Where does the "pumpkin spice latte" craze come from? The story of a drink that became a meme

In Italy, coffee is an almost sacred tradition — which hasn't stopped Starbucks from finding success there, nor has it prevented the (largely American) culture surrounding it from spreading across the ocean through social media. And with the arrival of September and, more broadly, the approaching prospect of autumn, memes have started circulating again online about one of the most famous drinks of all: the Pumpkin Spice Latte. This drink became famous thanks to the type of person who drinks it — namely, the Spice Girl.

The Spice Girl archetype has always been the same. She wears yoga leggings with Uggs, often sports a wide-brimmed hat paired with an oversized scarf. Her hair is long, full of curls made with a curling iron, often blonde or with blonde highlights. Since it's autumn, she wears one of those heavy, cozy sweaters — often slightly oversized, sometimes with a hem slipping off one shoulder to reveal a tank top strap. Frequently, instead of leggings, she wears skinny jeans with high-heeled ankle boots, set against an autumnal, slightly rustic backdrop. The bags are enormous totes — Phoebe Philo-era Celine, or similar styles that are understated but not too flashy.

In America, it has become such a symbol that, as far back as 2018, Cait Munro was writing on Refinery29: "The PSL has been mocked, analyzed, and saddled with negative connotations so thoroughly that there's almost no need to explain why someone might be reluctant to order one. [...] Since its debut in 2003, the PSL has taken on symbolic significance very similar to that of rosé, avocado toast, cupcakes, or the Cosmopolitan." And few drinks in recent history have managed to blend marketing, nostalgia, and humor quite like the Pumpkin Spice Latte, which has become synonymous with the American autumn. But how did we get here?

Who invented it (and who claims to have invented it)

The official version, as told by Starbucks itself, places the birth of the Pumpkin Spice Latte in early 2003, in an internal lab called the "Liquid Lab," on the seventh floor of the company's Seattle headquarters. The project lead was Peter Dukes, and his team — fresh off the success of two winter drinks, the Eggnog Latte and the Peppermint Mocha — was looking for a new seasonal offering for autumn. Dukes and his colleagues developed four possible flavors: chocolate, caramel, cinnamon, and, of course, pumpkin spice.

To perfect the recipe, the group took to eating forkfuls of pumpkin pie alternated with sips of espresso, to figure out which spices paired best with coffee. After about three months of testing, the drink was launched experimentally in around 100 stores across Vancouver and Washington D.C. in autumn 2003. The success was immediate, and the following year the PSL rolled out to all Starbucks locations in the United States. By 2005, Starbucks sales had risen 11%, thanks in part, according to the CEO of the time, to the PSL.

This story, however, was investigated further by blogger and author Doug Mack who, digging deeper, uncovered culinary articles from the early 1910s in which "a blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and ginger" was considered the go-to spice mix for making pumpkin pie. That very blend was later commercialized as Pumpkin Spice around the 1930s. From there, Mack traces the growing popularity of the spice mix — first through autumnal baked goods featured in various magazines and advertisements, and then in numerous types of cakes, even those without pumpkin, starting in the 1960s.

In the 1970s, Seattle experienced a boom in European-style coffee bars, driven by the success of Caffè Allegro, which later became an inspiration for Starbucks — a company that expanded from Seattle to the rest of the world. For those looking for further anecdotes, more recent research has unearthed a September 1994 interview, published in the magazine The Rocket, in which singer-songwriter Tori Amos described making herself a homemade coffee that "tastes like pumpkin pie," calling it her personal contribution to Halloween — nearly a decade before Starbucks' official debut. But how did the drink become a meme?

From drink to meme

While the Pumpkin Spice Latte has existed since 2003, its transformation into a full-blown meme has a much more precise birth date, reconstructed in detail by the dedicated entry on Know Your Meme. The transition from simple drink to meme occurred a decade after its debut, between August and September 2014. On August 4th of that year, the Twitter account @PumpkinSpiceLatte was created, posting tweets written as if the drink itself were speaking in the first person — and it gained over 93,500 followers in just two months.

A few days later, on August 8th, the Tumblr blog The Real PSL also launched, dedicated to collecting fan-made and Starbucks-produced images of the drink. At the end of the month, food blogger Food Babe published a widely shared infographic criticizing the drink's ingredients, igniting a fierce online debate. The real explosion came in early September with a controversial BuzzFeed article titled 25 Things All Basic White Girls Do During The Fall. The very first item on the list was the Pumpkin Spice Latte. At that point, a wave of viral tweets began to mock the association more and more, to the extent that by late September, BuzzFeed published another article on how to make the drink at home, calling it "the sacred elixir of basic white girls everywhere," and released a video review on YouTube.

That same month, the Facebook page of the brand Four Loko posted a photomontage of a "Pumpkin Spice Four Loko" can as a joke for fans, further fueling the ridicule — mostly affectionate — of the trend. In October, host John Oliver dedicated a now-iconic segment on his show to the PSL, which went on to rack up 6.2 million views on YouTube over four years. By that point the meme had taken hold, including with vaguely sexist undertones that were called out three years later, in 2017, by Jaya Saxena in Taste — which, however, activated a new level of irony and memes directed at those who rail against the PSL with excessive seriousness and pedantry.

A new chapter in the meme's evolution came in August 2018, when Starbucks decided to move the seasonal launch forward to August 28th rather than the first days of September. According to Business Insider, the move was also intended to divert attention from a controversy surrounding the arrest of two Black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia, which had occurred a few months earlier. The move worked: the official tweet announcing the drink's return with the slogan "Fall, is it really you? Pumpkin Spice Latte is back" surpassed eight thousand retweets within 24 hours.

In 2019, the meme got a second life with the iconic, camp tweet from @lasagnabby that launched the phrase Christian Girl Autumn and the career of blogger Caitlin Covington, who became the unofficial face of an entire aesthetic built around curls, Celine bags, oversized sweaters, and wide-brimmed hats in autumnal settings. An entire visual world that Covington cultivated with wit and skill (with another iconic PopCrave tweet arriving in 2022, which read: 'Christian Girl Autumn' influencer Caitlin Covington will be taking her annual fall photos next week in Vermont) and which served to reclaim the Pumpkin Spice Latte within a fully reappropriated aesthetic. And from there on, the rest is history.