Where’s the Pumpkin? Pumpkin Spice and the Art of Selling a Feeling
Every year, somewhere around the last week of August, while it’s still full-on summer in Georgia and nobody in their right mind is thinking about sweaters, pumpkin spice shows up. This year Starbucks brought the Pumpkin Spice Latte back on August 25, a day earlier than last year, and before you knew it the flavor was in the creamer, the candles, the beer and (I’m not making this up) the trash bags.
And look, I’ll say this up front so nobody gets the wrong idea. I will not turn down a PSL if one is offered. If that’s basic, then I’m as basic as it gets. (That’s a homemade latte in my favorite mug in the photo, and we’ll get to that.)
So this isn’t a post about how pumpkin spice is beneath us. It’s a post about how pumpkin spice got sold to us, because once you pull on that thread, the story turns out to be a lot weirder and a lot more interesting than a coffee drink.
Let’s start with the name, because the name is where the whole trick lives.
Pumpkin spice was never pumpkin. It’s pumpkin pie spice, the warm spices you put with the pumpkin: cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, cloves, maybe some allspice. Home cooks were mixing their own for well over a century before anybody thought to sell it in a jar. Amelia Simmons put a “pompkin” pie seasoned with allspice and ginger in American Cookery back in 1796, the first cookbook written by an American and published in the United States.
Then in the early 1930s a spice company called Thompson & Taylor started selling a premixed “Pumpkin Pie Spice,” and McCormick followed with its own blend in 1934, just a few years after canned pumpkin showed up on grocery shelves. The pitch was convenience (why buy five jars when one does the job?), and it caught on fast.
Here’s the part I love. Around Thanksgiving the newspapers were packed with ads for all these competing pie spices, and to save space, the ads sometimes shortened “pumpkin pie spice” to “pumpkin spice.” And that’s the whole origin of the name. It’d make a better villain story if some marketing genius in a corner office had dropped the word “pie” on purpose, but it was really just an ad that needed to fit on the page.
What that missing word did afterward is a different story. “Pumpkin pie spice” tells you exactly what it is, the spice for the pie. “Pumpkin spice” sounds like pumpkin and spice, like there’s pumpkin in there somewhere. Nobody had to lie about it. We filled in the pumpkin ourselves.
Which brings us to 2003, when Starbucks was hunting for its next seasonal hit after the Peppermint Mocha. The team tested close to a dozen pumpkin drinks, some of them made with actual pumpkin, and the tasters liked the ones with just the pie spices best. So the Pumpkin Spice Latte launched with no pumpkin in it at all, and it stayed that way for twelve whole years. Starbucks didn’t add real pumpkin puree until August 2015, after enough customers asked the obvious question.
Where’s the pumpkin?
Once you start asking that one, it’s hard to stop, because even the can in your pantry is complicated. Libby’s sells most of the canned pumpkin in this country (somewhere around 85 to 90 percent, depending on who’s counting), and it isn’t made from the round orange jack-o’-lantern kind. It’s a variety called Dickinson, a tan, oblong thing in the same species as butternut squash. The FDA has been fine with golden-fleshed squash going into a can labeled pumpkin since 1938. To be fair to Libby’s, there’s no real botanical line between a pumpkin and a squash, Dickinson really is sold as a pumpkin, and it makes a far better pie than a stringy, watery jack-o’-lantern ever would. But the pumpkin on the label and the pumpkin in your head aren’t the same pumpkin. Follow it all the way down and the pumpkin just keeps getting further away.
Okay, so if we’re not buying pumpkin, what are we buying?
A feeling. That’s the real product, and it’s a brilliant one. Pumpkin spice sells sweaters and falling leaves and football and that first cool morning when you can finally open the windows, and it sells all of that to us in August, when Georgia is still very much a sauna.
The scarcity is the strategy. Smithsonian pointed out that the latte only being around in the fall is a deliberate part of the marketing, and that the launch date keeps creeping earlier. Starbucks has rolled out its fall lineup on the last Tuesday of August most years since 2018. If you could get a PSL in March, nobody would line up for one in August. Taking it away is exactly what makes us want it back.
And it worked so well that everybody copied it. Dunkin’ had pumpkin drinks by 2007, and these days there’s a whole pumpkin spice economy out there. None of that playbook is unique to pumpkin spice, either. It’s the limited-edition flavor, the seasonal packaging and the “back by popular demand” you see all over the grocery store. Once you notice it on the PSL, you start noticing it everywhere.
Friday was World Food Day, and I’ve been chewing on what all of this has to do with that. I think it’s this: knowing what’s actually in our food, where it came from and who it came from is a small kind of power. Not the kind that makes you better than anybody else in the coffee line. The kind that means you get to choose.
And the “where it came from” part of pumpkin spice goes a long way past Seattle. For centuries, nutmeg grew in exactly one place on earth, the Banda Islands in what’s now Indonesia, and the Bandanese grew it and traded it for generations. In 1621 the Dutch East India Company, under Jan Pieterszoon Coen, decided it wanted the nutmeg trade all to itself and took the islands by force. Of somewhere around 15,000 people living there, only about a thousand were left, most of them put to forced labor on what became Dutch nutmeg plantations, and the Company held that monopoly for close to two hundred years.
I’m not telling y’all that so you’ll feel bad about your latte. I’m telling you because that little brown seed you grate over your eggnog has a history, and the people who grew it first belong in the story we tell about it. Credit where it’s due, every time.
Which brings me back to my own kitchen, and to the most freeing thing about all of this, which is how simple the real thing is. Strip away the cup and the merch and the launch date, and pumpkin spice is a handful of spices, some sugar and some water.
I’ve made my own pumpkin spice syrup at least a half dozen times now, and it goes in our weekend lattes. Here’s the math, because I couldn’t help myself. A grande PSL at Starbies, with two shots and three pumps of syrup, is $7.45, or $8.03 once Georgia gets its cut. At home, I pull two shots from Peach Coffee Roasters beans (they’re just up the street from me, and I love them) at $19 for a 10-ounce bag. I buy the small bag so it stays fresh, and yes, that’s expensive, but we only do lattes on the weekends, so it’s worth it. Add about 12 ounces of steamed Amul milk from Costco and a couple of tablespoons of syrup, and that comes out to roughly $1.85 a latte. The whole batch of syrup costs about a dollar and a quarter to make. Is it a Starbucks latte? No. Do I know every single thing that’s in it? Yes, and I picked every one of them.
So drink the PSL if you love it. I’m right there in line with you. Just know it’s pie spice, maybe make a jar at home sometime, and remember that the nutmeg came from somewhere.
What about y’all? PSL people, pumpkin spice skeptics, or somewhere in between? Let me know in the comments.
Kara’s Pumpkin Spice Syrup
Ingredients
- 1 cup dark brown sugar lightly packed
- 1 cup water
- 2 heaping Tbsp canned pumpkin plain puree, not pie filling
- 1½ tsp ground cinnamon
- ½ tsp ground ginger
- ¼ tsp nutmeg ground or freshly grated
- ⅛ tsp ground cloves
- ½ tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt not table salt; see Notes
Instructions
- Put everything in a small saucepan over medium heat and stir until the sugar dissolves.1 cup dark brown sugar, 1 cup water, 2 heaping Tbsp canned pumpkin, 1½ tsp ground cinnamon, ½ tsp ground ginger, ¼ tsp nutmeg, ⅛ tsp ground cloves, ½ tsp Diamond Crystal kosher salt
- Simmer gently for about 10 minutes, until everything’s combined.
- Strain through a fine-mesh sieve to catch the pumpkin and the spice grit, then chill. Shake before using.
Notes
- Use plain canned pumpkin, not pumpkin pie filling. Pie filling is already sweetened and spiced.
- Don’t skip the fine-mesh sieve. Ground spices and pumpkin will leave sludge in the bottom of your cup otherwise.
- That’s 1/2 teaspoon of Diamond Crystal kosher salt, NOT regular iodized table salt. Table salt is much saltier by volume, so if that’s all you’ve got, cut it way back.
- It keeps about a month in the fridge. Shake it before every use, because the spices settle to the bottom.
- How much goes in a latte? A couple of tablespoons, or measure with your heart. Some days I want a sweeter drink and some days I want just a hint.
P.S. I was born a Simmons, so of course I went looking. I’d love to tell you Amelia was some great-great-something aunt, but nobody knows much of anything about her beyond the “American orphan” on her title page, so I have no idea. For now we’re just two Simmons women with opinions about pumpkin pie.
P.P.S. Yes, I floated a cinnamon stick in the jar for the photos. It was the one stick left over from a jar I’d used in a holiday display, so it earned its keep one more time.