If you’ve spent any time on social media recently, you’ll have seen the many memes about the Pumpkin Spice Latte season. Pumpkin Spice in coffee, desserts, candles, you name it, there’s a pumpkin spice variation. What’s more interesting is that the pumpkin spice boom only happens at this time of year, so we thought we’d take a look into why we love Pumpkin Spice so much and why is it such a seasonal staple in Autumn?
When did it get so popular?
Take a quick look at Google Trends, and you can see that Pumpkin Spice always gets a sharp increase of searches October to November and the popularity has just been increasing year after year. But we can specifically date the origins of the Pumpkin Spice phenomena back to 2003 when Starbucks first brought out their Pumpkin Spice Latte.
Why did it get so popular?
Pumpkin isn’t usually a food that people crave or look forward to eating. It’s main purpose to most people is for carving scary faces and lighting them up with candles at Hallowe’en, so why did Starbucks release the Pumpkin Spice latte in the first place? Why did it start a craze and not just fade into obscurity? As for the why, Starbucks simply wanted a “Fall” drink that they could promote in a similar way to their Winter and Festive drinks and they decided upon the “Pumpkin Spice Latte”.
Fun Fact: there’s no “pumpkin spice” in the pumpkin spice syrup that Starbucks use, just pumpkin puree, milk and sugar.
The reason for the craze is a bit more scientific and surprisingly has little to do with the taste of pumpkins and more to do with the smell of the drink. In simple terms, your sense of smell is processed by a part of your brain that’s close to where it also processes emotions and memories. Because a pumpkin spice drink has such a “warm” smell it probably evokes feelings of nostalgia and warmth that makes you feel nice and fuzzy inside.
If you’re the type of person who gets nostalgic during Autumn anyway, then you might look forward to the first Pumpkin Spice Latte of the season because of the warm feelings that the smell gives to you and reminds you of how happy you were when you first tried the drink. This cycle leads us back to why it’s so seasonal. Firstly, because Starbucks and every other major company that jumped on the bandwagon only release their Pumpkin Spice ranges during the autumn. And secondly, because very few people want to feel warm and fuzzy in a hat and scarf during a summer heatwave.
The Pumpkin Spice craze isn’t going away anytime soon much to the delight of the Pumpkin Spice Latte crew, but to the pumpkin haters, maybe you just need to smell more to smile more.