My annual pumpkin spice roundup has become a tradition of sorts around here, with readers feeling the season incomplete without curling up next to an open fire, launching Not the Bee, and realizing "oh right, these are way too long to read."
As in past years, the products I review below are about as random as it gets, although I do try to avoid repeats. I genuinely like pumpkin spices and so keep an eye out for products attempting to incorporate the traditional fall flavoring in unexpected ways, usually leading to disappointment with a few surprises along the way.
And so, in no particular order:
Three Wishes Pumpkin Spice Cereal
Hey, I have three wishes!
I wish I never bought this.
I wish I never bought this.
I wish I never bought this.
When you first open the box you are assaulted with an aroma I have difficulty describing. It's a sickly sweetness like an aerosolized Celine Dion song. When I had my son take a whiff he gave me that look he gives me when I ask him how is homework is coming along.
I checked out the ingredients.
This was... interesting. I started reading them out loud to my son:
Me: Chickpea.
Son: What?
Me: Tapioca.
Son: Stop.
I poured out a bowl and... what is going on with these? Why do they look like this?
The box is super light, which makes sense given that a cup of this cereal only yields 130 calories.
You've got a lot of not-food going on here. Based on appearances, that not-food would most likely be air.
I steeled myself to the prospect of having a taste.
I haven't disliked a breakfast cereal this much since Kashi Go, a ghastly entry in the keto sweepstakes.
I think the real downfall for me with this cereal was the use of monk fruit as the nonnutritive (non-caloric) sweetener. It's "natural," like stevia and some others, and so has become popular with the health food crowd. The problem with these sweeteners is that while sweet, they have their own particular take on sweet, and so have a distinct flavor, distinct enough that some people really hate stevia, and some really hate monk fruit. I'm in the latter group.
This becomes a bigger problem in that the monk fruit overwhelms everything else. If this were monk fruit season, they'd have nailed it.
But it's more than that. I've had concoctions like this with chickpea before, and was never a fan of that either, so this was a complete disaster with me. Making things worse, the bad taste lingers in your mouth like Elon Musk in your guest house.
It was also expensive, at over $6 a box.
My son gave it a shot and had a similar reaction, texting me the following while I was up in my home office:
Later, I found this on the kitchen counter.
I usually scold him for wasting food, but... I gave him a break given the circumstances.
As for pumpkin spice flavor? Maybe it's there, I can't tell. There's too much else going on to have any idea, like trying to follow Vivek Ramaswamy answering a reporter's question.
I should note that the company is owned by what appears to be a lovely family. In fact, "Three Wishes" was originally a play on their last name and their three children (now four) and there are clearly enough people who enjoy this cereal for the company to have survived five years.
I genuinely wish them the best of luck.
Still...
Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte
The Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte is arguably the OG of the Pumpkin Spice season, the granddaddy of them all, the iconic drink eagerly anticipated by its dedicated fans.
Also, I don't like it. Haven't for years. I'm tired of drinking it.
So instead I'm going to review...
Starbucks Peppermint Mocha
Yes, technically speaking, peppermint mocha is not pumpkin spice in that it doesn't have any pumpkin in it. Or spice. However, if experience is any guide, not having any pumpkin or spice flavor is not necessarily a disqualifying feature to be considered a pumpkin spice product.
Besides, it's still considered "seasonal."
I would normally dial down the pumps, but I wanted to have this as Starbucks intended, in all its syrupy glory.
I did pass on the default choice of 2% milk and instead substituted whole as the good Lord had intended. Still, that bumped up the calories of the Grande from 440 to something I chose not to look it up.
Bottom line, this was not very good. Overly sweet, chalky, with some mocha-ish flavor and an aroma of peppermint if not any actual peppermint taste.
I had purchased one for my son as well and asked him why he liked them. He looked at me like I was crazy.
What kind of question is that? Why do you like air?
He likes them. I'd assume that's just because he's a teenager with an insatiable need for sugar and who sheds calories like Kamala Harris sheds office staff.
However his forty-something nephew likes them, too, so perhaps worth a try, however I'm pretty much done with sugary Starbucks coffee concoctions.
Tastykake Pumpkin Pie
I found this in a convenience store while driving to visit family for Thanksgiving. This one seemed promising in that it wasn't an enormous leap to make a pumpkin pie product in the form of a pumpkin pie.
In terms of appearances, not bad.
I took a taste while we were driving (my son was handling photography duties) and again, not bad, and not too sweet, but the texture was off, more thick pudding than pie, and an artificial feel which is unavoidable given the additives required to make a shelf-stable pumpkin pie.
I had my son try a piece while we were at it, and he said it tasted like something that came out of an Easy-Bake Oven.
Of course, I had to compare it to an actual pumpkin pie.
Aside from the texture issue, it suffers what so many of these products suffer from: It's too sweet to be considered a real pumpkin pie.
Overall, it would do in a pinch, as long as you understand what you're getting. I would not recommend it as road food, however, as it's pretty crumbly and starts falling apart as soon you try to pull it out of its pan.
Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino
Okay, after this, I'm done with sugary Starbucks coffee concoctions.
They really lean in hard on this season desperately trying to recapture the glory of the original pumpkin spice latte like Disney dragging Harrison Ford out of retirement for just one, last, Indiana Jones movie.
I poured out a glass with a fair amount of dread, like a federal employee reading DOGE tweets.
And yes, ridiculously sweet. In fact, it has more sugar, even adjusting for the 13.5 ounce serving size, than Coca-Cola.
And again, the sugar overwhelms whatever pumpkin spice there may be, not to mention coffee. Coffee drinks like this are for people who don't like coffee.
My son and I also both agreed that it had this odd artificiality to it, even though the ingredients appear to be pretty clean.
It's a hard pass from both of us.
Coffee Mate Pumpkin Spice Creamer
This was one my son purchased and it was a pleasant surprise. Yes, it's a nutritional disaster, a chemical concoction made more in a laboratory than a cow, and yet they got the formula right for the most part. Sweet, yes, but not overpowering, if you use a light hand pouring, with a well balanced pumpkin spiciness.
I would never buy this because it's so bad for you, but it's in the house, and while I almost always drink my coffee black, I've reached for this more than a few times.
Random Bakery Pumpkin Spice Thing.
Surely you've seen this, or something like it. A seasonal offering from your local bakery. In this case, my wife picked up a pumpkin spice apple thing. I was excited at first. It was from a local bakery! It has to be good!
This had a weird taste. There were definitely pumpkin spices in it, but there were other things going on that made it unpleasant. But that wasn't the worst thing. The worst thing was the lack of crust.
This was like getting a Snickers Bar but only ending up with the nougat. Once you were done with that paper-thin crust you were left with a heaping pile of odd, over-spiced filling.
Pumpkin Spice Oreos
I've had these before, and will have them again.
Too sweet? Check.
Too artificial? Check.
Too tasty and delicious? Check and check.
One of the things you realize when you compare one of these pumpkin spice products with an actual pumpkin pie is that very few of them taste like an actual pumpkin pie. Many of them don't eve promise to taste like a pumpkin pie, just the spices that go into a pumpkin pie, but regardless, pumpkin flavor is subtle and hard to pull off.
So, when I ate this with an actual pumpkin pie?
These taste nothing like a pumpkin pie. They do taste like they have some pumpkin spice, which is all that is promised anyway, so that's fine.
As for the sweetness, it's a cookie, it's supposed to be sweet so you kind of expect that.
The rest is pretty well executed including color.
I'm pretty hard on Oreo variants, but this is one of the good ones.
Buzz Bakery Pumpkin Latte
I said I was done with pumpkin spice lattes, specifically ones from Starbucks, but I didn't say anything about pumpkin lattes, which is what intrigued me about this one. Could it be true? Could it be just pumpkin?
It takes a lot to distract me from whoopie pies, believe me, but I was on a seasonal mission, and while I had come here for some cupcakes my wife had ordered, I knew I had to try this on the remote chance it wasn't an overly spiced overly sweet exercise in disappointment like the rest.
It wasn't. It was a pumpkin latte. That's it. If there was spice, it was very subtle, subtle enough that you could taste the pumpkin.
You could also still taste the coffee. You could tell they hadn't overdone the pumpkin either from the color of the drink.
Somehow, this local (as far as I an tell) bakery/coffee shop pulled off a genuine pumpkin latte.
I'm sure they get a fair amount of complaints from people conditioned by Starbucks, but this was the real deal.
Overall, if you want something pumpkin spice flavored, have a pumpkin pie, but if you want to experiment a bit, explore how the concept translates to other food items, by all means give it a shot, you'll probably find a few gems in the rough.
Just be prepared for disappointment.
I always am, and in a bit of irony, am rarely disappointed in my disappointment.
