Food Theory: How Pumpkin Spice Killed Coffee! (Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte)

hear ye hear ye pumpkin spice season has officially commenced the line forms here wow it's october and uh pumpkin spice season is only starting now gotta admit i'm kind of pleasantly surprised here figured starbucks would have started back in august or something uh you know this is the line for next year's pumpkin spice latte right bro this year's pumpkin spice season already ended it did yeah like two years ago honestly try to keep up dude [Applause] [Music] hello internet welcome to food theory the culinary show that's not just good for your stomach it's good for your gourd there's nothing quite like autumn is there the leaves change the weather gets cooler and americans line up to purchase or to hate on starbucks most popular seasonal drink of all time the pumpkin spice latte now if you've never experienced a pumpkin spice season stateside what i need you to understand is that today's episode isn't just about some excessively sugary autumn themed drink but beyond that now the pumpkin spice latte has become a force in and of itself since 2003 starbucks has sold 424 million of the lattes in the u.s alone not too bad for a drink that's only available for a couple months out of the year but the sales alone aren't what make the pumpkin spice latte trend so remarkable it's the cultural impact of it all because it's not just starbucks who's doing pumpkin spice anymore it is everyone when starbucks first launched this drink they didn't realize it but they created a food revolution now every fall americans are inundated with pumpkin spice coffee creamers and candles and donuts and cream cheese and waffle mixes and toothpastes and four lokos alright so that last one actually turned out to be a joke but you know what it's not a very good joke because if i saw a pumpkin spice 4 loco on the shelf i wouldn't even bat an eye see pumpkin spice is more than a meme it's no fat either not anymore pumpkin spice is old enough to drive people over its 17-year reign pumpkin spice has seen the rise and fall of tebowing fidget spinners tide pods and the word yolo every single one of those fads had a meteoric rise in popularity at which point the haters swooped in and swiftly reminded us exactly how uncool each of these things actually were and pumpkin spice knows all about this because never in the history of hating has the internet tried to kill something so hard to pumpkin spice haters the psl as it's referred to in so many hashtags represents everything that's wrong with the holiday season in america not only was there no actual pumpkin in the thing until 2015 but there's a sense that ordering a pumpkin spice latte is to openly embrace consumerism and hop aboard whatever's generally trendy at the moment aka ya basic and yet despite their best efforts the haters have definitely lost this battle fidget spinners couldn't handle the hate and promptly spun off into obscurity yolo did indeed only live once and not for very long but as for the pumpkin spice latte its popularity especially in the us has done nothing but climb steadily throughout it all year after year after year apparently these so-called basic pumpkin spice lovers don't really care what the haters have to say they like what they like and they are not ashamed to admit it i haven't had a starbucks on in so long literally since like last fall oh it's so good it's amazing i'm addicted when it's cold outside it gives you a sense of warmth it's almost thanksgiving it's christmas time it feels good this is the perfect just coffee we just go yeah yeah exactly and hocus pocus is on the disney channel it would seem then that the pumpkin spice latte just makes people feel good it evokes the nostalgia of coziness and holidays with family and hey the grande has 380 calories so it doesn't necessarily take a psychologist to understand the appeal at the end of the day this thing is just a drink that tastes like candy on the other hand maybe the psychologists can be of use here i mean there are a lot of delicious staggeringly unhealthy drinks out there and none of them have managed to weave themselves into the fabric of pop culture quite like the pumpkin spice latte has so what we're gonna look at today is how starbucks did it how did they develop a product so comforting so nostalgia-inducing that it became completely and utterly hater proof turns out there's a lot of science going on under the hood the psl's runaway success can be attributed to the fact that starbucks has figured out how to hack pretty much every major region of our brains with just one little product it all begins with the concept of scarcity where people place higher value on things that aren't in abundance for instance mr beast's fans can buy merch anytime they want to but the moment that he announces that he's gonna personally sign every hoodie or shirt ordered within a 24-hour window his fans turn out in droves and purchase over 68 000 of them and that exact same concept applies to seasonal drinks like the pumpkin spice latte it too is a special product that's available for only a specific window of time usually late august to december so when the psl ads start coming out customers know that if they want something with pumpkin spice in it they have to get it now otherwise they're gonna have to wait until next year and this is the first way that the pumpkin spice latte hacks your brain see a scarcity mindset increases activity in the customer's orbitofrontal cortex region of the brain which is involved in attributing value to things a scarcity mindset also decreases activity in the customer's dorso lateral prefrontal cortex which is involved in higher order goals working memory and attention allocation basically a customer's scarcity mindset makes them inflate their perceived value of an item while their ability to see the bigger picture gets simultaneously depleted in other words they're more susceptible to marketing now is starbucks doing this intentionally 100 yes they are remember the original psl syrup had no real pumpkin in it it's not like we're dealing with a product that relies on seasonal produce here friends the supposed scarcity of the pumpkin spice latte is completely artificial as artificial as the latte's pumpkin flavoring was for the first decade of its existence nailed your pumpkin spice latte syrup that bottle of pumpkin-flavored science goo sits behind the counter of starbucks all year round never aging like ryan seacrest the increased perceived value of a seasonal drink like the pumpkin spice latte makes it a status symbol of sorts an item worthy of being shared talked about and hashtagged online and when people see their peers participating in an event or trend without them that's when fomo the fear of missing out starts to creep in and what we call fomo today is essentially the same survival instinct that's always made our species afraid to be left out of the herd according to clinical psychologist anita sans quote getting the impression that one is not part of the in-group is enough for many individuals amygdalas to engage the stress or activation response the fight-or-flight response end quote naturally one way to rid yourself of that stress is to join the herd and today enough americans have joined the herd that seasonal drinks like the pumpkin spice latte and peppermint mocha are household terms but there's obviously something else about the pumpkin spice latte that the other seasonal drinks don't have otherwise john oliver would be ranting about chestnut praline season or frappuccino season or like i just said the peppermint mocha season what is the secret ingredient inside of that pumpkin spice latte well a key difference is the season itself autumn and all the nostalgia that comes with it nostalgia activates a number of areas in the brain including a slew of reward centers like the hippocampus the substantia the ventral tegmental area and the ventral striatum for americans autumn is an especially social time of the year fall always reminds me of trick-or-treating returning to school the fall theater production tailgating during football season being a singing football vendor selling popcorn in the stands i was shameless but of course one of the biggest events of the fall thanksgiving dinner with the family autumn has no shortage of great moments to wax nostalgic about which means autumn has no shortage of ways to activate the reward centers in your brain now of course a lot of this could apply to the december holidays just as easily christmas is an extremely nostalgic time of the year for many of us so why isn't the peppermint mocha or the eggnog latte sitting atop the pedestal at starbucks's best-selling seasonal latte of all time well one big reason is that starbucks slate of december holiday drinks effectively cannibalized each other in popularity in 2003 if you wanted a seasonal autumn drink from starbucks pumpkin spice latte only way to go if you wanted a seasonal drink around christmas time though he had multiple hit drinks to choose from because the pumpkin spice latte essentially had the entire market to itself it was able to spread its wings and really make a cultural impact just in time for the rise of social media and fomo as fate would have it another reason though could be the execution starbucks put a whole lot of research and development into making sure the pumpkin spice latte recipe hit our taste buds and brains just the right way in the spring of 2003 starbucks's liquid lab was tasked with capturing the essence of fall in a drink after taking a slew of autumnal concepts out to customers they found that the chocolate and caramel flavor is rated highest whereas pumpkin flavor was in the middle of the pack nevertheless liquid lab's director of espresso which has just got to be like one of the best job titles of all time peter dukes went ahead and made pumpkin one of the four flavors that moved on to the prototype phase since quote there wasn't anything around pumpkin at the time and so starbucks's pumpkin latte prototype went head to head against a chocolate caramel drink an orange and spiced latte and a cinnamon streusel latte which would go on to become the cinnamon dolce latte a few years later but what pumpkin had going for it was american tradition pumpkin is a new world gourd that's been a part of the american table since day one so knowing this liquid labs zeroed in on a blend of spices utilized in the traditional pumpkin spice cake recipe which appeared in a 1936 cookbook using nutmeg allspice cinnamon cloves and ginger and this particular spice blend which had been in the american tradition for generations would prove to be a nostalgia-inducing gold mine you see scent is the strongest sense linked to memory the olfactory bulb is the first place that smell information is processed in the brain and from there it sends the info along for further processing to other regions of the brain which happen to be the old friends that we met earlier this episode information is sent for further processing in the amygdala which associates smells with emotion info is also passed along to the hippocampus which contributes to the formation of episodic memory memories that occur at a particular place and time info also gets passed along to the orbital frontal cortex which associates odor and taste if you've ever taken a bite out of an old family recipe and thought back to the summer that you spent with your grandparents that's exactly what's going on here so as you can imagine a drink that is so much about aromatic spice smells is primed to light up all those parts of the brain and activate a wave of positive emotion and nostalgic memories and starbucks knows it as the story goes the liquid lab team brought in their own homemade pumpkin pies from family recipes they then alternated between bites of pie and sips of latte back and forth until they slowly honed in on the perfect flavor profile for the drink that they hoped would encapsulate autumn which is funny since the psl is about as unnatural of a drink as you can get today only about five to ten percent of the spices in a pumpkin spice latte are real the rest are flavor compounds that mimic the spices that you'd typically find in the american cupboard in all there are about 340 flavor compounds in the pumpkin spice latte even starbucks's inclusion of real pumpkin should be taken with a grain of salt according to food organization ift quote the amount of pumpkin puree added does very little other than appease those who wanted to see real pumpkin on the list of ingredients but here's the real twist friends not only does the psl activate our fomo decrease our ability to think rationally increase its own perceived value and then hit us with scents that heavily activate positive seasonal memories targeting nearly every major part of the brain it also does one last thing that i think is just hilarious it doesn't taste like coffee as the story goes when the flavor testers finally settled on a proper pumpkin spice formula some of the higher ups at the company were worried that it covered up the taste of the beans as tim kearn founder and former executive at starbucks admits quote a number of us thought it was a beverage so dominated by a flavor other than coffee that it didn't put starbucks's coffee in the best light and that to me is the best twist of all because the pumpkin spice latte formulation eliminates the one last thing that holds back most other starbucks drinks and that is the coffee itself i don't know if you've ever had a conversation with someone about this but i know multiple people who don't like starbucks coffee because they say it's too strong or too burnt tasting and while that's my anecdotal evidence they're not alone in that assessment if i asked all of you what you wanted a coffee every one of you would say i want a dark rich hearty roast what percentage of you actually like a dark rich hearty roast somewhere between 25 and 27 most of you like milky weak coffee but you will never ever say to someone who asks you what you want that i want a milky weak coffee you see coffee is a weird drink because it's bitter and bitterness is something that we humans have been evolutionarily primed against since the caveman days because it served as a defensive mechanism preventing us from eating poisonous food and yet as the theory goes coffee gets around that aversion because of conditioning our brains are getting rewarded by the hit of caffeine when we take a sip of coffee so we condition ourselves to be okay with this taste that we would otherwise be actively trying to avoid but what if you had all the positive effects of caffeine and none of the bitterness well that my friends is a drink that'll sell millions and that is the pumpkin spice latte which means in a delightfully ironic twist the most popular coffee drinks at starbucks would be the ones that taste the least like coffee and i think starbucks has figured it out at this point for an example let's go international in japan they've released christmas strawberry cake milk which incorporates the flavors of one of japan's favorite christmas desserts the japanese love their whipped cream and strawberry topped sponge cake so much that they even have an emoji for it and starbucks went all in on matching the flavor to the point that it includes no coffee just white mocha syrup in china starbucks is wisely hopping on the cheese trend that's sweeping southeast asia heard me right i said cheese trend cheese isn't a traditional part of the chinese diet but cheesy drinks have become all the rage in the region in recent years starbucks is doing its part to fan the flames with their snowy cheese latte which sounds super weird but then again so is putting a bland orange gourd into coffee but regardless of which of these take off or not i think what we've all learned today is that the most important ingredients aren't necessarily the ones hitting our taste buds it's the ones hitting our brains but hey that's just a theory a food theory bon appetit hey if you liked this episode make sure you check out our other episode on coffee and how it changed the course of human history not gonna learn about this one in your history books or you know you could just subscribe make sure that you never miss another episode again ever we're like the weak milky coffee of youtube not one of those flashy bold cups but generally well liked by everyone so take a swig and subscribe it's good for your brain

Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 2,237,434

Rating: 4.9636931 out of 5

Keywords: starbucks, coffee, pumpkin spice, pumpkin spice latte, psl, starbucks pumpkin spice, latte, psl recipe, pumpkin spice recipe, pumpkin spice latte recipe, pumpkin recipe, autumn, fall, halloween, starbuck secret menu, secret menu, starbucks hacks, coffee hacks, matpat, food theorists, food theory, film theory, game theory, game theorists, film theorists, eat the menu, rosanna pansino, binging with babish, starbucks secret menu, starbucks drinks, starbucks coffee

Id: CKgoFPVj1TI

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 08 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Edvarius]

There may not be a Pumpkin Spice 4 Loko... but just yesterday at the store I work at I entered a chocolate pumpkin spike liqueur into our system. So people are looking to sell consumers on getting pumpkin spice drunk.