Every year, there is a single day when summer turns to fall. In 2025, on the Gregorian calendar, this day is September 22. On the pumpkin-spice calendar, it was Tuesday, when Starbucks reintroduced its legendary latte. (For Dunkin’ loyalists, fall began on August 20.)
Pumpkin spice, as fans and haters alike will tell you, is not simply a flavor. It is a state of mind. You might imagine that, by now, our national appetite would be sated. You would be incorrect. This year, among other innovations, we will be graced with pumpkin-spice-dipped waffle cones, pumpkin-spice protein shakes, and pumpkin-spice spreadable cheese. That there are still products left to pumpkin spice-ify is a testament to human ingenuity. You can already find pumpkin-spice yogurt, pumpkin-spice almonds, pumpkin-spice graham-cracker Goldfish, and pumpkin-spice fig bars. There is pumpkin-spice bacon and pumpkin-spice cottage cheese. For the seed oil–conscious, there is pumpkin-spice avocado oil.
But just as the Pumpkin-Spice Industrial Complex whirs into action, as it does every August, there is a new threat. On Wednesday, the Trump administration imposed 50 percent tariffs on imports from India. This might be just another episode in Donald Trump’s ongoing trade war, except that India is a major exporter of spices: among them, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves. Together, along with allspice and ginger, these form the backbone of the pumpkin-spice mix. Like so many other goods, pumpkin spice—the taste, smell, and spirit of fall—might get more expensive. Just how much do Americans love it? We’re about to find out.
The timing is spectacularly inopportune. Long after Starbucks unleashed the pumpkin-spice latte upon America in 2003, it was easy to dismiss pumpkin spice as a trend. The nature of the world is that people get tired of things and move on. There was a period when everyone lost their mind over the concept of roasted brussels sprouts, but then they discovered cauliflower.
Instead, pumpkin spice only continued to rise. It became a personality. Pumpkin spice was a 20-something white girl in Ugg boots who kept a Pinterest board to catalog ideas about her future wedding, distilled into a single flavor. It became so popular that its very popularity inspired a backlash. Disliking pumpkin spice, if you did it very loudly, became a shorthand to indicate you had discerning taste. Anthony Bourdain hated it. John Oliver railed against it. Facebook communities sprang up to spread the gospel of revulsion. It was offensive precisely because it was so aggressively benign.
But pumpkin spice just keeps winning. Many people who might have once looked down on pumpkin spice, or slurped in secret, now “just embrace it,” Diana Kelter, the director of consumer trends at Mintel, North America, told me. Pumpkin spice has become so omnipresent that it no longer says all that much about you. Oh, you’re the kind of person who likes air? You’re one of those water drinkers? “It’s, like, beyond big,” Leigh O’Donnell, a consumer-insights analyst at Kantar, a market-research firm, told me. Over Zoom, she showed me a graph of consumer transactions involving pumpkin-flavored and pumpkin-spice-flavored things. The figures aren’t skyrocketing, but each year shows results higher than the one before. “Freight train,” she said, gesturing at the chart. “Ain’t no slowing down.”
The scope and scale of pumpkin spice—pumpkin-spice air freshener! pumpkin-spice dog treats!—only mean the tariffs could hurt more. Don’t expect major changes immediately. At Starbucks, a PSL costs the same as last year, a spokesperson told me: $5.75 to $7.25 for a grande, depending on the location. (Dunkin’ did not respond to my request for comment.) For now, there will still be plenty of pumpkin spice: pumpkin-spice crackers, pumpkin-spice bone broth, pumpkin-spice oat milk. (While Trader Joe’s will not be offering any pumpkin-spice hummus, that is only because it was discontinued in 2023.) This autumn’s pumpkin-spice products were almost certainly made with cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves that were imported before this week’s tariffs. (There are also the seemingly unlimited possibilities of artificial flavoring.)
Eventually, though, America’s pumpkin-spice fix will become more expensive. It might happen sooner rather than later. Sana Javeri Kadri, the founder and CEO of Diaspora Co., a spice company that imports exclusively from India and Sri Lanka, anticipates that she’ll have no choice but to raise prices: A tin of Diaspora Co. pumpkin spice that now goes for $13 might soon be $14.50. “Everybody’s in the same boat right now, in that we’re fucked,” she told me. Even companies that likely have back stock and source spices from lots of countries—Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Mexico—are bracing: On an earnings call this summer, the spice goliath McCormick, which sources globally, predicted that tariffs could cost the company $90 million a year.
Imported spices, of course, won’t be the only reason the cost of a cozy autumn could go up. Your PSL might be served in a paper cup that is now more expensive because of tariffs, and the coffee is certainly imported; the foil top of your pumpkin-spice-yogurt container might have been made from aluminum that was imported and taxed. Americans are already beginning to feel the weight of the tariffs, and prices are poised to rise on all kinds of products. It’s another way that pumpkin spice is not special. Economically, as culturally, it is like everything else.
If a trade war doesn’t blunt America’s appetite for pumpkin spice, it’s hard to see what will. You could read its sheer dominance as a symptom of cultural collapse—evidence that everyone is simple now; that criticism, like punk, is dead. But unlike the current churn of trends that seemingly arise whole-cloth from nowhere—Dubai chocolate? Labubus? Lafufus?—pumpkin spice is staunchly rooted in reality. The pumpkin-spice latte was a corporate invention, but the first recipe for spiced “pompkin pie” was published in 1796. The appeal is obvious: It’s cozy; it’s nostalgic; it helps blunt the taste of coffee. Most things in the world are volatile, but not pumpkin spice. It appears each year like clockwork, reassuring us that, despite the actual weather, fall has arrived.
The post A Terrible Week for Pumpkin Spice appeared first on The Atlantic.
