Pumpkin Spice Latte

The Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte is a coffee drink made with a mix of traditional fall spice flavors (cinnamon, nutmeg, and clove), steamed milk, and espresso and is topped with whipped cream and pumpkin pie spice. The drink is offered by Starbucks on a seasonal basis, usually being introduced on the first of September—though in 2014 the drink was introduced earlier on August 25—and usually, depending on the store, will end sometime around the end of December. Starbucks started developing the Pumpkin Spice Latte in January 2003 after the company noticed the success of other winter seasonal drinks such as the Peppermint Mocha and Eggnog Latte and wanted to expand their seasonal reach into the fall. According to Peter Dukes, Starbucks' director of espresso Americas, developers went through a large brainstorming process in which they came up with ten products to test with consumers. The overall response from the ten experimental beverages came back with the Pumpkin Spice Latte somewhere in the middle of the spectrum behind ideas including chocolate and caramel flavors. However, as Peter Dukes notes, "developers realized there was something special around the pumpkin flavor, especially since there wasn't anything around pumpkin at the time". The company started experimenting with many different combinations and ratios of pumpkin to spice, ultimately deciding on a recipe with more spice in it. In fall of 2003, the final recipe was tested in Vancouver and Washington, D.C.. Sales of the drink exceeded all expectations—"we couldn't keep up initially" explained Dukes, "we had to expedite inventory to the stores [at the time 7,225—now nearly 19,000]." This immediate success called for a national debut of the flavor, which entered all American Starbucks stores the following year. Now, the company and consumers recognize the Pumpkin Spice Latte as Starbucks' most popular seasonal beverage with more than 200 million sold since it was introduced in 2003. Many people have voiced concerns regarding the ingredients used to make the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte. Perhaps most vocal about their concerns is a blogger by the name of Vani Hari, or "Food Babe" whose article "You'll Never Guess What's in a Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte (Hint: You Won't Be Happy)" got more than 13 million Facebook and Twitter shares in a matter of days. The most predominate concerns mentioned in the article include the use of Caramel Color Class IV, scientifically known as 4-MEI, which Hari claims is a cancer-causing agent. The FDA said, however, that the ingredients are nothing to worry about, though continues to look into it. Others have raised concerns over the fact that the drink does not contain any actual pumpkin, a point which Kantha Shelke, a food scientist with a background in organic chemistry and spokesperson for the Institute of Food Technologists, would say is for the best. "It's supposed to taste like the spicy components of homemade pumpkin pie, not actual pumpkin" explains Shelke. Kantha Shelke does, however, draw attention to one other heath concern surrounding the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte—the sugar content. "One pump of pumpkin sauce contains 8 grams of sugar, Starbucks says—in the form of both sugar and high fructose corn syrup—so a grande Pumpkin Spice Latte, with three pumps of syrup, had 24 grams of sugar just from spice flavoring, and 49 grams total."