What even is pumpkin spice?

Somehow four baking spices became a whole season. The interesting part is what happens when you pull them apart.

Don’t lie. The second the air turns crisp, you go looking for something pumpkin spice. Lattes, protein bars, creamers, cereal, candles, dog treats. By September it has escaped the pie plate and turned up just about anywhere a flavor can legally go. Ask somebody what’s actually in it, though, and you’ll probably get “Uhhhh… cinnamon? And… fall?”

That’s a fairer answer than it sounds, because the recipe has never held still for long.

Pumpkin pie is about as American as it gets. As early as 1655, a Dutch writer in New Netherland noted that the English colonists “like pumpkins very much and use them also in pies.” In 1796, Amelia Simmons published American Cookery, the first cookbook written by an American and published in America. It has two recipes for “pompkin” pudding: one seasoned with mace, nutmeg and ginger, the other with allspice and ginger. Cinnamon, today’s headliner, isn’t in either one.

The name isn’t much more trustworthy. There’s barely any pumpkin in pumpkin spice, if any at all. Pumpkin is the afterthought that got top billing: it brings a little color and lends its name, then sits back and lets the spices do the work.

So much for the sacred formula.

The pie went on to claim a permanent seat at the Thanksgiving table, and by the 1930 pre-mixed pie spices started hitting supermarket shelves, blending cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, and clove. Then in 2003 Starbucks poured those familiar baking spices into a latte. They didn’t invent the flavor, they just changed its address. Since then, a handful of baking spices has become a season you can order in a venti, and a big one: NielsenIQ put US sales of pumpkin spice products above $1.1 billion in 2023. Take one sip and play it back in slow motion.

The cinnamon gets there first, reaching your nose before the cup reaches your mouth and telling your brain to expect something baked. (Odds are it’s cassia, cinnamon’s hotter, louder cousin and the one most Americans are actually buying.) The sugar does the sweetening, and nutmeg’s warm, woody aroma makes it seem a little sweeter still. The warmth is mostly the drink itself, with an assist from ginger, which trips the same heat sensor a jalapeño does, just far more politely. And somewhere underneath sits clove, a note you’d never pick out on its own and would miss the second it left.

Clove is the one to handle with tongs. Its oil is mostly eugenol, a compound dentists have put to work for generations, so a little reads as holiday baking and a lot has somebody handing you a tiny paper cup and asking whether you floss. That’s why clove shows up in small, disciplined doses: mulled into warm red wine, studded into a holiday ham, tucked into garam masala and Chinese five-spice. It also does something sneaky: researchers at UC Davis found that eugenol makes warmth actually feel warmer on the tongue, so a mildly heated drink with a little clove registers as hotter than it is. Four spices, four different tricks, all being processed by the brain in less than a second.

Now pour the same drink over ice. The aroma takes the biggest hit, since far less of it rises off a cold drink, and most of the bakery goes with it. Ginger keeps working, though — its warmth comes from that heat sensor, and the sensor still fires in the cold. Nothing in the recipe changed, and yet it tastes like a different drink. 

Fresh ginger is bright and zippy, but when dried it turns hotter and earthier, which is part of why gingerbread tastes nothing like a ginger shot. It pairs well with tart fruit like pear, apple and cranberry, and a proper fermented ginger beer (the cloudy kind, not the sweet, clear soda) has the bite to carry a fall cocktail or mocktail without any pumpkin in sight.

Nutmeg works the opposite way. It does nothing on heat at all. Its signature aroma compound, myristicin, goes straight through the nose, which is why nutmeg reads as cozy even though nothing about it is spicy. Look at where it lives and a pattern shows up: eggnog, custard, béchamel, anything built on milk or cream. It’s the spice that makes dairy taste like comfort. Next to cinnamon, ginger and clove, it’s also the quietest voice in the room, and the first to get buried in a blend.

So which part was the pumpkin spice: the spices, the warmth of the cup, the sweetness, the smell, or twenty-odd years of being told this is what October tastes like? Probably yes.

It also makes pumpkin spice surprisingly fragile. Change the temperature, the food around it, the processing or the months it spends on a shelf, and one of those cues gets louder or slips away. A nutmeg note that sings at the bench can whisper from the freezer. Time can quietly edit the formula after everybody in the development room has already approved it. The recipe may still say pumpkin spice. Your brain may disagree.

So what even is pumpkin spice? Aroma, sweetness, warmth, a little pungency and a fairly impressive amount of cultural conditioning, all arriving close enough together that your brain stopped bothering with the details and filed the whole thing under fall.

“Uhhhh… cinnamon? And… fall?” was a pretty good answer after all.

If you’re building a fall product, pumpkin spice’s fragility is also an opening. Pull the cues apart and each one can headline its own flavor:

• Ginger-pear seltzer or cranberry-ginger RTD. Warmth that never has to be hot, and a fall drink that doesn’t need a mug.
• Blood orange and clove in a sparkling water. Blood orange is already surging (Mintel reports a 1,100% jump in global fall launches from 2023 to 2024), and clove brings the kitchen and the holiday ritual. 
• Nutmeg with maple brown butter in a creamer, oat milk, ice cream or cold brew with sweet cream. Maple brown butter is already being pitched as a next-wave fall flavor, and nutmeg is its natural partner: all the memory of pumpkin pie, no pumpkin required.

And if you just want to go full pumpkin spice? Do it. Even if your product has no business being pumpkin spice-flavored (we see you, pumpkin spice SPAM), sometimes the season calls and you answer. Just commit to the bit. Make it bold, make it fun, and make it taste like the real thing.