Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte: 20 years of the seasonal autumn coffee drink people love, and sometimes hate
- As autumn approaches, Seattle-based coffee giant Starbucks unleashes its most popular seasonal drink, the Pumpkin Spice Latte
- Starbucks’ decision to sell it only in autumn was a stroke of marketing genius, exploiting the strong link between smell, memory and nostalgia
The seasonal drink that made pumpkin spice a star is turning 20. And unlike the autumn days it celebrates, there seems to be no chill in customer demand.
Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte goes on sale, as it does each year, near the end of August when the nights start getting longer and autumn begins.
It’s the coffee giant’s most popular seasonal drink, with hundreds of millions sold since its launch in 2003. And it has produced a huge – and growing – industry of imitators flecked with cinnamon, nutmeg and clove.
For better – and, some might say, for worse – the phenomenon has moved beyond coffee shops and groceries and into the larger world.
It’s part of getting into the season. It’s almost like a ritual, even if you’re just waiting in the drive-through.
It has also spawned a vocal group of detractors – and become an easy target for parodies. Comedian John Oliver once called Pumpkin Spice Lattes “the coffee that tastes like a candle”.
There’s a Facebook group called “I Hate Pumpkin Spice” and T-shirts with slogans like “Ain’t no pumpkin spice in my mug”.
The haters, though, appear to be in the minority.
Last year, Starbucks said sales of its pumpkin spice drinks – including Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew – were up 17 per cent in the July-September period. And in a 2022 study of 20,000 Twitter and Instagram posts mentioning pumpkin spice, just 8 per cent were negative, according to researchers at Montclair State University in the US state of New Jersey.
It wasn’t always this way.
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Starbucks began experimenting with an autumn drink that would replicate the success of the Peppermint Mocha, which took the winter holidays by storm in 2002. Customer surveys suggested chocolate or caramel drinks, but Starbucks noticed that pumpkin scored high for “uniqueness”.
In the spring of 2003, a team gathered in a lab in Starbucks’ Seattle headquarters, bringing autumn decorations to set the mood. They sipped espresso between bites of pumpkin pie, figuring out which spices best complemented the coffee.
After three months, they offered taste tests, and pumpkin spice beat chocolate and caramel drinks.
The only thing I do not like about autumn is seeing everyone obsess over PSLs. Makes me want to shut off social media for a month.
Starbucks tested the Pumpkin Spice Latte in 100 outlets in Washington DC and Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada that autumn. The company quickly realised it had a winner and rolled it out across the US and Canada the following autumn.
Then, in 2015, the company added real pumpkin to the recipe.
These days, Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latte has its own handle on X – formerly known as Twitter – with 82,000 followers, and a Facebook fan group called the Leaf Rakers Society with 43,000 members.
And it has fans, like Jon McBrine, who drinks black iced coffee for most of the year but eagerly awaits the latte’s return each autumn.
“I love the flavour and I love the subculture that has evolved from this huge marketing campaign,” says McBrine, a graphic designer and aspiring author who lives in Texas in the Dallas area.
It’s hot until the end of October where he lives, so McBrine typically orders his with ice. But at least once a year, he gets a hot latte, savouring memories of the autumns of his childhood in the state of Delaware.
“It’s part of getting into the season,” he says. “It’s almost like a ritual, even if you’re just waiting in the drive-through.”
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Jason Fischer, an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, in the state of Maryland, who studies human perception through sight, sound and smell, says odour and flavour have a more direct route than other senses to the area of the brain that processes memories.
That’s because of evolution; humans needed to remember which foods were safe to eat.
Still, he said, people’s sense of smell can be malleable. In experiments, subjects have taken a sniff of something and described it in many different ways. But when they’re shown a label for that smell – say, “pumpkin spice” – their perceptions shift and their descriptions become more similar.
“Odours and sights are associated with a certain kind of experience. And marketing taps into that, and it’s a cue for a product.”
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Pumpkin spice doesn’t conjure happy memories for everyone. Kari-Jane Roze, who lives in Fredericton, Canada, loves many things about autumn, including back-to-school routines, changing leaves and hockey.
But she’s not a fan of pumpkin pie or pumpkin bread – and she has a particular dislike for pumpkin spice lattes.
“The artificial flavour is disgusting,” says Roze, who works at New Brunswick Community College. “The only thing I do not like about autumn is seeing everyone obsess over PSLs. Makes me want to shut off social media for a month.”
She won’t have to deal with those “PSLs” for long. The limited-time nature of the product is another thing that keeps customers hooked, marketing experts say.
Last year, Starbucks switched to holiday-themed drinks such as the Peppermint Mocha and Caramel Brulée Latte on November 3. And then, for devoted fans, the wait begins anew.
