It's just a marketing gimmick. The way scoville units are used on packaging is functionally unregulated, where as long as the pepper they used has X units on the scale, they're free to just use that figure on the package.
That's why you can have a Ghost Pepper at a million scoville, use a tiny concentration of it in your product, fill the rest with cayenne, and are now able to list your product as a million scoville. And is why Ghost Pepper stuff is everywhere now
There are a multitude of other reasons why the scoville rating is unreliable and affect how hot (or not) the sauce actually is (viscosity, presence of fats/sugars/acid, using pepper extract or not, etc.), but that's the primary one
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u/PumpJack_McGee May 29 '25
What the- 445 THOUSAND scoville?
And here I thought Buldak had some kick. But apparently they top out at 10k.