7 Pot Primo vs Carolina Reaper

Both peppers are American-bred Capsicum chinense with a red, wrinkled pod and a long tail, and each has a breeder who tells the story his own way. Troy Primeaux says on his own site that he developed the 7 Pot Primo in 2005 while working in the University of Louisiana at Lafayette's horticulture department, crossing a Trinidad 7 Pot with a Naga Morich and selecting for the tail. Primo is his nickname. His page calls it arguably, and controversially, the hottest pepper in the world. Ed Currie's Carolina Reaper came out of PuckerButt in South Carolina. Guinness World Records, certifying it on November 19, 2013, described it as a cross between a sweet habanero and a Naga Viper that took ten years to stabilize. It went by the plot code HP22B before it had a name.

The word controversially is doing work. For years growers have compared the two pods, noted that both carry a naga on one side of the stated pedigree, and asked whether the Reaper owes something to the Primo. What is on the record is each breeder's own account. NMSU's 2012 RAPD marker study, the peer-reviewed DNA work on Trinidad superhots, compared those landraces with Bhut Jolokia and included neither of these two. Until someone runs that comparison, the ancestry question stays a matter of testimony.

The heat numbers come from different places. Guinness listed the Reaper at an average of 1,569,300 SHU in 2013, then 1,641,183 SHU in 2017 after testing at Winthrop University, and the Reaper held the title until October 2023, when Currie's Pepper X took it at 2,693,000. Primeaux's site states an average of 1.79 million SHU for the Primo. That is the breeder's figure, not a Guinness or university trial result, and this database's range for the Primo tops out at one million. The 7 Pot name itself is folklore. Bosland, Coon and Reeves note that the Trinidad names allude to a pepper hot enough to season seven pots of soup, and their trial put the 7 Pot Jonah at a mean of 1,066,882 SHU with single plants from 727,680 to 1,262,641.

In use the two are interchangeable. Both go into extract-style sauces, dried powders and eating contests. PuckerButt describes the Reaper as painfully hot with sweet, fruity undertones and hints of cinnamon and chocolate. The Primo's tail is the tell in a lineup. It can run more than an inch, giving the pod an almost alien look, while the Reaper's tail is shorter and curved like a sickle, which is where the name came from. If you are buying seed, buy from the breeder, because look-alike pods are the whole reason this argument exists.

Sources

• Primo's Peppers (Troy Primeaux): About
• Guinness World Records, 19 November 2013: Confirmed, Smokin Ed's Carolina Reaper sets new record for hottest chilli
• Guinness World Records, October 2023: Pepper X dethrones Carolina Reaper as world's hottest chilli pepper
• PuckerButt Pepper Company: Our Roots
• Bosland, Coon and Reeves, HortTechnology 22(4), 2012: 'Trinidad Moruga Scorpion' Pepper is the World's Hottest Measured Chile Pepper