Your cinnamon is almost certainly cassia

The Sunday Teardown · Pantry

The bottle says ground cinnamon, and the bark inside it almost certainly came from a different tree than the one that gave the spice its name. True cinnamon grows mostly in Sri Lanka and reaches American shelves labeled Ceylon. What fills nearly every other jar is cassia, most often Cinnamomum burmannii from Indonesia, and federal labeling rules allow both to be sold under the same word.

American baking was built around that substitution long before anyone thought to question it, so the species is where this story starts rather than where it ends. The better questions are what a plant does to raw bark before it reaches the jar, and which of the two safety concerns attached to cinnamon deserves your attention, since only one of them has turned up in food made for children.

One word covers at least 4 trees. True cinnamon is Cinnamomum verum, grown mostly in Sri Lanka and sold in the United States as Ceylon. Nearly everything else in an American pantry is cassia, which is a group of species rather than a single plant. Cinnamomum burmannii from Indonesia, traded as korintje, is the workhorse of the US supply. Cinnamomum cassia comes from China, and Cinnamomum loureiroi from Vietnam is the one sold on American shelves as Saigon cinnamon.

Nothing requires the bottle to say which. Cinnamon has no federal standard of identity of the kind that governs parmesan or cream cheese. Spices fall under the general labeling rules, FDA allows a spice to be declared by its common name, and the common name for every one of these species is cinnamon. A bottle labeled ground cinnamon is accurate whether it holds verum from Sri Lanka or burmannii from Sumatra. The premium products volunteer their species because naming it earns money, Saigon for its aroma and Ceylon for its scarcity, and the plain bottle stays silent because it has nothing to gain by speaking.

The difference in flavor is real, and cassia wins where Americans bake. Cassia is bolder and hotter, with a single strong note that carries through sugar and butter, which is exactly what a cinnamon roll asks of it. Ceylon is lighter and more floral, and in a snickerdoodle it largely disappears. The industry did not so much substitute cassia for cinnamon as build American baking around it.

The last column is the one most people have heard about in some form, because coumarin, a compound present in cassia and nearly absent from Ceylon, powers most of what is written about cinnamon online. The column also undoes an assumption. Saigon cinnamon, sold in small bottles at gourmet prices as the refined choice, sits among the highest in coumarin of anything in the aisle.

So the plain bottle holds cassia and does not have to say so, and the premium choice is not the cautious one. What the label cannot show is what happened to the bark between the tree and the jar, including a step that exists because of what dried spices tend to carry in from the field, and it cannot tell you which cinnamon risk is real.

Below the line for paid subscribers. I follow the bark from the bale to the bottle, including the steam treatment that never appears on a label and the heavy-metal testing a careful brand runs on every incoming lot. I explain how Ceylon is peeled by hand while cassia is stripped from trees in Sumatra, why ground cinnamon goes flat within months, and what coumarin looks like in numbers against the European limit. I then explain why lead is the cinnamon risk worth watching, and put 6 bottles and bags side by side at their price per ounce. The cost sheet is there too, and its most surprising line is the bottle.