How the Pumpkin Spice Latte Took Over Fall

The long read

The most famous pumpkin drink in the world spent its first twelve years without any pumpkin in it, and that is the least surprising thing about it. The pumpkin spice latte was never really about a squash. It was about a feeling, bottled by a small team in Seattle, that turned out to be worth hundreds of millions of cups and an entire season of the grocery store.

Today is Halloween, which means the PSL is somewhere near the end of its yearly victory lap. So it feels like the right moment to tell the whole pumpkin spice latte history properly: where the spice came from, how the drink nearly lost to chocolate, and why a flavor most people associate with a coffee chain was already in an American cookbook in 1796.

I. The pie came first

Long before anyone steamed milk for it, pumpkin spice was a pie problem. In 1796 Amelia Simmons published American Cookery, often called the first American cookbook, and it includes two recipes for “pompkin” pudding baked in a crust. One seasons the filling with mace, nutmeg and ginger. The other uses allspice and ginger. The flavor that would one day sell lattes was already on the page, spelled a little differently.

Cooks kept riffing for more than a century. Mary Randolph’s 1824 version added “a wine glass of brandy,” which tells you something about how festive this was meant to feel. By 1930 a newspaper ad in Ironwood, Michigan was selling “T&T Mixed Pumpkin Pie Spice,” an early sign that people were happy to buy the blend premixed.

The version most Americans know arrived in 1934, when McCormick introduced its pumpkin pie spice, a few years after canned pumpkin hit shelves in 1929. The McCormick jar is cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg and allspice. Notice what is missing: pumpkin. The spice was always the costume, and the pumpkin was optional.

The spice was always the costume, and the pumpkin was optional.

II. A forkful of pie, a sip of espresso

Fast forward to Seattle in 2003. Starbucks had just found its first blockbuster seasonal drink in the Peppermint Mocha, and the team behind it wanted a matching hit for fall. Peter Dukes, who led the espresso beverage team and has been nicknamed “the father of PSL,” helped run a brainstorm that put roughly 100 ideas on a wall.

Those ideas were trimmed to a shortlist that included chocolate, caramel, orange, cinnamon and pumpkin, and then tested with customers. Here is the plot twist. Chocolate and caramel won on purchase intent, the measure of whether people said they would actually buy the thing. Pumpkin did not. What pumpkin had was a high score for uniqueness. Nobody else was doing it.

So in early spring of 2003, a small group gathered in the Liquid Lab, a secure research space on the seventh floor of Starbucks headquarters, and did something that sounds like a dare. They ate a forkful of pumpkin pie, then took a sip of espresso. The pairing worked. The team spent about three months refining a recipe built from espresso, steamed milk and a pumpkin spice sauce flavored with cinnamon, clove and nutmeg, finished with whipped cream and a pumpkin pie topping.

When it went head to head with the chocolate and caramel drinks in a taste test, pumpkin was the clear winner. It even dodged a blander fate: one name on the table was the Fall Harvest Latte.

III. One week was enough

In the fall of 2003 the drink went into a market test at about 100 stores in Washington, D.C. and Vancouver. It did not take long to read the results.

“Within the first week of the market test, we knew we had a winner.”Peter Dukes, Starbucks

The next fall it rolled out across the United States and Canada. It is easy to forget how different the coffee world was then. Dukes has recalled that many customers did not really know the difference between a latte, a cappuccino, espresso and an Americano. A drink that tasted like dessert and fall at the same time was an easy way in.

Even so, its future was not guaranteed. Starbucks has said it considered dropping the PSL in its early years. What saved it was timing. Social media arrived in the mid 2000s, and suddenly a cup with a dusting of spice on top was something people wanted to photograph and share. The drink became a seasonal ritual you could post about, and every post was free advertising.

IV. Everyone wants a slice

Success invited company. Dunkin’ introduced its own pumpkin drinks in 2007, and McDonald’s added a pumpkin spice latte in 2013. If you want a fair look at how the two biggest coffee chains really compare, we did that in Starbucks vs Dunkin’. The short version for this story is that pumpkin spice stopped being one company’s idea and became a season everyone competes in.

By its tenth birthday in 2014, Starbucks said the PSL had been enjoyed more than 200 million times. By its twentieth, the company described it as its most popular seasonal beverage, with hundreds of millions sold. Along the way it answered its oldest joke. In 2015 Starbucks reformulated the sauce to include real pumpkin.

And then the flavor escaped the coffee cup entirely. NielsenIQ data reported by the Associated Press put U.S. sales of pumpkin flavored products at $802.5 million in the year ending July 29, 2023, up 42 percent from 2019. The list runs well past lattes into Oreos, beer, cereal and even Spam. A Walmart search turned up more than 1,000 pumpkin products. NIQ’s later figures show the category holding steady at around $817 million for the year to July 2024.

V. The season that keeps moving

If it feels like the PSL shows up earlier every year, you are not imagining it. In 2026 it returned on August 25, a day earlier than in 2025, though the record still belongs to 2024, when it landed on August 22. This year it arrived with a crowd of pumpkin cousins, from an iced pumpkin cream shaken espresso to a pumpkin spice chai and even a pumpkin cream matcha.

There is data behind the calendar creep. Darren Seifer, a food and beverage analyst at Circana, has said pumpkin consumption picks up in August, peaks in September and slips a little in October before holiday flavors like peppermint take over. In other words, by Halloween the pumpkin is already handing the baton back to the drink that inspired it in the first place.

VI. Why it worked

It is fashionable to roll your eyes at the PSL, and it has been mocked as the official drink of being basic for about as long as people have been posting it. But the story is more interesting than the joke. A team picked the option that tested worse on paper because it was the only one nobody else had. They grounded it in a flavor Americans had been baking for two centuries. And it arrived right as people started sharing what they drank.

That is not a gimmick. That is a very good read on people. Coffee nerds can debate whether a sweet, spiced latte counts as coffee at all, and plenty of them will. For a deeper look at how coffee got from an Ethiopian hillside to a Seattle test kitchen, our history of coffee covers the long road. Either way, the pumpkin spice latte earned its spot in it.

A team picked the option that tested worse on paper because it was the only one nobody else had.