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Years before Starbucks debuted the pumpkin spice latte, a small, family-owned coffee company in Pennsylvania had already rolled out a predecessor.
“We were the company that developed pumpkin spice [coffee] before anybody,” Randy Fasig, owner of Fasig’s coffee in Allentown, told PA Local by phone.
There are several written histories about the rise of pumpkin spice. Perhaps the most frequently cited example, published by The Chicagoist , points to a 1998 mention of Fasig’s pumpkin spice coffee in Allentown’s Morning Call newspaper as one of the earliest references found anywhere. And while a Tampa Bay Times article from two years prior mentioned pumpkin spice coffee in a piece on local roasters there, Fasig is confident Pennsylvania had it first.
Fasig, now 71 and “basically retired,” can’t recall the exact year of their pumpkin spice coffee launch, but it was advertised with the Northampton Farmers Market in 1997 and “may go back to 1991.” He added: “Before we introduced it to supermarkets we sold it to speciality food customers for years.” Starbucks rolled out its pumpkin spice latte in 2003.