The Pumpkin Spice Latte Is a Fast-Food Dessert | Eater

"Brought back for its 15th annual run, the chain’s pumpkin-spice latte is presented and best understood as a liquid dessert rather than an everyday coffee: a hot milkshake flavored to evoke pumpkin pie spices (cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves) with only a small amount of actual pumpkin. Mass-produced and deliberately simple—brown in color and built on an already familiar flavor profile—it trades culinary ambition for broad appeal, which helps explain its popularity even as some consumers’ enthusiasm feels overwrought. As an industrially engineered sweet it’s a serviceable fast-food–style dessert, arguably preferable to other processed options, while some of the chain’s flashier seasonal experiments aim more for viral attention and visual spectacle than for lasting taste satisfaction. " - Tim Forster