Pumpkin spice lattes — and the backlash, and the backlash to the backlash — Vox

RESOLVING THE LEDGER

Pumpkin spice lattes — and the backlash, and the backlash to the backlash — Vox | AIPROPX

An anthropomorphized Pumpkin Spice Latte with a spooky black cat. | @TheRealPSL /Twitter

Editor’s note, August 25, 10:15 am ET: This article was originally published in 2018 and has been updated for the start of the new PSL season.

August 25 is not a day that is particularly known for feeling especially crisp or autumnal in most parts of North America. And yet it’s the day this year — the earliest release date ever — that Starbucks, contending with a slowdown in sales, will unleash its annual run of pumpkin spice lattes upon its customers.

You’d be forgiven for mistaking this tone for one of disdain. Since its inception in 2003, the pumpkin spice latte has become something of a straw man for discussions about capitalism, seasonal creep, and the meaning of “basic,” resulting in widespread hatred for an otherwise innocuous beverage.

For example, back in 2014, at the height of pumpkin spice mania, this very website described the PSL as “an unctuous, pungent, saccharine brown liquid, equal parts dairy and diabetes, served in paper cups and guzzled down by the liter” — even though clearly the pumpkin spice latte is a highly delicious treat that pairs well with wearing vests and making dorky comments about how crisp the air feels today. Yes, it contains 380 calories; yes, it will make your coffee a rather unappetizing orange color; no, you should not “guzzle it down by the liter.”

But contempt for the PSL and other items of the seasonal pumpkin spice variety is often not really about the flavor itself. After all, there are plenty of other flavors we should all be way more furious about. (There is a shop in Scotland that serves mayonnaise ice cream , people!) Too frequently, it’s about sexism, class anxiety, and our collective skepticism of savvy marketing. After all, the PSL is doing something right: It’s Starbucks’ most popular seasonal beverage, with about 424 million sold worldwide . In 2019, the chain leaned in further with the introduction of the Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew, finally admitting to the world that late August is still iced coffee weather.

The history of the PSL

The pumpkin spice latte almost didn’t exist. As former Starbucks veteran Tim Kern told Quartz , “A number of us thought it was a beverage so dominated by a flavor other than coffee that it didn’t put Starbucks’ coffee in the best light.”

Fortunately for Starbucks, the Tim Kerns of the company were ultimately overruled, because within a decade of its launch in 2003, the PSL became its top-selling drink, with more than 200 million of them sold. In 2015, Forbes estimated the PSL brought in around $100 million in revenue over a single season.

2015 was also the year that Starbucks changed its decade-old formula to include actual pumpkin for the first time, rather than simply caramel coloring and pumpkin pie spices (like cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, and cloves). By all accounts, it tasted pretty much the same, just, according to its inventor, “cleaner.”

At that point, the PSL wasn’t just a cash cow — it was a cultural phenomenon. In part, that’s thanks to its marketing: There is nothing inherently seasonal about the spices that go in pumpkin pie, but Starbucks is able to convince us that the drink should only be consumed during the fall months, thereby increasing demand.

But there’s another reason the PSL exploded so much over the past decade. Culinary food trend analyst Suzy Badaracco told Vox in 2014 , “Pumpkin became 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’re more likely to crave foods that bring back happy memories .

Surely, though, the reason we all began talking about PSLs to begin with was their prevalence on social media. It’s not that they’re inherently photogenic — a Starbucks cup is a Starbucks cup regardless of what’s inside it, and the PSL doesn’t get its own specially designed cup the way the holiday drinks do.

It’s because when you add a PSL to a photo of, say, your new fall boots standing atop crunchy-looking leaves or a selfie featuring a festive dark lip color, it adds to the autumnal aesthetic. It’s not a coincidence that Instagram — the epicenter of cutesy fall tableaus — happened to blow up in the early 2010s, which is the same time it became cool to claim you despised pumpkin spice.

But maybe that’s not the whole story.

The backlash is about our anxieties around capitalism

The fact that the pumpkin spice latte — which, to many, conjures the scents and imagery of Thanksgiving — is released in increasingly hot weather year after year is often touted as an ominous harbinger of the evil forces of seasonal creep. “ It’s agricultural revisionism! ” argue some, citing the fact that pumpkins aren’t actually in season until autumn proper.

A viral John Oliver clip from 2014 declares as much, noting that “that bottle of pumpkin-flavored science goo sits behind the counter of Starbucks, never aging, like Ryan Seacrest”:

Perhaps in response to such criticism, in 2019 Starbucks released its second pumpkin spice beverage since the PSL’s introduction, but this time, it’s cold. The Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew is a vanilla cold brew with pumpkin cold foam and topped with pumpkin spice, which CNBC describes as “less sweet and has a stronger coffee taste than a pumpkin spice latte.”

The success of the PSL is also largely responsible for the barrage of pumpkin spice-flavored everything else, including cream cheese, dog treats, Kahlua, and an especially wacky seasonal crossover, Peeps . There have also been air fresheners , deodorant , even Four Loko (okay, that one ended up being a joke ), resulting in the expected amount of hand-wringing about a food trend “gone too far.” (Indeed, back in 2010, the spice brand McCormick forecast that pumpkin spice would be a popular flavor for the holiday season, which in turn likely exacerbated the rush.)

When a food trend is as in-your-face as pumpk...