A John Deere Publication

Person holds championship belt and clear trophy in dimly lit room.

Jessica Millar outlasted her three male competitors to win the 2024 Extreme Chili Alliance Belt Match held as the finale of Heating Up the Capitol. The contest is held in the Ottawa, Ontario, vicinity every September.

Agriculture, Specialty/Niche September 01, 2025

Last One Standing

Pushing through the pain to claim the Extreme Chili Alliance Belt Match.

by Lorne McClinton

Sweat pours off the competitors' red-tinged faces. Every few minutes they pause to wipe their brows. Nobody is having fun; actually, several look like they want to die. Little wonder, any contest that combines speed eating with hot peppers is going to be tough.

Alex Gougeon, Mike Bastien, Blake Hambly, and Jessica Millar are competing in the fourth annual Extreme Chili Alliance (ECA) Belt Match held around Ottawa, Ontario, every September. It's the finale of Heating Up the Capital, the city's hot sauce festival. Whoever wins receives the championship belt, a trophy, and a check for $250.

The concept is simple. Contestants race against the clock to finish a series of plates of hot peppers in under three minutes starting with a batch of jalapeños. These are relatively mild as hot peppers go, falling between 2,500 and 8,000 on the Scoville scale that measures the pungency of peppers. What makes these extra challenging are their huge size, those on the plates being as big as cucumbers. This repeats round after round with slightly hotter peppers each time, until only one contestant is left standing. The last and most challenging of all is a plate of Carolina Reapers that clock in between 1.4 and 2.2 million Scovilles.

"But as you go on, the capsaicin [the chemical that makes peppers spicy] stacks up," Gougeon says. "A Carolina Reaper, for example, falls in the 1.6 to 2.4 million range on the Scoville scale. It's absolutely insane. Some people just have a crazy high tolerance for heat. It's truly astonishing what some in the community can do."

Above. Alex Gougeon, Blake Hambly, and Jessica Millar endure the heat as they work their way through plate after plate of increasingly hot peppers. Even for those used to eating hot foods it's a severe mental challenge. Organizers weigh out each plate of the different peppers to make sure each contestant gets an equal portion.

Something for everyone. "We have three different competitions during the day culminating with the Belt Match," says event organizer Angela Thomson. "Two—the spicy sausage competition and the pepper eating challenge—are open to anyone. Up to 10 people come up on stage for the challenge to see how far they can push themselves. There's no prize at the end. Plates with small squares of the peppers are also passed through the crowd so they can get a taste of what the challengers are going through."

However, not just anyone can enter the Belt Match. Thomson says most contestants train their stomachs, mouths, and brains for a couple weeks beforehand, prior to entering.

"But it's going to suck regardless of how much you train," Jessica Millar says. "You just kind of have to go in with the mindset that it's going to be fun."

"People who've never eaten spicy foods don't realize that they'll get cramps from all the capsaicin in your stomach," Thomson says. "It's not unusual for newbies in the sausage competition to find that it's quite a bit more intense than they thought it would be. Some years a few people went to the hospital thinking that there was something seriously wrong with them. The hospital would give them Advil or Tylenol to help them ride it out for five or six hours before the [capsaicin] cramps go away."

The aftereffects of eating such amounts of hot peppers are very different than eating a plate of spicy chicken wings, Gougeon cautions. Experienced competitors develop strategies to purge their system after the competition. He says no one warned him of the danger before his first competition, so he endured 12 hours of agony afterwards. He now keeps downing water afterwards until he brings everything back up. It still burns but it really shortens the suffering.

And the winner is. "I really thought I had a decent chance in 2024," Gougeon says. "I tried to keep my focus on eating and chewing as fast as possible to get them down as quickly as possible. But some of those peppers are really hot. I'd eaten three out of the five Madame Jeannette peppers but the clock was ticking. I did the math in my head and realized I'd still have one left when the three-minute time slot was up. So, I tapped out. Actually, all three of the guys tapped out around the same time. But Jessica just chowed them all down and was ready for more. She is an amazing competitor, so full congrats to her. She just blew us all away." ‡