GREENSBORO, N.C. — Everything these days is pumpkin spice. I Googled ‘pumpkin spice’ and selected images to find everything from Spam, Cup of Noodles, pancake mix, Swiss Miss Hot Chocolate, hummus, and Cheerios, just to name a few.
You can't deny it, it's the ‘it’ flavor. Now, if I asked you how pumpkin spice got its start you would probably say Starbucks. Of course, they started it all with the PSL-- the pumpkin spice latte. CBS News caught up with the man who invented the pumpkin spice flavor.
“We were asked, 'Hey, can we come out-- come out with something for the fall?' So, we came up with a hundred different ideas and whittled it down to 10. We had about 500 customers look at these 10 concepts. When we got back the results, chocolate and caramel, oh, yeah, I'll buy that, for sure. Cinnamon, solid, pretty well. This is something that people don't know or are not aware of, pumpkin spiced latte never had a chance that it was never going to get to prototype,” said Peter Dukes of Starbucks.
It finally did make it to prototype and 18 years later, that’s right, the PSL has been around since 2003 and more than 500,000,000 of them have been sold.
The original recipe caught the attention of health experts because it was high in sugar, with artificial flavors and no real pumpkin. There's still no real pumpkin in the PSL, and there's no real pumpkin in most pumpkin spice items.
Here's the thing, pumpkin spice is really the taste of all the spices you usually put into Pumpkin Pie. USA TODAY put together a tutorial on how to make your own pumpkin spice. Yes, you can buy pumpkin pie spice, but chances are, you already have bottles of all the things included in the pumpkin spice.
2 Tbsp Cinnamon
2 tsp Nutmeg
2 tsp Ground Ginger
1 tsp Ground Cloves
1 tsp All Spice
Mix it into your ice cream, whip cream, cream cheese, smoothies, the possibilities for pumpkin spice are endless!