Do you judge people who obsess over pumpkin spice?

This was an interesting article. I was in the test market when it was launched and don’t remember a thing about it

It just seemed that one day there were a million pumpkin flavored things

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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 Thursday in the U.S. and Canada, as it does each year when the nights start getting longer and the fall winds gather.

It’s the coffee giant’s most popular seasonal beverage, 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.

In the year ending July 29, U.S. sales of pumpkin-flavored products reached $802.5 million, according to Nielsen. That’s up 42% from the same period in 2019. There are pumpkin spice Oreos, protein drinks, craft beers, cereals and even Spam.

A search of “pumpkin spice” on Walmart’s website brings up more than 1,000 products. A thousand products that smell or taste like, well, pumpkin pie.

For better — and, some might say, for worse — the phenomenon has moved beyond coffee shops and groceries and into the larger world.

Great Wolf Lodge is featuring a Pumpkin Spice Suite at five of its resorts this fall, decked out with potpourri, pumpkin throw pillows and bottomless pumpkin spice lattes.

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 newer offerings like Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew — were up 17% in the July-September period.

And in a 2022 study of 20,000 Twitter and Instagram posts mentioning pumpkin spice, just 8% were negative, according to researchers at Montclair State University in New Jersey.

It wasn’t always this way.
Canned pumpkin and pie spices were relegated to the baking aisle when 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.” That would turn out to be prescient.

In the spring of 2003, a team gathered in a lab in Starbucks’ Seattle headquarters, bringing fall decorations to set the mood. They sipped espresso between bites of pumpkin pie, figuring out which spices most complemented the coffee. After three months, they offered taste tests; pumpkin spice beat out chocolate and caramel drinks.

Starbucks tested the Pumpkin Spice Latte in 100 stores in Washington, D.C., and Vancouver, British Columbia, that fall. The company quickly realized it had a winner and rolled it out across the United States and Canada the following fall.

And in 2015, a watershed: The company added real pumpkin to the recipe.……

https://apnews.com/article/aeac4eaecf371e77af161598f4b62949