August 22 Not a day that much of North America is known for a particularly crisp or autumnal feel. And yet it’s that day this year — the earliest release date — that Starbucks, struggling with slumping sales, will reveal. Annual run of pumpkin spice lattes on its customers.
You’d be forgiven for mistaking this tone for contempt. Since its inception in 2003, the pumpkin spice latte has become a straw man for discussions of capitalism, seasonal creep, and the meaning of “basic,” leading to widespread disdain for the otherwise innocuous drink.
For example, in 2014, at the height of pumpkin spice mania, this website described PSL as “an unusual, pungent, saccharine brown liquid, equal parts dairy and diabetes, served in paper cups and guzzled by the liter” — though apparently the pumpkin spice latte is a very Delicious food that goes well with it wearing a jacket And making snide comments about how crisp the air feels today. Yes, it has 380 calories; Yes, it will turn your coffee an unpleasant orange color; No, you shouldn’t “melt it down by the liter.”
But the disdain for PSL and other items in the seasonal pumpkin spice variety isn’t often about taste. After all, there are plenty of other flavors we should all be raving about. (There is one Shops that serve in Scotland Mayonnaise ice creamPeople!) Too often, it’s about sexism, class anxiety, and our collective skepticism of clever marketing. After all, PSL is doing something right: It’s Starbucks’ most popular seasonal drink, by far 424 million sold worldwide. In 2019, the chain leaned further with the introduction of Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew, finally admitting to the world that late August is still iced coffee weather.
History of PSL
Pumpkin spice lattes were almost non-existent. as the former Starbucks veteran Tim Kern told Quartz“Many of us thought it was a drink dominated by flavors other than coffee that doesn’t put Starbucks coffee in the best light.”
Fortunately for Starbucks, the company’s Tim Kearns was eventually overruled, because within a decade of its launch in 2003, PSL became its best-selling drink, with over 200 million sold. In 2015, Forbes estimated PSL’s revenue is around $100 million in a single season.
2015 was also the year Starbucks changed its decade-old formula Includes actual pumpkins For the first time, not just caramel color and pumpkin pie spices (such as cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and cloves). All in all, it tasted pretty much the same, only, According to its inventor, “Cleaner.”
At that time, PSL was not just a cash cow; It was a cultural phenomenon. In part, that’s thanks to its marketing — there’s nothing inherently seasonal about the spices that go into pumpkin pie, but Starbucks is able to convince us that the drink should only be consumed during the fall months, driving demand.
But there is another reason why PSL has exploded so much in the last decade. Culinary food trends analyst Suzy Badarako told Vox in 2014, “Pumpkin was recognized as part of the comfort food trend during the recession in 2008,” due to its association with Thanksgiving and the holidays. In tough times, we are Foods that bring back happy memories are more likely to be craved.
Of course, though, the reason we all started talking about PSL was their popularity on social media. It’s not that they’re inherently photogenic—a Starbucks cup is a Starbucks cup no matter what’s inside it, and PSL doesn’t get its own specially designed cup the way holiday drinks do.
Because when you add a PSL to a photo of, say, a selfie featuring your new fall boots standing on top of crunchy leaves or a festive bold lip color, it adds to the fall aesthetic. It’s no coincidence that Instagram — the epicenter of the cute fall table — blew up in the early 2010s, around the same time it became cool to claim you hated pumpkin spice.
But maybe that’s not the whole story.
The response is our anxiety surrounding capitalism
Pumpkin spice lattes—which for many conjure up the aroma and imagery of Thanksgiving—released year after year in increasingly hot weather are often considered an ominous harbinger of the sinister forces of the seasonal creep. “This is agrarian revisionism!” Some argue, citing the fact that pumpkins aren’t actually in season until fall.
A viral John Oliver clip from 2014 declared that “a bottle of pumpkin-flavored science sits behind the counter at Starbucks, never aging like Ryan Seacrest”:
Perhaps in response to such criticism, in 2019 Starbucks released its second pumpkin spice drink since the introduction of PSL, but this time, it’s cold. Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew is a vanilla cold brew with pumpkin cold foam topped with pumpkin spice. CNBC explains Like “less sweet and has a stronger coffee flavor than a pumpkin spice latte.”
Also largely responsible for PSL’s success is pumpkin spice-flavored everything else, including Cream cheese, dog treats, Kahlua, and a particularly awkward seasonal crossover, Peeps.. Been there too Air freshener, DeodorantEven four people (okay, That one ends up being a joke), resulting in the expected amount of hand-wringing about a food trend “gone too far.” (Indeed, in 2010, spice brand McCormick predicted that pumpkin spice would be a popular flavor during the holiday season, which likely fueled the rush.)
When a food trend is as in-your-face as pumpkin spice — there ever has been one Trader Joe’s in October? — it makes us wonder how the free market was originally designed to create such phenomena. If a product like pumpkin spice sells, it is natural under capitalism for other companies to try to replicate that success. But it’s uncomfortable when we see it happening on such an exaggerated scale.
In fact, the response is about our contempt for women
Well, maybe, but what the reaction to pumpkin spice is really about is a dismissal of our tendencies that are coded as feminine. As Jaya Saxena wrote in Taste last fall, in a piece titled “Women don’t waste food,” “When men enjoy something, they improve it. But when women enjoy something, they spoil it.”
He talks about the craze for “girly” foods like acai bowls, rose and pumpkin spice vs. “manly” foods like barbecue, flamin’ hot Cheetos, and IPAs:
When these foods are thrown out, we judge women for falling for the marketing or trying to jump on the bandwagon, and we assume that they like the same things as other women, they don’t have a mind of their own. And on top of that, women are asked to reckon, consciously or unconsciously, with the perceived psycho-sexual symbolism attached to seemingly innocuous foods.
Also, “masculine” foods are almost never punished for having them “Basic,” the ever-present term used to describe someone with average, predictable tastes usually reserved for women.
In the most stereotypical (and now perhaps outdated) terms, a “basic beach” wears a north face, leggings and Uggs, and Absolutely love hashtag-pslShe has been characterized as a woman with “a girlish interest in the changing of the seasons and a sophisticated penchant for sweets”. The cut was mentioned back in 2014.
There are often classicist influences, too. In a BuzzFeed piece about “fundamentals” and class anxiety, By Anne Helen Peterson:
The unique taste – and the ability to avoid the basics – is a privilege. Location (usually urban), education (exposure to other cultures and locales) and parents (who introduce and enhance other tastes). To summarize the seminal work of theorist Pierre Bourdieu: We do not so much choose our tastes as determine the micro-specifics of our class. Consuming and performing online in a fundamental way is thus a reflection of a highly American, capitalist upbringing. Basically because girls love their stuffAlmost every part of the American commercial mediaTold them that they should.
Basically, hating pumpkin spice lattes is our way of distinguishing others who drink them, and in the process branding ourselves as decidedly non-fundamental.
Of course, the concept of “basic” doesn’t mean the same way black people have been using it for decades, which, Kara Brown explains JezebelRoughly just translates to “I think the things you like are lame and I really don’t like you.”
“Rihanna could be the official spokesperson for Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte and no one would think she’s original,” he wrote. “You know why? Because Rihanna does what she wants and what she thinks is cool and doesn’t give a damn about anyone else.”
Or maybe no one cares anymore
Even if Rihanna suddenly became the PSL’s official spokesperson, chances are, quite frankly, no one really cares that much anymore. While we seem to have reached peak “pumpkin spice hot take” in 2014, searches for “pumpkin spice latte” peaked in 2015.
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Perhaps it’s because we all suffer from seasonal drink fatigue in general. Starbucks is constantly coming up with random gimmicky drinks, from the Unicorn Frappuccino to the so-called “secret menu.”
Nor are we seeing the same rage for arguably replacing pumpkin spice as the de facto flavor of fall. In 2017, Starbucks and Dunkin’ Donuts both released maple pecan lattes. And According to restaurant menu information Since that year, “references to maple as an alcoholic beverage flavor on menus have increased 86 percent this year compared to last year. … Pumpkin, on the other hand, notes 20 percent less.” Yet no one complains about how silly maple syrup is.
And these days, tweets about PSL are “Screw you and let me enjoy my crappy drink in peace, because everything is horrible.”
People have expressed fatigue about “really-ing” what pumpkin spice is, as if someone really Want to talk about it.
Even the anti-Pumpkin Spice brigade has ironic tweets poking fun at the automatism of the feminist response:
However, all of this is to say that perhaps by now pumpkin spice has finally returned to mean an autumnal blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and cloves and nothing more: not original, not everything wrong with capitalism and not gross. Because it is not! It is delicious.
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Update, August 22, 2024, 10:20 am ET: This story was originally published in 2018 and has been updated multiple times, most recently with a PSL return date of 2024.
