Pumpkin spice ‘overrated,’ some students say
Liquid coffee is the eighth-most popular pumpkin-flavored product by annual sales, behind dog food, cream and pie filling, according to a 2017 three-year trend by Nielsen Retail Measurement Services. Graphic by EMMA REITH.
This year, Starbucks started selling its pumpkin spice latte Aug. 28, the earliest official launch date in the coffee chain’s history. The drink celebrates 15 years on Starbucks’ menu this year. Even after all these years, the product has kept its popularity. Bayley McKenzie, a senior business administration major, said that the arrival of the pumpkin spice latte in stores is one of the big signs that fall has arrived. Fall is even referred to as “pumpkin spice season” by many college students, McKenzie said.
“I’ve seen people with shirts that say ‘pumpkin spice everything’ and buying everything pumpkin flavored,” McKenzie said. “People go crazy, but personally, I think it’s overrated.”
The pumpkin spice latte was created by Starbucks in 2003. After the success of the eggnog latte and peppermint mocha, Peter Dukes, former director of espresso Americas for Starbucks, was looking to create a fall-themed coffee drink. The fall-themed espresso drink was then introduced to 100 stores in Washington, D.C., and Vancouver, Canada.
“Within the first week of the market test, we knew we had a winner,” Dukes said in a 2014 Starbucks Newsroom interview.
The next fall, the pumpkin spice latte debuted in Starbucks stores across the United States. In the following 10 years, the drink was sold more 200 million times, making it “the company’s most popular seasonal beverage of all time,” according to Starbucks public relations.
The pumpkin spice latte doesn’t make sense in the Southern California setting, said Elizabeth Hymes, a senior film and television production major. Hymes is from the east coast where it’s “actually fall,” she said, and she doesn’t understand why the drink is so popular on the West Coast. When surrounded by fall foliage and cold weather, it makes sense to drink a warm, pumpkin spice-flavored coffee, Hymes said.
“The other day when it was rainy and there was actually a change in the weather, then I was craving a hot drink,” Hymes said. “Otherwise, it’s like 90 degrees, why would I get a pumpkin spice latte?”
Local coffee shops like The Aussie Bean haven’t bought into the pumpkin spice trend. Dana Hicks, a junior screen acting major and Aussie Bean barista, said that there are occasionally customers who ask about pumpkin flavored drinks, but the Australian-inspired coffee shop has never, to Hicks’ knowledge, provided seasonal drinks or flavors. Instead, the Aussie Bean focuses on all-natural coffee and ingredients, even omitting sugar unless the customer requests it.
“People come in wanting the ‘Starbucks thing,’ but that’s the opposite of what The Aussie Bean is,” Hicks said. “People will order stuff and we prepare it in the traditional Australian way, they’re expecting the Americanized version of these drinks.”
Starbucks’ sugary American versions of classic coffee drinks are sometimes too much for avid coffee drinkers to bear, Hymes said. She wished she liked pumpkin spice lattes; she loves coffee, lattes and even pumpkin-flavored things, but the PSL is just too much sugar for her to handle.
“I heavily rely on caffeine, especially in the morning,” Hymes said. “I’d rather just have straight coffee than all that sugar. If I drank the pumpkin spice latte in the morning, I’d be bouncing off the walls in my history class.”