Fall's favorite flavor strikes again. Everywhere you taste, there it is. Whether at your local coffee shop, or seemingly every aisle of the grocery store, pumpkin spice is winning the hearts of consumers throughout the country. Now, it’s time to find out what is in this elusive flavor. The answer is not pumpkin.
Sales of pumpkin spice-flavored products rose 14 percent to nearly $350 million in U.S. retail outlets in 2013, according to Forbes Magazine. Food industry tracker Mintel reports that the use of pumpkin as an ingredient in beverages has grown 130 percent since 2006, and pumpkin in food on menus has grown ten-fold since 2004.
So, the flavor is popular. But we do not know what exactly makes it taste so good. Food scientist Kantha Shelke, principal at Corvus Blue, a Chicago-based food science and research firm, set out to answer this question. "The growing popularity of pumpkin spice flavor begged inquisitive minds like mine to understand the what, why, and how of pumpkin spice flavor," she states.
Shelke says that food companies "have come up with a simplified recipe that includes just a few of the chemicals that occur naturally in pumpkin and cinnamon and cloves and nutmeg." These flavors come together to trick the brain into tasting pumpkin pie. "Just like the brain can fill in the missing vowels and make sense of jumbled letters and cryptic words, it can fill in various flavors and aromas when provided with just the key compounds," Shelke explains. These compounds, which are manufactured in factories using synthetic chemistry, are listed as "artificial flavors."
Hearing all of this information raises many questions about the trend. The flavor's origin is often contributed to Starbucks. Starbucks started developing the Pumpkin Spice Latte in January 2003 after the company noticed the success of winter seasonal drinks such as the Peppermint Mocha and Eggnog Latte, and wanted to expand its seasonal reach into the fall.
Peter Dukes, director of Espresso Americas for Starbucks, was the product manager who led the development of Pumpkin Spice Latte. "Developers realized there was something special about the pumpkin flavor, especially since there wasn't anything pumpkin around at the time," Dukes said in an interview for Starbucks Newsroom. Thus, the PSL, as the pumpkin spice latte has become known, was born. From then, more and more pumpkin spice products began to appear.
When we buy something that is labeled “pumpkin spice,” we expect it to be just that. However, the flavor is truly a trick being played on our minds. Will this news bring an end to the trend? Most likely, the answer is no.
