Your Coffee Creamer Might Be Flammable

Coffee creamer (whether healthy or not) is one of those food items that we often take for granted. Sure, you could use half and half and sugar in your morning beverage, but why would you want to do something more time-consuming and frankly, boring, when you can have a delicious flavored drink at home simply by pouring it out of a container? One of the signature marks of adulthood is realizing just how much of a game-changer coffee creamer can be.

Also, it might burn your house down. This is not a punchline to a joke; there are actually a lot of flammable products you keep around your house (probably many of them kept closer to sources of open flame than you'd want), but coffee creamer can be one of the most dangerous. The reason why has to do with what happens if it gets loose in the air in large enough quantities (hint: the end result is very bad).

Just to be clear: We're only talking about the non-dairy powdered kind of coffee creamer here. This isn't like the many times the Cuyahoga River caught on fire in Cleveland; liquid coffee creamers are — unsurprisingly — not flammable.

The problem is that dairy-free powdered coffee creamer is in large part made of finely ground corn syrup solids. When processed, these solids turn into a substance akin to sugar (which is also highly flammable). But while classic white sugar's density means it can't simply float in the air (powdered sugar is another story), coffee creamer is light enough that particles can conceivably hang around.

When a substance like that gets into the air, it becomes what is scientifically known as "a problem," because when those particles ignite, the end result often isn't just a fire, it can be a literal explosion. Do not light an open flame inside your kitchen if there is powdered coffee creamer in the air.

It's not just coffee creamer, either; airborne powders in general can be a significant hazard. In addition to powdered sugar, flour is even worse: more explosive even than gunpowder and with 35 times the power of coal dust. There's a reason flour mill explosions are considered such a hazard.

The good news is there are ways to avoid fire and explosion hazards with aerosolized powders like these. Coffee creamer isn't going to catch on fire in a pile on your counter; its combustibility requires the right dispersion between airborne particles, along with plenty of oxygen, a confined space, and an ignition source (this is why militaries have typically made use of gunpowder rather than non-dairy creamer). If you accidentally create a cloud of a substance like this in your kitchen, pretty much all you need to do is open a window and don't set off any ignition sources (particularly something like a gas range,) until the dust has been allowed to settle or dissipate. When the powder isn't in the air anymore, it can't set off a chain reaction.