The Scoville Scale was the brain child of an American pharmacist named Wilbur Scoville. Wilbur devised the scale in 1912 and the method to obtain chili rankings on this scale is called the Scoville Organoleptic Test.

What Does the Scale Measure

The Scoville Scale is a measurement of the spicy heat of chili peppers.  The Scoville Scale is reported in Scoville heat units (SHU).  The SHU value is a function of the concentration of a key chemical compound found in chilies.  This chemical compound found in chilies is called capsaicin. 

The Subjective Nature of the Scale

The Scoville scale is based on empirical measurements which are dependent on the subjective assessment of testers who identify their relative sensitivity to the capsaicin in a test ingredient. Data gathered this way to measure the capsaicin content of a chili or chili-laden ingredient is imprecise. Furthermore, as the public is introduced to new sources of capsaicin, the relative ranking of previously measured chilies tend to change within the scale.  

An Enhanced Method of Combining SHU Data

Since there are many published sources of overlapping and slightly divergent SHU data, and because the data is inherently subjective in nature, we attempt to combine that data in the vCalc equation named Scoville Integrated Scale.

Sources of Scale Data

We have collected data from multiple websites to provide a cross-section of source estimates for SHU values. Here are the source

Scott Roberts Website