On Tuesday, while much of the country is still running air conditioners, Starbucks will declare the unofficial beginning of fall with the return of the Pumpkin Spice Latte. Sure, the timing feels absurd as we’re still sweating through our shorts, and the drink is, indeed, ridiculous. But resistance is futile: the Pumpkin Spice Latte is here.
For more than two decades, the latte has returned every year to enormous attention, despite relentless mockery. It has survived pumpkin-spice Spam, pumpkin-spice deodorant, the “basic” era, seasonal-creep complaints and the indignity of being photographed beside decorative gourds. Jadrian Wooten, an economics professor at Virginia Tech, told Newsweek that the ridicule may actually be part of the PSL’s durability.
That turns into free advertising Starbucks doesn't have to pay for.” The drink has also survived by changing. The original Pumpkin Spice Latte, introduced in 2003, famously contained no actual pumpkin. In 2015, after years of scrutiny over its ingredients, Starbucks reformulated the drink, adding real pumpkin and removing caramel coloring.
The PSL, in other words, has already learned one useful lesson about American food culture: when people start staring too closely at the ingredient list, reinvent. We dare say it may now have met the political moment capable of producing its strangest reinvention yet: the Make America Healthy Again movement. MAHA has turned what Americans eat into a major political issue, with the Trump administration taking aim at ultra-processed foods, additives and other features of the modern food supply.
Put a Pumpkin Spice Latte next to that agenda, and you might witness cultural combustion. So, perhaps, the more interesting question this fall is no longer why Americans remain so obsessed with the PSL or how it has survived so much ridicule. After all, the drink has already proved remarkably good at surviving both.
The question is what happens when America’s favorite ultra-branded seasonal indulgence collides with a movement promising to purify the American diet. Could pumpkin spice reinvent itself again—more real pumpkin, less sugar, fewer mysterious ingredients, perhaps a little wellness-influencer magic? Turn the drink once mocked as the mascot of “basic” consumerism into something the wellness right could plausibly claim as its own.
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