off.

Plus, countless others have already tried the challenge and shared their experience on YouTube. Pain quickly ensues but the participants seemed to come out of it okay.

When Wolobah ate the chip, the sophomore must have had an especially adverse reaction. According to Harris's mother, Lois Wolobah, he fainted and was sent to the nurse's office that day.

"When I went there, he was lying down and I said, 'What was the chip you ate?'" his mother told WBZ TV. Wolobah showed his mom the Paqui brand One Chip Challenge. His father, Amos, said his son didn't have any pre-existing condition, at least to his knowledge, he said.

Wolobah died in his home hours later. Autopsy results have not yet been released, and the family and Hershey did not respond to a request for comment. But the Wolobahs are pointing the blame squarely at the One Chip Challenge.

Paqui in response said in a statement that it's working with retailers to "remove the product from shelves."

It's unclear if the heat had anything to do with Wolobah's death, but the challenge's mere existence points to a uniquely American fascination with spice.

At restaurants, sweat-inducing heat is almost expected on the menu. In the aisles of grocery stores, shoppers can choose from a dizzying selection of hot sauces. And in South Carolina, a farm is singlehandedly responsible for developing one of the hottest peppers ever eaten by mankind. The farm recently just topped its own record with a pepper rated at more than 2 million Scoville Heat Units.

The demand has sometimes veered into the realm of morbid curiosity. Online, content creators farm for attention by taking part in extreme food challenges, expecting the pain, while millions watch.

Here's how we got here.

It all began with an Italian explorer

The very brief summary of the chile peppers' origin starts somewhere in South America around Bolivia and Brazil, according to Stephanie Walker, an extension vegetable specialist at New Mexico State University's Chile Pepper Institute.

When humans discovered peppers and their kick — a sensation, not a flavor — thousands of years ago, they immediately latched onto the fruit as a medicinal crop, and through human selection, a variety of chile peppers of different sizes and shapes started to appear, Walker told Business Insider.

But the chile pepper's global proliferation began with a familiar name: Christopher Columbus.

Columbus was looking for black peppercorns — a highly sought-after fruit at the time — but instead encountered a red plant that had a similar pungency, according to Walker. Hence the reason why we call the red fruit, chile peppers, despite having no relationship to the black peppercorn.

Once the Italian explorer took the seed back to the Old World, the fruit took off.

"Many countries, especially Asian countries, African countries, really embraced it and started developing their own particular types of chile based on the flavors, the heat level, and other attributes that they preferred," the professor said.

At least since the 20th century, the US has consistently seen a steady increase in chile pepper demand, especially as immigration opened up in the country.

Between 1980 and 2020, chile pepper consumption increased more than twofold, from three pounds to seven pounds per person according to a 2021 research paper from the New Mexico State University's Department of Agricultural Economics and Agricultural Business.

"Consumption of peppers is going up in the United States, and it has been steadily for some time," Walker said.

By 2020, according to the USDA, the chile pepper market was valued at $100 million.

A world record

Ed Currie — arguably the godfather of extremely hot chile peppers for his hand in developing the world's hottest chiles — traces his fascination with spice back to his college days in the '80s when his parents had to give him a reality check.

"My parents told me I was going to die of heart disease or cancer, and I had better do something about it if I wanted to keep on living the lifestyle that I was leading," Currie told Business Insider. Currie, at that time, was a "full-blown alcoholic and addict."

His habits didn't come to a sudden halt, but he did discover his interest in peppers during visits to the school library at absurd hours. In particular, Currie was piqued by the chile peppers' medicinal qualities. Perhaps, he thought, they contained the key to keep him chugging along.

"I found out that the lowest indices of cancer and heart disease were around the equator from the two tropics," he said.

Currie began sending letters all over the world, mostly to embassies, requesting samples of chiles or chile seeds. The internet still had a few years before it truly took off.

After a brief stint as a bank trust officer and a move to South Carolina, Currie opened a small booth at a flea market slinging homemade salsa using peppers he grew in his yard. In 2003, Puckerbutt Pepper Company was born. Currie by then also was a recovering addict for several years.

It was at his farm in Fort Mills, where Currie developed two of the hottest peppers in the world — at least according to Guinness World Records.

In 2013, he set a world record with his Carolina Reaper pepper, which was recorded then with an average of 1.6 million Scoville Heat Units — just about the same pungency as police pepper spray, according to The Associated Press.

In October, he broke his own record again after patiently waiting more than a decade for someone to dethrone his Reaper. The pepper, called Pepper X, measures at about 2.7 million SHU.

The South Carolina farmer gave three reasons why he and his team created peppers that are essentially suitable for torture.

One, "because we can," he told Business Insider.

Two, Currie's interest in the chile pepper's medicinal qualities persists.

And, three, "for flavor," he says.

Currie doesn't enjoy burning himself up more than anyone else, although he's likely developed an extraordinary tolerance over the years testing hot peppers.

The challenges that are spawned from his product, including the One Chip Challenge that so happens to be seasoned with the Reaper, might make for effective marketing, but Currie doesn't care to participate.

"I don't do those challenges 'cause they're stupid," he said.

Instead, developing a hotter pepper is part of a business model that would allow him to sell, for example, a hotter sauce with less pepper he says, but also, believe it or not, about creating a better-tasting product.

"The philosophy for me is how can I take something that's already popular and make it taste better," he said.

Make it hotter, chef

For as long as Roberto Santibañez was based in the US, the chef of almost four decades recalls Americans having a unique affinity to spicy foods.

Santibañez, a Mexico City native who opened three restaurants in his hometown, moved to New York City in 1996, where he would later open Fonda in 2009 serving contemporary Mexican food.

When his family got a taste of his spin on his native cuisine, they were shocked by the levels of heat.

In Mexico and in school at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, Santibańez felt that restaurants and chefs cooked with spice but with a bit of caution.

In the US, however, Santibańez has to remember: "People really go for it."

"I think what I've experienced is if you promise people with wordings like, 'This is a spicy sauce,' then people really want it spicy," he told Business Insider. "You can not fail them."

Some Fonda patrons ask for more heat on top of the hot salsas already served at his restaurant, Santibañez said, and he'll oblige by giving them diced habanero, a pepper rated at 150,000 to 350,000 SHU. In his cookbooks, the chef will advise home cooks not to be afraid to add more spice, understanding what his audience expects.

Americans' high tolerance for spice at restaurants can also be charted with the explosion of the Nashville Hot Chicken scene.

The dish — generally, fried chicken slathered with a cayenne-pepper-based sauce or paste and typically served with pickles and white bread — has been around for several decades, perhaps even as far back as the 1930s, according to NPR.

Prince's Hot Chicken Shack in Nashville is often cited as the originator. The lore behind the recipe is said to have involved a woman creating the dish to punish her cheating partner, Thornton Prince, the great-uncle of the restaurant's owner, Andre Prince.

In the past decade, however, the hot chicken appears to have received renewed attention with headlines on how the Nashville Hot Chicken is exploding in popularity.

One man responsible for the hot chicken's prominence in southern California is Johnny Ray Zone, a Los Angeles native with a childhood love for spicy food and snacks.

"I was a big fan of Hot Cheetos, even though they're not spicy," Zone told Business Insider. "I ate so many of those I had to get my appendix cut out."

After his father's untimely death, Zone, who by now had worked his way up from dishwasher to executive chef, took a trip to Nashville and fell in love with the iconic hot chicken dish.

LA needed this, Zone thought. In 2014, he started Howlin' Rays out of a food truck, serving Nashville hot chicken quarters with side dishes such as braised collard greens and a mac and cheese salad.

The simple genius behind Howlin' Rays and its eventual "viral success," as The Los Angeles Times described, was putting the hot chicken in sandwich form — something Nashville did not have at the time, according to Zone.

"Once we did that, then it took off," he said.

But one part of the Nashville Hot Chicken experience Zone made sure to preserve was offering different levels of spice, going from mild all the way up to "howlin'" and "howlin' plus plus," which is off-menu.

In Nashville, every hot chicken restaurant offers different levels of spice and might have a unique name for each level, Zone said. And each restaurant had its own take on what their level of "hot" was.

"That's part of the lure of hot chicken," he said.

This doesn't mean that hoards of customers are coming in requesting the top three spice levels available. Zone said that they're actually "not that popular."

But when first-time customers do feel adventurous, Zone makes sure to give them a small sample of what to expect.

"If people hear so much stuff about us, and it's their first time trying it, we don't want their experience to be ruined," Zone said. "And we keep it authentic for how hot it is in Nashville. We don't want to dumb it down just for sales."

A nuanced heat

Novelty chip challenges, extreme peppers, and hot chicken satisfy the appetite of a small base of thrill seekers — while millions of others just watch — but our dishes aren't necessarily getting hotter.

In fact, the pendulum could be swinging the other way.

Denise Purcell, vice president of content and education of Specialty Food Association, which highlights trends in global, artisanal foods, told Business Insider that more and more food retailers and purveyors are thinking about how to incorporate heat to complement the foods we eat rather than overpowering our experience.

"The trend seemed to be the hotter, the better — like ghost pepper and whatever the hottest pepper is," Purcell said. "Let's see if people could handle it. And that is giving way a little bit to this more nuanced heat idea, where it's not just all about burning your tongue and seeing what your tolerance is. It's heat that enhances the flavor. It's things like hot honey we see now in a lot of menus and a lot of packaged products."

The push to incorporate a more nuanced heat is also being commercialized, as fast food companies roll out sweet and spicy products or sauces.

Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen intermittently brings back its hot honey sauce and chicken. McDonald's last month released its Sweet & Spicy Jam sauce for a limited time, which incorporates Szechuan peppercorn and cayenne pepper, according to the fast food restaurant.

For Zone, the spicy foods he's intimately familiar with are dishes from one of many Thai restaurants that dot Los Angeles and have incorporated a balance of sweet and spicy like larb or yum nua.

"In all these different Thai classics, the sugar balances out the spice," he said. "And so how long have they been serving that? Hundreds of years."