Red, white and blistering: the chillies America actually bred

It's the 4th of July, which is as good an excuse as any to look at the chillies the USA can properly claim credit for. Not chillies that just happen to be grown there, mind, but ones that were deliberately bred, crossed or selected on American soil, often by a single stubborn person with a paintbrush and too much patience.

Turns out there's a good story behind most of them. Here's a grower's tour.

The one that started it all: New Mexico No. 9

Long before superhots were a competitive sport, a horticulturist called Fabián García was quietly doing the real work. Starting in the late 1800s at what's now New Mexico State University, García set out to turn the wildly inconsistent local landrace chillies into something a farmer could actually rely on: predictable size, predictable heat, predictable yield.

In 1913, that project produced New Mexico No. 9, the first standardised chilli cultivar bred in the US. It's the ancestor of pretty much every "New Mexican" pod-type chilli grown today, including the chilli sold as Anaheim (the seed was taken from New Mexico to Anaheim, California, where it settled in and became its own regional variety) and the NuMex line still bred at NMSU, home to the longest continuously running chilli breeding programme in the world.

If you've ever roasted a Hatch chilli, you've eaten García's legacy.

Grower's note: these are mild-to-medium, thick-walled, and built for roasting. Great started indoors in late winter for a long New Zealand summer season.

Sandia: the campus cross

Sticking with New Mexico, the Sandia chilli is a straightforward example of deliberate crossbreeding. In 1956, NMSU's Dr Roy Harper crossed a NuMex No. 9 descendant with a Californian Anaheim (itself also a No. 9 descendant) to produce a slightly hotter, high-yielding New Mexican-type pod. It's still widely grown for green chile and ristras today.

Fresno: the accidental jalapeño lookalike

In 1952, a Californian grower named Clarence Brown Hamlin developed a new pepper near Fresno, aiming for something that would perform well commercially in the San Joaquin Valley. What he ended up with looks a lot like a jalapeño, but isn't one: thinner walls, a pointed rather than blunt tip, and a fruitier, slightly smokier flavour as it ripens to red.

It's a nice one to grow alongside jalapeños if you want to compare notes, since they sit in a similar heat range but taste noticeably different.

Then things get serious: the superhot arms race

From the 2000s on, a handful of American breeders more or less invented the modern superhot category by hand-pollinating Caribbean and South Asian varieties together. This is where the story gets properly dramatic.

Trinidad Scorpion 'Butch T' — Named for Butch Taylor of Zydeco Farms in Mississippi, who stabilised and propagated the strain from Trinidad Moruga Scorpion genetics in the early 2000s. It held the Guinness World Record for hottest pepper from 2011, testing at 1,463,700 SHU, before being knocked off by a Trinidad-grown rival.

7 Pot Primo — Bred by Louisiana horticulturist Troy Primeaux from around 2005, crossing a Naga Morich with a Trinidad 7 Pot. It's known for its long, lumpy, stinger-tailed pods and a heat level that regularly tops 1.4 million SHU. There's long-running, friendly debate in the chilihead community about how closely its genetics might overlap with the next pepper on this list — nobody's saying for certain, and both breeders have kept some of their exact lineage close to their chest.

Carolina Reaper — The pepper most people actually know by name. Ed Currie of PuckerButt Pepper Company in Fort Mill, South Carolina, spent over a decade crossing a Naga-type pepper with a La Soufrière habanero from Saint Vincent. It was originally certified by Guinness in 2013, then reconfirmed in 2017 at an average of 1,641,183 SHU, with individual pods reportedly hitting 2.2 million. It held the "world's hottest" title for a decade.

Pepper X — Currie's follow-up act, also bred at PuckerButt, dethroned his own Carolina Reaper in 2023 with an average of 2.69 million SHU. Same breeder, same farm, even hotter.

Worth flagging honestly: SHU figures you'll see quoted for any of these vary a lot depending on the source, the growing conditions and which pod got tested. Treat big round numbers on packaging (including ours, on any superhot listings) as a guide to the ballpark, not a lab certificate.

Why this matters if you're growing at home

None of this is just trivia for the sake of it. If you're growing NuMex or Anaheim types, you're growing genetics bred specifically for reliable yield and roasting performance, not heat, so don't expect fireworks. If you're growing a Reaper, Primo or Butch T, you're growing genetics bred by someone chasing the absolute ceiling of what a chilli plant can do, so expect a longer season, fussier germination and a plant that wants every bit of warmth you can give it.

Knowing the breeding history is genuinely useful when you're deciding what to grow and why, not just a fun fact for the packet.

Kia ora, and happy 4th to those of you celebrating. Get the BBQ out, and maybe don't put the Reaper on the barbecue next to anything you don't want tasting like Reaper.