The Pumpkin Spice Takeover, Counted: New Products in the USDA Database by Year

A barcode-level record of branded food labels

The source is the Branded Foods portion of USDA's FoodData Central, a nutrient database that the agency says was first launched in April 2019 and receives major updates every six months. Branded Foods holds the information printed on packaged foods: product names, ingredient statements, serving sizes, and nutrition panels.

That branded collection is older than FoodData Central itself. The USDA Global Branded Food Products Database, a public-private partnership, officially launched on September 16, 2016, with partners that include USDA, GS1 US, 1WorldSync, the University of Maryland, and Euromonitor International. When FoodData Central opened in 2019, it absorbed that existing collection in one go, and that detail turns out to matter a great deal for any count by year.

The version we used

We worked from the Branded Foods bulk download dated April 30, 2026, which is the most recent release as of this writing. Its newest record is dated April 23, 2026, so every 2026 figure below is year-to-date through that point, not a full year. The file holds 1,999,950 records, but many of those are repeat versions of the same product, because a barcode gets a new record each time its label data is updated. Collapsed to one entry per barcode, and limited to products sold in the United States, the database covers 464,005 distinct products.

The full table

Here's the core of it: every distinct US product whose name or ingredient list includes "pumpkin spice" or "pumpkin pie spice," dated by its first appearance in the database. The last column is the one to watch. It shows pumpkin spice products as a share of all new products that entered the database that year, expressed per 10,000.

If you only looked at the middle column, you might come away with a strange story: pumpkin spice peaked in 2019, bounced back in 2023, then all but disappeared. That is not what happened on store shelves, and the two sections below explain why the raw numbers wobble the way they do.

Why 2019 looks enormous

Of the 288,709 US products first dated 2019, 257,081 share a single date: April 1, 2019. That's the day FoodData Central opened and took in the entire existing branded collection, including products that had been gathered since 2016. So the 539 pumpkin spice products stamped 2019 are best read as an opening inventory, a snapshot of everything already in the system, rather than a wave of new launches.

There is a second way to look at those early years. Each record also carries a date for when the manufacturer last changed the product data. Using that date on each product's earliest record spreads the 2019 pile back across 2017 (196 pumpkin spice products), 2018 (300), and 2019 (65). The share barely moves across all three, sitting between 18.2 and 19.4 per 10,000. That steadiness is a good sign the baseline is real and not a quirk of the April 2019 upload.

Why the counts shrink after 2023

The drop in 2024 and beyond has nothing to do with pumpkin spice and everything to do with plumbing. Most new products in the database's early years arrived through one data partner, Label Insight, which supplied 275,927 of the 288,709 new US products in 2019 and 55,890 of the 59,000 in 2023. After 2023, that feed contributes no new products at all. The 2024 and 2025 additions come only through the GS1 channel, and 2026 so far is mostly a new Euromonitor feed.

Fewer products flowing in means fewer pumpkin spice products counted, even if the flavor is as popular as ever. The newer feeds' recent entries also lean toward big national brands, the kind that roll out seasonal flavors, so the higher shares for 2024 through 2026 rest on small numbers and a different mix of suppliers. They're worth showing, and they point in the same direction, but they aren't a like-for-like comparison with earlier years.

The number that holds up: share of new products

Once you set aside the database's growth spurts, the comparison that works is the share. Across 2019 and 2020, pumpkin spice accounted for about 18.9 of every 10,000 new products, or roughly one in 530. Across 2021 through 2023, it was about 28.1 per 10,000, closer to one in 355. That's a rise of roughly one and a half times within the stretch when the same two data feeds were doing the supplying.

We also tested a stricter rule. About a quarter of the matches name pumpkin spice only in the ingredient list, not in the product name, and those are clustered in the 2019 backlog. Counting only products that put the flavor in their name, the share climbs even more steeply, from about 11 per 10,000 in 2019 and 2020 to about 26 per 10,000 in 2021 through 2023. Either way you slice it, the flavor's slice of new products grew.

The big picture by aisle

The database sorts products into categories assigned by its data partners, and the 1,000 pumpkin spice products land in 71 of them. Because the two main data feeds use slightly different labels for the same shelf (one says "Cookies & Biscuits," another "Biscuits/Cookies"), we grouped them into families. Here's how those families break down across the three eras of the database.

A few patterns jump out. Baked goods and snacks carry the biggest totals, which makes sense for a flavor born in a pie. But coffee creamers and drink mixes are the one family that grew from the backlog to the 2020 to 2023 era, from 56 products to 72, and they make up the largest share of the newest entries. If it feels like pumpkin spice has moved into your morning coffee more than anywhere else, the database agrees.

At the single-category level, the leaders are "Popcorn, Peanuts, Seeds & Related Snacks" with 100 products, "Cookies & Biscuits" with 81, "Cakes, Cupcakes, Snack Cakes" with 78, and "Milk Additives," the category that holds most coffee creamers, with 61. Cereal comes in with 47, a group that sits alongside the boxes in our look at 20 "healthy" cereals ranked by fiber per dollar.

Already everywhere by the time the database opened

We set out to date the moment pumpkin spice reached each aisle, and the database only partly allows it. Of the 71 categories, 54 already hold at least one pumpkin spice product in the 2019 opening backlog. In other words, by the time USDA's public branded database opened its doors, the flavor had already reached cheese, yogurt, sausage, seafood, honey, nut butter, chewing gum, and frozen waffles. The takeover wasn't something the database watched unfold. It was already well underway.

The aisles it reached later

Seventeen categories show their first pumpkin spice product after 2019. Several of those are simply the newer feeds' names for shelves that were already covered, like "Snacks" or "Cream/Cream Substitutes." The rest are new ground, and they read like a map of the flavor's outer edges:

• 2020: pre-packaged produce (pumpkin spice caramel apples), cooking oils (a pumpkin spice infused avocado oil spray), filled pasta, and bottled iced tea
• 2022: sauces, with a pumpkin spice sauce in the ketchup, mustard, and barbecue category
• 2023: bacon, a pumpkin spice ramen, frozen dough, and an alcoholic beverage
• 2024: nutritional supplements, in the form of a plant-based protein powder

Because the data feeds changed over this period, a first appearance can also reflect a new supplier rather than a new product. Still, the direction is hard to miss: the flavor keeps finding its way past the bakery and toward the savory side of the store.

The strangest entries

Every big dataset has its surprises, and this one is no exception. Among the 1,000 products, you'll find a pumpkin spice Atlantic salmon sold as two boneless fillets, an organic chicken sausage flavored with pumpkin spice, pumpkin spice hickory-smoked thick-cut bacon, and a chili seasoning from a farm-pantry brand labeled "Harvest Pumpkin Spice." There are chopped salad kits with pumpkin-spiced cornbread crumbles and a pumpkin-spiced Caesar dressing, and a pumpkin spice flavored ramen.

It's worth pausing on what this does and doesn't mean. Savory pumpkin spice products are real, but they're rare. The whole "everything else" family, from meat to pasta to cooking oil, adds up to just 21 products, about 2% of the total. The headline-grabbing oddities are the fringe. The core of pumpkin spice is still a sweet, snackable, sippable flavor.

Store brands lead the count

When you sort the 1,000 products by the company that owns the brand, the top of the list isn't a famous cereal maker or coffee chain. It's retailers. Target Stores leads with 59 pumpkin spice products, followed by Wal-Mart Stores with 26 and Ahold USA, the grocery group behind several regional chains, with 24. Meijer, Safeway, Giant Eagle, and Whole Foods Market all land in the top dozen as well.

National manufacturers fill out the rest: General Mills and Nestlé USA with 17 each, Chobani with 16, and Kellogg and Kraft Heinz with 11 apiece. Part of the retailer lead is simple arithmetic. A store brand might offer pumpkin spice cookies, pretzels, almonds, coffee, and creamer all under one label, and each one gets its own barcode. If you're curious how those store-brand shelves stack up in other ways, our comparison of which grocery stores offer the best nutrition per dollar looks at the same retailers from a different angle.

The newest entries are all about coffee

The handful of products added since 2024 paint a clear picture of where big brands are investing. Six International Delight pumpkin pie spice creamers arrived in 2025, in sizes from single-serve cups to a 64-ounce bottle. Coffee mate, Starbucks, Silk, Califia Farms, Elmhurst, and Laird Superfood creamers all appear in the 2024 to 2026 records, along with a pumpkin spice cream cheese spread from Philadelphia. Of the 34 products from this period, 21 sit in the coffee creamer, drink mix, and dairy families.

About four in ten name it and contain it

Here's a detail that surprises a lot of people: pumpkin spice, as a blend, contains no pumpkin at all. It's a mix of warm baking spices. So a product called "pumpkin spice" might contain pumpkin, or it might simply taste like the spices that go into a pumpkin pie.

Because every product in the database comes with its ingredient statement, we could check this at scale. Of the 727 products that put pumpkin spice in their name, 311, or about 43%, list some form of pumpkin in their most recent ingredients, most often pumpkin puree, pumpkin powder, or pumpkin flakes. We didn't count pumpkin seeds or "pumpkin flavor" as pumpkin, and we removed the phrase "pumpkin spice" itself before checking. The other 57% or so get their pumpkin character from spices and flavorings alone.

That split is the whole idea behind our companion piece, The Pumpkin Spice Audit, which takes a closer look at 40 individual products and what their ingredient lists actually reveal. The census here shows the pattern holds across the full database: the word on the front of the package describes a taste, and the ingredient list is where the contents are spelled out. For a broader look at how front-of-package language can outrun what's inside, our guide to the exaggerated claims food brands put on their labels walks through the most common ones.

The spice blend itself is barely there

If you went looking for jars of plain pumpkin pie spice, you'd find surprisingly few. Only 13 of the 1,000 products are spice blends or seasonings, and even that group includes a chili seasoning, a popcorn seasoning, and a pumpkin spice sugar. The straight blend appears under names like Spice Islands, Whole Foods Market, Morton Bassett, and The Nutmeg Spice Co. The most famous jar of all, McCormick's, doesn't appear in the branded database, a reminder that the census reflects which companies submit their data, not a complete inventory of the spice rack.

From a 1934 spice jar to a 2003 coffee lab

Pumpkin spice as a commercial product has a clear starting point. McCormick says that in 1934 it introduced pumpkin pie spice, a blend of cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and allspice.

The flavor's leap from the baking aisle to everything else is usually traced to coffee. Starbucks describes how a small team in its "Liquid Lab" began working on a new fall drink early in 2003, tested it in 100 stores, and rolled the Pumpkin Spice Latte out across its US stores in fall 2004. The database doesn't reach back that far, but its contents hint at the drink's shadow. Starbucks-branded pumpkin spice coffee drinks and creamers turn up in the records, and the phrase "pumpkin spice latte" appears on creamers and tea concentrates from other brands, too.

It's a neat bit of symmetry. The flavor began as a pie seasoning, spent most of the 20th century in the spice cabinet, and then, in roughly the two decades since that coffee test, turned into the orange wave you now see every fall.

The method, step by step

This is the worksheet behind every number above, laid out so anyone can reproduce it.

1. Source. USDA FoodData Central Branded Foods bulk CSV, release dated April 30, 2026, joining the branded product file to the main food file by record ID.
2. Market. Kept products whose market country is the United States, which is 464,005 distinct barcodes.
3. Match rule. Flagged a product if its description or ingredient statement, in any version, contains "pumpkin spice" or "pumpkin pie spice," ignoring case. The pattern also catches small variants such as "pumpkin spiced," "pumpkin-spiced," and "pumpkinspice."
4. Deduplication. Collapsed every product to a single barcode (GTIN or UPC), keeping the earliest publication date. USDA's own field notes say duplicate codes signify an update to the product, so counting records instead of barcodes would have produced 3,499 matches for the same 1,000 products, an average of 3.9 versions each.
5. Date field. Used the date each record was published to FoodData Central. In this release, the publication date and the "available date" match on every record, so the choice between them makes no difference. The manufacturer's modification date was used as a second lens.
6. Normalization. Divided each year's pumpkin spice count by all new US barcodes first published that year, reported per 10,000.
7. Categories. Used the category assigned by the data partner, then grouped the 71 labels into families to reconcile naming differences between feeds.

What the count can and can't tell you

The database is built from what companies and data partners send in. USDA describes the branded collection as information received from food industry data providers, with downloads generated every six months that reflect the most up-to-date version of each product. That makes it a strong, consistent record of what has been submitted, and an incomplete record of what has been sold. Some brands never submit, which is why a household name like McCormick's jar is missing.

A few more limits worth knowing:

• Dates are record events. USDA's documentation notes that an updated value doesn't necessarily reflect a product change and may instead correct a data-entry error. The same caution applies to dates: they describe when a record moved, not when a product launched.
• Removed products are nearly irrelevant here. We checked two archived releases, from December 2019 and October 2023. At most 17 pumpkin spice products that appeared in those files are missing from the current one, under 2% of the total.
• The match rule has edges. Another 77 US products use wording like "spiced pumpkin" or "pumpkin & spice" and fall outside the rule. Including them would lift the total by about 8% without changing the trend.
• 2024 onward is thin. Small, different data feeds supply those years, so their shares are directional, not directly comparable with 2019 through 2023.