Love Bite: 20 Years of the Pumpkin Spice Latte, The Internet’s Favourite Drink

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Love Bite is a column which considers the intersection between what we eat and the way we share it online.

Every year as September melts into October, there’s a noticeable shift in vibe. The leaves drift from the trees, everyone’s Spotify playlist recommendations change from from “Sexy Lady Summer” (Megan Thee Stallion, Dua Lipa) to “Antisocial Bitch Autumn” (Fiona Apple, The Cranberries, 50 Hours of White Noise for Insomniacs), and, like clockwork, the Pumpkin Spice Latte comes to town. 

Essentially a milky coffee paired with a sauce made using cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg (that is, the type of seasonings you might employ if you were baking a pumpkin pie around Halloween or Thanksgiving), the drink began life as a Starbucks creation in 2003. Over the past two decades, it has become synonymous with the period from late September to early November annually.

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Having become too big for even Starbucks to contain alone, in the mid 2010s the PSL transcended its origins to the extent that variations on it are sold by many different chains – even in Europe, where pumpkin pie itself isn’t really a thing. Indeed, here in the UK, its reach is so great that other “pumpkin spice” products – from biscuits to bleach (mwah) – now line the shelves at the same time of year, too. 

The drink’s ubiquitousness owes a lot to the internet, and considering its age – 20 this year (mad how the most millennial beverage to ever exist but is actually Gen Z) – it’s no wonder that the PSL’s popularity feels like such a true product of internet culture. I’d argue, in fact, that there’s probably no other food and drink item that feels more closely linked with the way online discourse and humour has evolved over time. You can pretty much trace histories of internet feminism, semiotics and meme culture all through one seasonal coffee – which almost didn’t even exist.  

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As Business Insider has it, the Pumpkin Spice phenomenon was very close to never happening at all. In the early 2000s, the flavour was panned by Starbucks stakeholders during testing for new autumnal beverages. One man, however, believed in the drink. Peter Dukes, a Starbucks brand manager, was so persistent about his beloved PSL that he eventually managed to get it onto the menu in 2003 (you can sort of imagine this guy’s inspirational true story – titled “SPICE” – being made by Netflix or something, can’t you?)

“You can pretty much trace histories of internet feminism, semiotics and meme culture all through one seasonal coffee.”

It was a hit with customers, and for a decade, the drink lay reasonably dormant as a US Starbucks fall staple. Around its 10th anniversary in 2013, however, perceptions of the drink began to change. This came as a result of the growth in popularity of discussion websites like Twitter and Tumblr, which made it so we could scream at each other across the void, turning anything into a major debate. In other words, the PSL got discourse’d. 

The PSL (which, ultimately, is a girl drink; I’ve never seen a man order one in my life) got caught in this particular crossfire because it had quietly come to symbolise a specific type of woman: an UGG boot wearin’, Snapchat dog filter lovin’ “basic bitch”. The basic bitch loves Prosecco and brunch, lives in leggings and “can’t wait for cosy nights with this one”. She’s a reasonably wide-ranging and harmless stereotype, but in the early to mid 2010s, when identifying social categories via lifestyle preferences was still a novelty of cultural consumption online, rather than an everyday reality of scrolling Insta “starter packs”, she set the internet alight. 

Women were an especially important area of conversation at this time because the proliferation of social media had given way to feminism’s internet-centric fourth wave. The blogosphere was full of gobby young women – on websites like Jezebel and The Vagenda, as well as their own Tumblr pages – who demanded an equal focus on high and low topics as legitimate feminist issues: PSLs and whether or not we should embrace our own basicness were, therefore, discussed alongside the wage gap and abortion rights.

This was, ultimately, a positive turn in the culture, as it saw female-coded entities like reality TV and the internet given proper critical credence. Some things, however, including the PSL, were taken a bit too seriously. As if to exemplify the sensibilities of this era – when social media still felt reasonably new and everyone felt like they had to talk about everything very sincerely all the time (an impulse that still hasn’t totally gone away, though the earnestness has diminished) – at the peak of this furore in 2014, the feminist website Bustle published a defence of loving PSLs. Both the headline – “Don’t Call Me a Basic B*tch – I Can Love Pumpkin Spice Lattes and Still Be Extraordinary” – and the piece itself feel like perfect artefacts of that time, though today it reads like something you might see on @goodshirts or any number of post-internet, irony pilled meme pages.

At this time, despite its “basic” rep, the PSL’s sales only grew as its visibility increased – in 2015, Forbes estimated that Starbucks made $100 million in revenue from the drink. And by 2019, it was back on our timelines yet again as a pillar of the Christian Girl Autumn meme, coined as the fall successor to Megan Thee Stallion’s Hot Girl Summer concept by Blizzy Mcguire. When influencer Caitlin Covington’s photos were used to illustrate the joke, she tweeted: “For the record, I do like pumpkin spice lattes. Cheers!"

While the initial “Christian Girl Autumn” post kicked back to the “basic” stereotype – the images shared saw their subjects in over-the-knee suede boots, skinny jeans and other trappings of basicness – the women pictured weren’t either maligned or held up as low-culture feminist heroes as they might have been by the internet in the early-to-mid 2010s. The meme was just considered funny for its own sake, symbolising the way in which internet humour had, by this point, become much more self-referential – with camp valued above all else (we can thank stan Twitter and queer culture for that one). 

Indeed, when Covington “announced” that she would be taking her annual autumn photos in October 2022, the news was reshared on Twitter by @PopCrave and received 112,000 likes in four days: we were all firmly in on the joke. Elsewhere, via TikTok, basicness has had something of a revamp via the “clean girl” aesthetic – slicked back buns, Vejas and so on – and we saw Starbucks embracing that evolution too, when, in 2020, the brand partnered in the UK with the figurehead of Basic 2.0, Molly-Mae Hague, to launch PSL season. 

Where once basicness, as symbolised by the PSL, was something to be pored over, the internet has – for better and for worse in general, though it’s probably a good thing in this case – become a place where things simply aren’t that deep. In a digital landscape so fast-moving that there’s a new TikTok “core” every day, the idea of the months-long PSL discourse of 2014 feels foreign. The drink itself, however, remains relevant, and the way we discuss it feels as though it has grown up online alongside us, changing and reflecting how we think and talk and what we find funny. Internet trends, as we know by now, come and go – but as long as we’ve got wifi, a PSL is forever.  

Words: Lauren O’Neill