I find it hard to believe that anyone finds this to be the “optimally delicious” amount of sugar, unless the only people they’re asking are 6-year-olds.
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Really, it shouldn’t be legal to sell that.
I checked and couldn’t find any Starbucks options that are anywhere close to that. They seem to max out at around 90g of sugar, which itself is staggering and shouldn’t be sold, but still, less than half this Frozen Swirl.
The comparable Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Crème Frappuccino® Blended Beverage, in a Venti (largest size) only comes to 61g of sugar, so about ONE THIRD. When your Starbucks Pumpkin Spice is the healthy option, something is deeply wrong.
A further point, if you get the Jamba Juice large size Pumpkin Smash, you get 119g of sugar. Once again, Starbucks is the healthy option compared to the fruit smoothie place!
I also checked McDonald’s. Their largest size vanilla shake comes in with 133g of carbs, although only 85g of that is sugar, whatever that means. What kind of carbs are in a shake that aren’t sugar? It’s some kind of thickening starch maybe?
Maybe Starbucks is taking seriously the idea of making their drinks enticing while reducing the load of sugar somehow?
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Very, very wired 6 year olds
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Yeah, my first question was “how?” (do they manage to load it up with that much sugar), followed by “why?” Because that’s too much - it’s clearly too sweet, and far more than similar products. Obviously enough people are into it to make it a viable product, somehow. Personally, I find I can’t eat a lot of processed foods because they’re grossly sweet - even the things that absolutely shouldn’t have sugar in them at all, but inexplicably do.
I wonder if they actually have another ingredient (or several) that’s unusually bitter (for the product type) and have added more sugar to mask it, which is why it’s so much higher than similar drinks.
Let’s see, they’ve got: corn syrup, glycerin, milk… (About 12 grams of carbs in a cup of milk.) Carrageenan has carbs, but they don’t seem to be using enough to contribute measurable amounts of carbs. The gums they use for thickeners don’t have (appreciable amounts of) carbs either.
With all that fat and sugar, there’s no room for actual coffee. (Seriously - it doesn’t appear to actually have coffee in it? “Coffee swirl syrup” is a minor sub-ingredient, and coffee is the third ingredient on that list.)
Ah, but in this case they don’t call it “pumpkin spice” but “pumpkin” - as there’s a pumpkin-flavored syrup in there, just no pumpkin itself. But that’s because the drink is basically a bunch of flavored syrups combined together: plain sugar syrup, coffee syrup, pumpkin syrup, caramel syrup (plus milk and whipped cream).
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Hilarious how behind everyone here is.
in response to this nutritional critique Dunkin announced a whole new drink incorporating 4 (yes four) Dunkin Pumpkin munchkins into a frozen coffee drink, mainly to distract you from the news that one normal frozen coffee is equivalent to 14 donuts, but also as a giant middle finger to anyone vaguely paying attention.
I wish i was joking, but here: I Tried The Ice Spice Munchkin Drink From Dunkin'—Here Are My Thoughts
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I guess between these two posts my question of “why?” is answered.
It’s either “we want to give you diabetes because we can, ROFLMAO 
”
or
“we have to fill the cup with something and every ingredient in the store besides water is mostly sugar.”
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I like how my knee-jerk reaction from glancing at the start of the post was echoed in the “Takeaway:” part.
I’m not a coffee or milkshake or whatever this is fan (I have actually forgotten the original post after scrolling through the comments, I’m tired) but I think I could eat fewer than 14 donuts in the name of healthy living.
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Cold stuff needs to have more flavouring and sweetening to register on the tongue. So they ‘need’ to pile more sugar in there to make it taste reasonably sweet.
As for the ‘why’ - well who knows, but I’m pretty sure this is the sort of reasoning that ends up with dinosaur theme parks and very fragile IT infrastructure on remote tropical islands…
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185 g of sugar. The mind boggles.
Yesterday, I prepared a simple cake for my colleagues.
I used 200 g of sugar for a medium size cake.
At fika we were eight, so about 25 g each. Nobody complained it wasn’t sweet enough.
As a kid, I tried coffee with sugar and did not like it at all.
When I decided to try it black, it was love at second sight.
But alas, coffee has nothing to do with this abomination.
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That’ll get your hair a’tingling!
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I’m a Krispy Kreme person and thought, ha 14 of those Dunkin donuts I bet KK can do that in 10 or less.
Apparently I was wrong. A regular glazed Krispy Kreme only has 10g of sugar and 190 calories.
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I bet even that “coffee syrup” has sugar in it. I don’t really love Starbucks, but at least you are getting real coffee along with the sugary deliciousness. Most of the time I stop by the local coffee shop, it’s both cheaper and tastier. (I still get something that is more chocolate than coffee, but it’s not a daily or weekly thing.)
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I think I can believe it. KK donuts are way smaller than DD donuts. I have not bothered to look it up (shame on me) but I wonder what the advertised weight of each donut is, and how the recipes compare portion-for-portion. My suspicion is that KKs are proportionally more sugary but also all the vendors love to cram hidden sugar into things for whatever bliss-point related reasons, so who knows.
I think KK actually toned down some of the sugar / fat in the original glazed due to some flack about calorically dense foods. I think at one time it was a good bit over 200 calories. Obviously they could have just made them smaller, but a dozen still fits about the same in their box (yeah I guess that could have shrank as well.)
Now the REAL question.
-Scarf down a dozen KK while running 5 miles
OR
-Guzzle the Dunkin’ Pumpkin while doing 5 miles…
Being mid-40’s I don’t think I could do either without 
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If I’m going to run 5 miles down Hillsborough St. I’d rather stop at Char-Grill on the way.
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A couple months ago I watched the 2014 documentary “Fed Up” for the first time and it really opened my eyes to just how bad sugar is. I went the Whole30 route and haven’t looked back. I think today if I drank one of those Frozen Swirl Pumpkin coffees it would throw me into cardiac arrest. 
Here’s the full documentary just in case you’ve never seen it…
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Mrs Peas just read a book called “Rest is Resistance” that made just this argument and that the American culture of overworking is a form of systemic oppression (it is!). Now she thinks I’m even more progressive. 
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This is a great recommendation, and luckily the Brooklyn Public Library has it! (41 holds on 13 copies, we’re winning!) I’m excited to read a book that I can feel proud instead of guilty if I read a few pages, get sleepy, grab a few winks, then continue.
The vaunted Virtue of Sleeplessness in The American Spirit of Capitalism has been bouncing around in my head for a while, particularly whenever I read that yet another sociopathic CEO just happens to be an insomniac. My mother in law - despite being a died in the wool labor advocate - also never needed/couldn’t sleep and tortured her kids with long nights of studies. The racist tropes of othering siesta culture and white contractors and clients mocking subcontractors with “mañana, mañana” fits nicely into this pattern as well. It makes it hard to nap knowing assholes never sleep…
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