The Curious "Cassia" of Cinnamon

So I recently discovered a little fact that I though was pretty interesting during one of the lab sessions of my Instrumental Analysis class. I thought I would share.

Apparently the spice industry has been misleading Americans for years. Cinnamon, a fairly well known spice, is actually not as abundant as we think. In fact, most of the time when you purchase cinnamon from your local grocery store it's actually a spice known as cassia. Cassia tastes just like cinnamon and it's cheaper so they just substitute to save money. Now other countries don't allow this. If you were to shop in Canada you would find both cassia and cinnamon in the spice section, but cinnamon would be a little more expensive.

What does this matter to you? It doesn't... unless you're some sort of spice purist nut. Although cinnamon has been shown to have health benefits for diabetics (I don't have a citation for this atm, I'll fix it later), the other changes are about the same. Both cinnamon and cassia have nice levels of cinnamon aldehyde and cinnamon amide (once again, I'll cite later) so they have essentially the same taste. The major difference is the presence of Eugenol, Benzyl Benzoate, and Coumarin.

Anyway, these 3 different chemicals can be seperated from the cinnamon and cassia samples by using Gas Chromatography which essentially seperates them by size and polarity. Then you can use Mass Spectroscopy to determine the weigh of each component and determine them by molecular weight.

Anyway! Some chemistry for you. Now go find real cinnamon!