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What happens when an engineer from Arkansas gets curious about how much heat he can tolerate? (And by tolerate, we mean how many hot peppers can he eat?!?!) For Stephen Curgan, the answer eventually involved championship belts, international flights, superhot peppers, world records, and a stage name that sounds tailor-made for the sport.
Known in the competitive pepper-eating world as Fiery Redd, Curgan lives in Northwest Arkansas and works as an automation engineer at the world’s largest retail company. By night, however, he is part of an international community of “chili heads” who grow, taste, and compete with some of the planet’s hottest peppers.
On Saturday, Aug. 29, Curgan will launch the inaugural Ozark Flame & Flavor Festival at Record Downtown in Bentonville, introducing Arkansans to a sport-and-food culture we haven’t experienced. Look a little closer, though, and a festival built around growers, makers, food, and a little friendly competition feels right at home in an agricultural state.
What Is Competitive Pepper Eating?
Before getting too deep into the backstory, it helps to understand just how hot “hot” can be.
A jalapeño might register around 5,000 Scoville Heat Units, while a habanero can reach around 100,000. Peppers that competitive eaters call “superhots” fall into an entirely different category, often exceeding one million Scoville Heat Units. The Carolina Reaper is probably the superhot pepper most familiar to the general public, but Curgan says there is an entire culture dedicated to cultivating unusual peppers.
Some growers pursue heat, while others focus on flavor, color, unusual shapes, or even variegated leaves. They carefully isolate plants, manage pollination practices and stabilize new varieties across multiple generations.
Curgan became so immersed in that world that he started growing peppers himself. Buying superhots for training became expensive, so a small pepper garden at home made sense. Then came another question.
Curgan is now developing his own sauce and collaborating with the Arkansas Food Innovation Center on commercial production and the FDA approval process.
From Hot Sauce Fan to “Fiery Redd”
Curgan spent about 10 years in manufacturing before moving into engineering. He later moved to Northwest Arkansas for his work with Walmart, but his pepper story began before Arkansas became his home.
At first, there was no competition and certainly no plan to become a world champion. “I was just someone who likes hot sauce and spicy foods,” he said.
He began exploring extreme craft hot sauces, initially using only a few drops at a time. Gradually, he discovered he liked both the flavor and the challenge of testing how much heat he could tolerate.
An online group called For the Love of Hot Sauce introduced him to new makers and increasingly spicy products. Members also kept recommending the series Superhot, which explores the world of peppers and the people obsessed with them.
The show introduced him to the global chili-head community and the League of Fire, an organization that oversees competitive chili eating. Curgan realized he could complete challenges from home. Participants purchase sanctioned spicy-food challenges, record themselves completing them, and earn points toward online rankings.
He figured he was already eating extremely spicy food. Why not see how he compared?
He joined on a whim, then started winning.
Curgan began completing challenges and climbing the rankings. If someone had eaten five of something, he wondered whether he could eat six. Soon, he was breaking record after record and eventually set a League of Fire mark for the most records broken in a year.
That was when a hobby he had picked up at home suddenly became something much bigger.
An Amateur Gets the Call
When a world belt match needed a replacement competitor, League of Fire officials looked at their online rankings.
Curgan was No. 1. They called. His response was essentially: Are you sure?
He had never competed in a live pepper-eating competition. Now one of the people he recognized from television was on the phone, asking him to step onto an international stage. That’s kinda how it works here. If you can’t defend your title, they call up someone else to take your place!
“If I lose, it’s still a win for me,” he remembered thinking. He had gone from watching these competitors on TV to being invited to compete against them.
Before taking on the world stage, however, he needed some practice.
He found people growing superhot peppers and started eating them at home. Then an opportunity arose to enter a lower-level belt match in Denver. Curgan signed up at the last minute, flew to Denver the morning of the competition, won the belt, and flew home that night.
Suddenly, the rookie had a championship belt.
Next came London. Although he lost to an established competitor, he learned a great deal about his mental game and what he needed to do to push himself through the final round.
Then another turn came in Cape Town, South Africa, where Curgan faced a formidable competitor known as Scorpion Slayer. Curgan studied videos before the match and knew his opponent had never lost.
But this time, Curgan didn’t set a point where simply getting far enough would count as success.
On that day, he was better. The belt was his. The Arkansas engineer who had started hot sauce challenges at home had become a world champion.
He has since successfully defended his world championship twice, making him a three-time League of Fire world champion. He is scheduled to defend the title again in Bulgaria this October.
Learning to Think Like a Champion
It would be easy to assume that elite pepper eaters eventually stop feeling the heat. Curgan says that is not what happens.
He regularly eats spicy food, and years of doing so have helped condition his response. But competition still looks exactly as you might imagine.
There are tears. There is a runny nose. There is pain. Your body is telling you to stop. The competition, Curgan says, becomes a question of whether you listen.
“It’s a mental game more than anything,” he said. “Mind over matter.” Many competitors reach a point when their instinct tells them to quit. Curgan believes success comes from developing the mental fortitude to keep going when your body tells you not to.
That is what makes his rise through the sport so unexpected. Yes, a person must endure extraordinary heat. But Curgan’s advantage may have less to do with his taste buds than with his willingness to keep telling himself he can take one more step.
Bringing the Pepper World to Bentonville
Curgan has traveled around the world through competitive pepper eating, met growers and makers, formed friendships with fellow chili heads, and found himself in a community he did not know existed just a few years ago.
Eventually, another question surfaced – Why couldn’t Arkansas have something like this?
The festival aims to introduce people to the broader culture surrounding peppers without assuming everyone wants to eat something painfully hot. And it’s clear that Arkansas and Bentonville love a food festival!
Visitors will find craft hot sauces in a range of heat levels, along with specialty foods such as jams, chocolates, baked goods, sauces, and salsas. Food trucks will be on site, and the bar will offer event-only drinks, mocktails, and dirty sodas. There will also be live music from Dreadful Day and a packed stage competition schedule throughout the event.
Watch the Pros or Take the Stage Yourself
The Ozark Flame & Flavor Festival will feature a spicy wing-eating competition, an amateur pepper-eating competition and a kids’ spicy-eating competition, giving curious visitors a chance to join the action.
The festival’s biggest competitive event will be an official, sanctioned League of Fire Bentonville Belt Match, with competitors traveling from multiple states. The Bentonville event is part of the road to the America’s Belt, giving the winner the opportunity to continue advancing through the League of Fire competition system.
For spectators, that means an Arkansas audience can see the same competitive world that first fascinated Curgan when he discovered it from home.
The festival is partially supported by a Visit Bentonville event grant, and organizers hope to expand Ozark Flame & Flavor into an annual Bentonville event.
Images throughout the story provided by Stephen Curgan and the Ozark Flame & Flavor Festival.
Keisha (Pittman) McKinney lives in Northwest Arkansas with her chicken man and break-dancing son. Keisha is passionate about connecting people and building community, seeking solutions to the everyday big and small things, and encouraging others through the mundane, hard, and typical that life often brings. She put her communications background to work as a former Non-profit Executive Director, college recruiter and fundraiser, small business trainer, and Digital Media Director at a large church in Northwest Arkansas. Now, she is using those experiences through McKinney Media Solutions and her blog @bigpittstop, which includes daily adventures, cooking escapades, #bigsisterchats, the social justice cases on her heart, and all that she is learning as a #boymom! Keisha loves to feed birds, read the stack on her nightstand, do dollar store crafts, cook recipes from her Pinterest boards, and chase everyday adventures on her Arkansas bucket list.
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