This story started with a question: What happens when people get tired of pumpkin spice? Apparently, they don’t.
A 2022 study on pumpkin spice from Montclair State University found “overwhelmingly positive” sentiments about the seasonal flavor on social media, despite its ubiquity, and despite the researchers actively looking for backlash. A follow-up study last year saw a continuation of the same trend, with “strong excitement” for pumpkin spice products — from lattes to candles and body oil — and “joyful conversations” on social media about the return of the fall staple.
“More bluntly put, according to our analysis of social media content, people appear to truly love pumpkin spice, and very few openly hate it,” the researchers wrote in 2022.
The same is true for retailers that rely on pumpkin spice to drive interest every fall. Bath & Body Works — which says pumpkin and “warming spices” like cinnamon, cardamom and cloves have been a key piece of its portfolio since it launched “Sweet Cinnamon Pumpkin” in the early 2000s — has seen enduring interest in the scent despite how popular it’s become.
“Fall fragrances inspired by pumpkin and spices continue to be customer favorites and we don’t see that changing — it’s similar to how you think of the pine fragrance and Christmas,” Maraga Martens, a 10-year Bath & Body Works veteran and its current associate vice president of merchandising, said via email.
The retailer has evolved its offering over the years to include twists on the iconic fragrance, like Pumpkin Pecan Waffles, White Pumpkin and Pumpkin Bonfire, and customers come back “year after year” to stock up on them, according to Martens. A Future Market Insights report from last year predicted pumpkin spice would be a $1.1 billion market in 2023 and grow at a compound annual growth rate of 8.2% over the following 10 years.
That doesn’t happen with every calendar-appropriate product release. Jin-A Choi, an assistant professor at Montclair State University who worked on the pumpkin spice studies, said a similar look into St. Patrick's Day and the Shamrock Shake revealed the timely beverage just didn’t have the same draw. Pumpkin spice, on the other hand, has stuck — and consumers aren’t letting go.
“The millennials are bringing back all the old cultures of like Y2K fashion and the baggy jeans and stuff,” Choi said. “I feel like millennials will hold onto this until the end of the earth.”
The Starbucks effect
Starbucks is widely credited with bringing pumpkin spice into the mainstream thanks to the ingenuity of its espresso beverage team, which developed and launched the Pumpkin Spice Latte in 2003 after seeing success with its Peppermint Mocha the year prior. The coffee chain’s Instagram account is littered with posts about the return of the Pumpkin Spice Latte and other, far less culturally significant, fall beverages (looking at you, Iced Apple Crisp Macchiato).
And while others have jumped on the bandwagon, Starbucks remains king of the pumpkin spice latte movement. The company earns more than half of all pumpkin spice latte content online, according to the Montclair researchers. That compares to just 4% for rival Dunkin’.
“If you were talking about a specific brand, you would talk about Starbucks,” Bond Benton, an associate professor at Montclair who also worked on the pumpkin spice research, said.
Ironically, Starbucks did not want to talk about pumpkin spice this year. The coffee chain denied Retail Dive’s request for an interview about its iconic beverage.
In some ways, the success of the pumpkin spice movement speaks for itself, though. In addition to the coffee-focused copycats, convenience chain 7-Eleven now has a Pumpkin Spice Slurpee, Chobani introduced a pumpkin spice yogurt drink this year and Dunkin’ is offering a new spiked pumpkin spice beverage. Interest in the concept transcends the beverage aisle, with pumpkin spice dog toys, pumpkin spice lip balm and even services like pumpkin spice facials and a PSL-themed Orangetheory workout.
What Starbucks achieved with the Pumpkin Spice Latte is any product innovation team’s dream: create something that is so successful it becomes a part of the cultural conversation for years to come. But it wasn’t always like that.
“It's been 21 years, and it's getting all this attraction now in the past five to eight years,” Choi said of the drink. “I remember going to Starbucks back in the day when they were shy about, ‘Oh, here's our new experiment.’ ‘Here, try a little bit in a small cup.’ So it's been a long time coming. Like, 21 years of dedication and experiments and promotional messages.”
To Barbara Kahn, a professor of marketing at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, part of the original appeal of pumpkin spice was that it was made up.
“That makes it really pique interest. It's like a newfangled thing, ‘Now, what is this pumpkin spice?’” Kahn said. “The other thing is, it only happens at this point in time, so then you start to look forward to it.”
It’s also no longer just pumpkin spice. Starbucks sells an Iced Pumpkin Cream Chai now and a Pumpkin Cream Cold Brew. And Bath & Body Works says it brings newness to pumpkin spice lovers with scents like Pumpkin Chai and Pumpkin S’mores. The scent is most popular in home fragrances, but the retailer also sells a fair share of pumpkin-scented lotion, soap, sanitizer and other products.
“The experience of pumpkin could evolve based on what it’s paired with,” Martens said. “For example, we bring a smokiness to pumpkin and cloves in our Pumpkin Bonfire 3-wick candle — it offers our customers a new take on the familiar fall staple.”
It’s unclear exactly what made pumpkin spice take off — as a drink, a scent and a cultural staple. But as Kahn alluded to, some of it is timing. It was an idea to take advantage of the fall season and a way to try something new. Once it was successful, it was a given to repeat it.
“It worked, so stick with it,” Kahn said. “It's like going into Valentine's Day and saying, ‘OK, this year we're going to do hearts. Next year we're going to do flowers.’ It doesn't even make any sense — hearts works, go with it.”
“There's a sensory dimension to this that extends beyond the product itself.”
Bond Benton
Associate professor at Montclair State University
Pumpkin spice falls into a convenient time period, before Thanksgiving and Christmas but after the summer holidays. Yi Luo, an associate professor at Montclair and the third member of the pumpkin spice research team, noted that the concept slots nicely into that gap between holidays and also serves as a harbinger of Halloween and fall more broadly. A pumpkin spice latte is best enjoyed when the weather starts getting cooler, which ties it very directly to the shift in seasons, the researchers said.
Indeed, in their 2022 study, they went so far as to say pumpkin spice may be attaining “similar cultural longevity” to more established rituals like eating turkey on Thanksgiving or chocolate on Valentine’s Day.
“There's a sensory dimension to this that extends beyond the product itself,” Benton said. “And I don't have a similar association with peppermint. There is a real marked period. There's a temporal connection to this that you may not see elsewhere.”
And there’s something else pumpkin spice has that other seasonal staples just don’t: the pumpkin spice girls.
#PumpkinSpiceGirls
No, that term doesn’t refer to a fall-themed version of the iconic ’90s pop group. But the phrase has begun appearing on social media as some people begin to see pumpkin spice as a part of their identity. Montclair’s 2023 study on pumpkin spice saw a growing trend of social media users mentioning the term and identifying themselves as “pumpkin spice girls.”
“Such identity affiliation implies that pumpkin spice has evolved from a commercial product into a salient cultural symbol in American pop culture,” the study states.
Retail Dive’s search of the term on Instagram even revealed a content creator identifying as “thepumpkinspiceboo,” who has “Pumpkin Spice Latte Girl” displayed prominently on their profile. Another influencer describing themselves as “The Autumn Queen” uses “the.pumpkin.spice.girls” as a handle. Both accounts post almost exclusively fall-inspired content.
“I think especially on social media, people are looking for those distinct identifiers, in a way, to make their content, to make their channel stand out — to merge with this cultural phenomenon,” Luo said. “Pumpkin [spice] is a great way to forge that connection with their fans or followers.”
Choi notes that there is even a feeling of superiority associated with drinking Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Lattes in particular, which deepens some customers’ associations with the brand and the product. And in some areas, consuming pumpkin spice products is a way to signal to oneself that fall has officially arrived.
“You symbolically put on Uggs, you symbolically put on vests and you have to drink a pumpkin spice to almost force [fall] to come,” Choi said.
Bath & Body Works’ Martens also highlighted that fragrance itself is “a deeply sensorial experience that can often be transportive.” As a result, the retailer’s merchandising team often travels to major cities globally to find inspiration for new scents. In pursuit of this year’s fall fragrances, for example, Bath & Body Works’ team traveled to the Hudson Valley in Upstate New York and took inspiration from experiences like apple picking and autumn wreaths.
“Pumpkin could connect you back to fond memories of fall — that could be time with family or friends during a holiday, walking through a park as the leaves change or cozying up next to a bonfire,” Martens said. “When you think fall, you think pumpkin — it truly places you in that seasonal mindset.”
Research backs that up as well, with a Johns Hopkins University study from 2021 highlighting that the scent of pumpkin spice can tap into nostalgia and remind shoppers of fond memories. And of course marketers have known about the impact of the five senses on enticing shoppers to buy for long before that.
"Why are some things memes and other things aren’t? Some of it is something intrinsic about it, and the other is, it was in the right place at the right time and it just hit.”
Barbara Kahn
Professor of marketing at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
As to why pumpkin spice itself has achieved such emotional significance, Kahn says a lot of it has to do with scarcity as well. The products are only available for a certain period of time, which makes them feel special, and retailers have latched onto the concept and continued to offer new versions of it over the years to drive further interest. And then there’s a piece of it that’s just luck.
“Why pumpkin spice and not apple spice or apple cider or something like that? I don't know. It just hit at the right time, and then it started growing. And once you get that kind of momentum, it builds on itself,” Kahn said. “I don't think there's something really special, in and of itself, about pumpkin … Why are some things memes and other things aren’t? Some of it is something intrinsic about it, and the other is, it was in the right place at the right time and it just hit.”
The limited-time nature of pumpkin spice helps drive obsession with it during the season, the same way people can’t stop buying peppermint-flavored things in winter.
“I know a friend who buys 50 pumpkin spice bagels [and] freezes them so she'll not run out throughout the year,” Choi said.
Haters gonna hate… something else
Signs point to pumpkin spice staying with us for the long-run. But brands still deliver bold declarations every year about how they might upset the perennial favorite, like Simply Spiked’s ad for a cranberry flavor, which includes the directive to “move over pumpkin spice.” A similar push for Cracker Barrel’s apple-inspired menu claims to help customers “forget about pumpkin spice.”
And there are some detractors from the flavor. Wharton marketing professor Peter Fader in a blog post last year said pumpkin spice had “jumped the shark” and become “eye-rolling,” and he suggested marketers think in terms of what’s the next pumpkin spice versus just what’s the next pumpkin spice product. Montclair’s 2023 study on pumpkin spice also identified a subset of social media users that seemed genuinely angry about pumpkin spice, but it accounted for just 5% of overall sentiment.
There’s also a gray area where sarcasm and mockery fall, because pumpkin spice does enjoy its fair share of meme culture and teasing. But have you really made it if you’re not being mercilessly mocked online?
“When you achieve the rock-star status of a flavor or an idea, you also get your detractors and that's almost a sign of how big it is,” Kahn said. “People don't make fun of things that don't get up to that status.”
When it comes to the teasing pumpkin spice receives, it’s also not usually an “authentic hatred,” according to Benton. Even the mockery of pumpkin spice brings people a feeling of joy, because it’s fun to poke fun.
That’s not to say it’s impossible for pumpkin spice to one day fade in importance. Choi’s own students said the flavor was overplayed and overhyped, and she pointed out that interest in pumpkin spice is already limited mostly to North America. But there’s a couple of factors that make it unlikely to truly disappear.
For one thing, the same scarcity that drives interest in pumpkin spice every year also makes it harder for shoppers to get too tired of it, according to Kahn. For another, she added that there are natural cycles in retail of products falling in and out of fashion, and companies are used to reframing concepts for a new year or to attract a new generation.
Bath & Body Works’ Martens said the company is constantly testing new fragrance combinations, but the retailer considers seasonal pumpkin fragrances “in a category of their own.” Vanilla is popular at the moment as well, but interest in that scent doesn’t replace pumpkin spice.
“Creating fragrance is equal parts business savvy and creativity — it’s having the ability to see diamonds, coupled with an understanding of emerging trends and a finesse to create something new and different,” Martens said. “At the same time, it’s about building on what we know customers want season after season and meeting that demand — sometimes with a new twist.”
Montclair’s pumpkin spice researchers all find it doubtful that the pumpkin spice phenomenon is capable of being replicated, but Kahn says it’s fully possible for some new concept to reach pumpkin spice’s status. Whatever it is might crop up around a different holiday, real or made up, but it’s the nature of consumer packaged goods to always be on the lookout for the next big thing, Kahn said. It’s just a matter of time before it’s found.
When it is, it won’t replace pumpkin spice — it will join it.
“If you rethink the history of peppermint or something like that — or hearts for Valentine's Day — it's not that dissimilar,” Kahn said. “There's really no reason a heart is more important than chocolates or candy or something for Valentine's Day. There's tons of different mints that could have made a frosty feeling. But in the right place, at the right time, it gets this connection and then it grows the status. Pumpkin spice is in the pantheon of holiday things that people celebrate.”
