Cassia vs Ceylon: What's Actually Sold as Cinnamon in India

If you opened your masala dabba right now and pulled out the cinnamon, there's about a 90% chance that what you're holding is technically cassia, not true cinnamon. This is fine — cassia is what most Indian, Chinese and Vietnamese cooking has used for centuries, and the difference for a quick chai or biryani is small. But the two are botanically different plants with measurably different chemistry, and once you know what to look for, you'll start making slightly different choices about which one to use where.

The botanical difference

True cinnamon (the one with "Ceylon" or "sweet" or "Cinnamomum verum" on the label) is the dried inner bark of a tree native to Sri Lanka. The bark is rolled thin and tight — if you split a stick down its length, you see multiple thin layers nested inside each other, like a cigar.

Cassia (Cinnamomum cassia or aromaticum) is the bark of a related but different tree, originally from southern China, now also grown in India, Vietnam, and Indonesia. The bark is thicker and rolls into a single hard curl. If you split a cassia stick, it looks like one heavy strip of bark that just curled up.

Both have cinnamaldehyde, the compound that smells and tastes like "cinnamon." But cassia is harsher, slightly more aggressive, with a back-of-the-throat heat. Ceylon is softer, sweeter, and more floral. Side by side they're easily distinguishable; on their own you might not notice unless you've grown up cooking with one specifically.

What this means for cooking

For long-simmered savoury dishes — biryani, pulao, mughlai gravies, slow-braised meats — cassia is the right answer. It holds up to long cooking and contributes the bold, slightly bitter warm note that we associate with these dishes. Ceylon would simmer into something muted and one-dimensional.

For desserts, baked goods, mulled drinks, milk-based preparations, and anything where you want the cinnamon to taste sweet and complex — Ceylon is what you actually want. A Ceylon-spiced rice pudding tastes notably better than a cassia one; same for cinnamon rolls, apple crumble, and golden milk.

For pickles, chutneys, and quick spice tempering: either works, depending on whether you want the sharper or the sweeter profile.

The coumarin question

There's a health argument that gets repeated online about cassia. Cassia contains a compound called coumarin in modest concentrations — around 0.4–0.5% by weight. Coumarin in very large doses has been linked to liver toxicity in animal studies. The German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, which tracks these things, suggests an upper daily intake limit of around 0.1mg per kg of body weight.

For a person weighing 65kg, that limit translates to about 6.5mg of coumarin per day, which works out to roughly 1.5g of cassia. So if you're eating two teaspoons of cassia powder every single day, year after year, there's a theoretical risk. If you're using cinnamon at normal cooking quantities — a stick in a curry, a pinch in chai — the risk is essentially zero.

Ceylon contains coumarin at about a fortieth of cassia's concentration. So if you cook with cinnamon every day in serious quantities (a baker, someone making a lot of mulled wine, etc.), Ceylon is the lower-risk option. For everyone else, it's not really worth worrying about.

How to tell the difference at home

Look at the stick. If it's a thin, tightly rolled multi-layered scroll, it's Ceylon. If it's a single thick curl of bark, it's cassia.

Smell. Ceylon is floral, soft, slightly citrusy. Cassia is hot, sharp, more linear.

Snap it. Ceylon snaps cleanly with a soft, fibrous break. Cassia is harder to snap and tends to splinter.

Read the label. Anything marketed as just "cinnamon" in India is almost certainly cassia. If it says "Ceylon" or "true cinnamon" or "sweet cinnamon," it's Ceylon. The word "cassia" on the label is rare in retail because it sounds less appealing, but you'll see it on commercial-supply bulk packs.

The Meghalaya cinnamon question

What we sell under the Adviah label is a Meghalaya-grown variety — a regional cultivar with a profile closer to the sweeter, more floral Ceylon style than the harder cassia commonly sold in India. Smaller-batch, milled within months of harvest. It's the kind of cinnamon that earns the rice pudding, not just the biryani.

The full Adviah range is here. For more on why the region produces such distinctive spices, the single-origin note goes into more depth.