美国各地的杂货过道都衬有舒适的秋季颜色舒适包装的产品，包括浓汤，南瓜香料松饼，南瓜香料牛肉干。等待。什么？增加肉桂，生姜和肉豆蔻的令人愉悦的季节性趋势已经从过去的传统烘焙食品到意外的（和不必要的）商品，从薯片到伏特加酒到指甲油。实际上，描述中包含“南瓜香料”的MyFitnessPal数据库中的不同食物数量从2009年1月的212升至迄今为止的近44,000。秋天的零食。
In response to the surge of pumpkin spice products and their passionate (often young, white, female) fans, a sort of pumpkin spice backlash has emerged. Cynics begrudge the fact that most pumpkin spice products don’t contain even a sniff of pumpkin and hope that this fad will burn itself out so pumpkins can return to their standard, sporadic appearances in pies and patches. A quick scan of Twitter shows that although people are still guzzling by the gallon, it’s become something of a collective cultural joke:
Given all the pumpkin spice preoccupation, we got curious.
The Rise (and Fall?) of Pumpkin Spice
为了评估南瓜香料疯狂如何随着时间的流逝而增长，我们扫描了超过400万食品和6500万用户的数据库，以查看过去5年中登录的食物的百分比在描述中具有“南瓜香料”。这就是我们发现的：
Peak pumpkin spice day reliably falls in mid to late October—just like the leaves. And as you can see from the graph above, pumpkin spice consumption has been increasing continuously for the past five years. In other words, it’sdefinitelya thing.
但是，根据我们对便利店货架的轶事评估，我们预计在过去几年中会看到急剧增加，因此我们惊讶地看到2013年的南瓜香料峰值仅比前一年高13％。将其与2011年和2012年的同比增长率（分别为44％和45％）相比，很明显，季节性的感觉正在放缓，而且似乎我们可能正在接近南瓜香料高原。
Carving the data another way leads to a similar conclusion: the total amount of pumpkin spice food consumed over the course of the year grew by 34% in 2011 and 46% in 2012, but only 14% in 2013. Though it’s too early to tell how things will shake out for 2014, looking at September as a leading indicator reveals that the numbers for this year and last are nearly identical, again hinting at a possible pumpkin spice stagnation. Maybe people are pumpkin-spiced out. Or maybe we’ve hit a saturation point because we’ve added pumpkin spice to absolutely everything that is physically feasible. Only time will tell.
Pumpkin Spice Season Creep
We next turned our attention to the length of pumpkin spice season. Is it just us, or does it seem to be getting longer?
To find out, we first took a look at when pumpkin spice season starts. Answer: whenever Starbucks decides that it does. Our database shows a huge surge in pumpkin spice foods every year on the release date of the infamous PSL. It tends to be right around September 1 without too much wiggle room, but they did sneak into August this year, releasing on the 25th. Declaring the beginning of fall before Labor Day weekend was a bit audacious, but surely they won’t go any earlier…right?
With that established, we assessed when pumpkin spice season ends. That’s a trickier question, as there’s no single day when consumption immediately falls off, but it does seem to be creeping steadily later. As evidence, we present to you this startling fact: in 2009, the bulk of pumpkin spice food entries in MyFitnessPal dropped off on January 5, whereas last year they stretched all the way until March 1. In total, it stretched an extra 51 days–that’s over seven extra weeks of pumpkin spice madness! (See below for methodology.)
Sure, pumpkin spice season started a smidge earlier this year, but the real headline here is that it’s creeping from fall all the way through winter, and now it has it’s cinnamony sights set on spring. Before you know it, we could be looking at pumpkin spice peeps and jelly beans.
Top 10 Pumpkin Spice Foods
发现南瓜香料季节始于星巴克的PSL，我们想知道它是否是单手负责我们数据中的趋势，还是还有其他同样流行的南瓜香料零食。因此，我们在2014年10月的MyFitnessPal数据库中挖掘了十大最受欢迎的南瓜香料食品。扰流板警报：咖啡伴侣的家庭奶精实际上击败了其昂贵的咖啡店竞争对手。同样有趣的是，尽管市场上有各种南瓜香料零食，但仍然是咖啡，或者您会用咖啡捕捉到我们的心，思想和卡路里的咖啡。
We love that two of the top ten pumpkin spice foods were homemade. If you’re in the pro-pumpkin spice camp, here are a few recipes you can try yourself:
带有奶油南瓜香醋的收获沙拉
Pumpkin Spice Pancakes
南瓜派电力叮咬
Spicy, Not Sinful Pumpkin Spice Latte
6 Delicious Ideas for Pumpkins & Squash
What do you think of pumpkin spice? Is it love, hate, or love/hate? Tell us in the comments.
Methodology
To examine the consumption of pumpkin spice foods over time, we counted all of the foods logged every day from the beginning of 2009 until October 14, 2014 that had “pumpkin spice” listed in the description. Then, to control for the general growth of our database over time, we divided that number by the number of overall foods logged on each day.
我们将南瓜香料季节的结束定义为南瓜香料食品的百分比下降到0.02％以下，这是大多数年来的淡季南瓜香料消耗率。
