Despite temperatures still setting records across the country and fall being a full month away, Starbucks announced its Pumpkin Spice Latte will return to stores on Thursday to celebrate its 20th year in existence.
The return of the Pumpkin Spice Latte marks the unofficial start of fall, and this year that’s ... [+]
The much-loved latte hitting stores on August 24 will tie 2021 for the drink’s earliest debut, according to Axios, while the drink’s latest release date in the last nine years was Sept. 8 in 2015.
Dunkin’ Donuts released its line of pumpkin spice drinks—including its Pumpkin Spice Signature Latte and Nutty Pumpkin Coffee—even earlier than Starbucks this year with those drinks and various pumpkin bakery treats hitting stores on August 16.
The drink helped make pumpkin spice a $500 million dollar industry, according to Nielsen sales data for pumpkin spice products showing they brought in around $488 million in 2021, CBS reported.
Prices for this year’s PSL from Starbucks aren’t yet released, though in 2022 the drink had about a 4% increase due to inflation, CNN reported.
Starbucks Reserve locations across the country are also getting in on the company’s most popular seasonal beverage and will serve Pumpkin Spice Whiskey Barrel-Aged Iced Lattes and Pumpkin Spice Espresso Martinis, along with a number of other fall items.
Pumpkin Spice Lattes were born in 2003 when Peter Dukes, then-leader of the beverage development team at Starbucks, was looking for a drink to follow up the creation of the Peppermint Mocha. Dukes and his team tested the beverage in about 100 stores in 2003 before launching it nationwide and in Canada the following year, and within the first week of sampling it he said they knew they had a winner. Dukes said they considered switching out the PSL for newer flavors in the first years of its success, but that once social media arrived in 2006 and drinkers took to Facebook and Twitter to share their love, “it just took off on a whole new level.”
Pumpkin spice wasn’t really a phenomenon before Starbucks created the PSL. In the 1930s, Thompson & Taylor Spice Co and McCormick & Company both released Pumpkin Pie Spice, a pre-blended mix bakers could use to season fall treats that Food & Wine magazine called “revolutionary.” But the flavor didn’t really take off until Starbucks released its signature fall drink, and now people can find everything from pumpkin spice hummus to pumpkin spice noodles in stores during the fall.
Hundreds of millions. That’s how Starbucks quantified the number of Pumpkin Spice Lattes sold since its inception. Though they didn’t provide a concrete number this year, in 2019 the company estimated more than 424 million Pumpkin Spice Lattes had been served in the U.S. alone since its launch.