How Is Cinnamon Made? Peeled by Hand, Not Stolen From Birds

It takes dead oxen to collect cinnamon, or so Herodotus was told in the fifth century BCE. Large birds carry “those dried sticks which we have learnt from the Phenicians to call cinnamon” to nests of clay on cliffs “which man can find no means of scaling,” so the Arabians cut up oxen, asses and other pack animals that have died into “pieces as large as convenient” and leave them near the nests. The birds carry the meat up, the nests give way under the weight, and the men gather the cinnamon from the ground.

The passage, in book three of his Histories, picks up the story with the sticks already dried. The Arabians “are not able to tell” where cinnamon grows, Herodotus concedes, except for “a probable account” placing it where Dionysos was brought up.

How is cinnamon made?

Cinnamon is made by peeling bark off Cinnamomum trees, usually just the inner layer, and drying it until it curls into quills. Workers cut shoots from coppiced bushes or strip bark from older cassia trunks. Whole quills become cinnamon sticks, and broken pieces are ground into powder. Almost all of it comes from China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

Pliny called the birds a pricing trick

Pliny the Elder, the Roman encyclopedist who also asked why people salute a sneeze, took up Herodotus’s stories about five centuries later. Herodotus had a cassia legend too: gatherers wrapped in cowhide cut the spice from a shallow pool guarded by “winged beasts nearly resembling bats.”

In book 12 of his Natural History, Pliny dismissed both stories: “All these tales, however, have been evidently invented for the purpose of enhancing the prices of these commodities.” The price, he added, “was formerly as much as a thousand denarii per pound.” Erik the Red, by the oldest surviving account, named Greenland on the same principle: people would be “more eager to go there because the land had a good name.”

Pliny then got the answer wrong himself, placing cinnamon “in the country of the Aethiopians,” though the same work correctly notes that the biggest tides come not exactly at the full or new moon but after them. Two books earlier, in his volume on birds, he had told the nest story straight: the Arabian cinnamolgus “builds its nest with sprigs of cinnamon; and the natives knock them down with arrows loaded with lead, in order to sell them.”

In the same chapter that calls the bird stories a price-raising invention, Pliny says the Aethiopians must ask a god’s permission to gather cinnamon, offering “the entrails of forty-four oxen, goats, and rams.”

Phoenician flasks held cinnamon 3,000 years ago

Both men were late to the trade. A 2015 review in Radiocarbon by Ayelet Gilboa and Dvory Namdar sums up residue analyses of small Phoenician clay flasks from the 11th to late 10th century BCE. Several had held cinnamon, “which in this period could only have originated in South/Southeast Asia.”

The word took the same route: Etymonline traces Greek kinnamomon to a Phoenician word akin to Hebrew qinnamon.

Sri Lankan peelers loosen the bark with a brass rod

Until Dutch experimental plantings in Colombo between 1765 and 1785, Sri Lankan cinnamon was harvested from the wild, says a history published by the country’s Department of Cinnamon Development. Cultivated trees are coppiced, cut back to the ground to force new shoots, so a species that can reach 50 feet stays a shrub of about 6 to 8 feet, according to the University of Illinois Extension. PROSEA, a Southeast Asian plant reference, reported that Indonesian cassia was still harvested mainly by felling whole trees.

For Ceylon cinnamon, the department’s post-harvest guide puts the first harvest two to three years after planting. Each cut is timed for when the rainy season’s new leaves have turned green and the bark “peels more easily,” and a well-managed plantation can be cut two to three times a year. Sesame growers work to a harsher clock, since ripe sesame pods split open by themselves and spill the seed. Pineapple growers on Hawaii’s plantations around 1990 had a faster one, taking a first crop about 18 months after planting.

The brown outer bark is scraped off first. Each stem is then rubbed with a brass rod “until the juice oozes out and loosens the bark from the wood,” and a small knife lifts the inner bark away in sheaths that curl as they dry in the shade.

Peelers stack the sheets and fill them with small pieces until the roll is 42 inches long, then dry the quills for four to seven days, until moisture falls to 14 percent or below. The thinnest of about 13 grades, Alba, is 6 millimetres across, and 45 of those quills weigh a kilogram. Capers are sized in millimetres too: Italy grades them from 7 to 16, and the smallest buds are worth the most.

Where does cinnamon come from?

Cinnamon comes from four major species of Cinnamomum, all native to Asia. Ceylon cinnamon grows in Sri Lanka and southern India, and the three cassia species grow in southern China, Vietnam and Indonesia.

Sold as	Species	Native to	Named in US regulations as
Ceylon cinnamon	C. verum	Sri Lanka, southern India	Cinnamon, Ceylon
Chinese cassia	C. cassia	Southern China	Cassia, Chinese and Cinnamon, Chinese
Saigon cinnamon	C. loureiroi	Vietnam	Cassia, Saigon and Cinnamon, Saigon
Indonesian cassia	C. burmanni	Southern China to Indonesia	Cassia, Padang or Batavia

A 2014 study cited by the USDA’s GRIN database calls these “the four major species of cinnamons.” Ranges are from GRIN; names are from 21 CFR 182.10, which uses the older names C. zeylanicum and C. loureirii.

FAO’s figures for 2024 put China first, with about 94,200 of the world’s 244,800 tonnes, though the China and Vietnam numbers are FAO estimates rather than official reports. China, Vietnam, Indonesia and Sri Lanka together grew more than 98 percent of the total.

The fake-cinnamon claim gets cassia wrong

The modern myth says cassia is fake cinnamon and only Ceylon is real. Calling Ceylon “true” cinnamon is a naming habit, common in much of the world according to Illinois Extension, but cassia is the bark of a Cinnamomum tree too. The federal list of spices generally recognized as safe names Cinnamomum cassia twice, as “Cassia, Chinese” and as “Cinnamon, Chinese.”

Illinois Extension does describe a real difference in the jar: Ceylon quills “composed of several thin layers” against cassia’s “thick, hard quills” and “a bold, intense flavor.” If the Ceylon version sounds unfamiliar, it adds, that is probably because most cinnamon sold in the United States is cassia.

Ground cinnamon is bark, not sawdust

The claim that cinnamon is basically sawdust mixes up the bark and the wood. Sri Lanka’s department defines ground cinnamon as dried, ground inner bark, and it warns that stems left too long between harvests can end up with “a higher wood percentage” but not necessarily much more bark, which can make top grades such as Alba harder to produce.

Pliny drew the same line: the thin upper parts of the shoot made the best cinnamon, he wrote, “there being the greatest proportion of bark there,” while the wood, xylocinnamum, “is held in no esteem at all.”

Bark peeled off a bush would have had a going rate. Sticks that had to be tricked out of a nest on a cliff face with a dead ox could cost whatever the seller said. Strictly FYI.