How this northern Ontario hot sauce maker is testing their heat

When Heather Dewey's customers ask her how spicy her hot sauces are, the best she can do is guess.

"I can tell people what I think how hot they are, but I mean, it's relative to everybody," said Dewey, who owns Lady Cobraa's Hot Sauces, based out of the small northern Ontario town of Noëlville.

But thanks to a collaboration with Cambrian College in Sudbury, Dewey will soon be able to give those customers a precise answer.

She sent samples of her four most popular hot sauces to the college's new Chemical Analysis and Scientific Services lab so researchers there can measure their Scoville heat units.

"The Scoville heat rating on a hot sauce, it basically tells you exactly how hot the sauce is," Dewey said.

"So a jalapeno, for example, would be roughly 8,000 Scoville heat units, whereas if you go up to a Carolina Reaper and you're looking at 1.5 million to 1.8 million."

The Scoville scale measures the concentration of capsaicinoids in a pepper or hot sauce. Those include capsaicin, which is what gives hot peppers their heat.

Dewey said hot sauce customers have become much more savvy and well-informed about Scoville heat units thanks to growth in the industry and shows like Hot Ones, where celebrities answer questions while eating spicy wings.

"On Hot Ones, before that celebrity eats that hot sauce on the wing they flash the Scoville heat rating on the screen," she said.

Dewey said purchasing the lab equipment necessary to test her hot sauces would have been prohibitively expensive for a small company like hers. She also doesn't have the scientific expertise to operate the equipment.

For a much smaller fee she can outsource that work to Cambrian and the researchers who operate the lab.

Mike Commito, Cambrian's director of applied research and innovation, said the lab officially opened in 2021, but is holding its public grand opening this week.

To test hot sauces, Commito said they use high performance liquid chromatography, which is the standard in analytical chemistry to measure the components of a mixture. 

"What they're going to do is they're extracting some of the sauce from the bottles and then mixing it into a solution and then running that through the machine," he said.

That analysis gives them the concentration of capsaicinoids and the spicy capsaicin in the sauces.

Commito said the lab is also working closely with mining companies like Frontier Lithium and businesses adjacent to the industry like Nexco, which designs explosives for mining. 

"The goal of the lab is not to replace what commercial laboratories can offer," he said.

"What we're trying to do is help companies pursue novel R&D [research and development], whether that's method development or just testing out to see what the results of a certain process or or product are."

Commito said the lab also gives students the opportunity to get hands-on experience with specialized lab equipment while they help industry partners solve problems.