![]() “That’s a cool thing for teens,” Simon says. “A Frappuccino is one of those types of things that gives them the feeling of appropriating adult behavior, and yet also straddles this world of still being sort of like an ice cream milkshake.”īut what’s remained unchanged is that coffee is still a symbol of adulthood, and Starbucks - as omnipresent as it might be - still requires a mastery of the language of words like venti and macchiato. “What are these tokens, these consumables that allow a younger person to feel like they’re entering into this adult world?” Kara Nielsen, vice president of trends and marketing at food trend analyst firm CCD Innovation asks. If I’m Starbucks, I’m loving that because I’m building loyalty.” “Teens can ease their way into a drink where the coffee’s actually disguised - or they don’t even have to have it. “Frappuccinos and stuff like that, they’re gateway drugs,” he says. I learned a lot about the world at that Starbucks while drinking a Frapp.” Now, there are reportedly over 36,000 possible flavor combinations of the comfortingly sweet Frappuccino, creating a devotion that’s lead to preteen Frappuccino-themed birthday parties.īryant Simon, a professor at Temple University who wrote Everything but the Coffee: Learning About America From Starbucks, describes the appeal of the blended-creme drink to teens - and to Starbucks. “We had a Starbucks and a Jamba Juice store a few blocks away, so we would all make the pilgrimage every Friday after school. “I used to have the amount it cost (with tax) memorized and would count it out to exact change during middle school nearly every Friday,” she says. Maddy Franklin, a 23-year-old designer living in Brooklyn, has a “very vivid memory” of being a 13-year-old putting her “precious two-dollar bill” towards buying a caramel Frappuccino. “But for our customers it represented a momentary break - an escape in their day.”Īnd for the last two decades, give or take, that dome lid and green straw have been synonymous with modern-day preteen life. “At the time, domed lids were radical thinking, so was the idea of adding whipped cream,” wrote Starbucks’s Dina Campion in a brief history of the Frappuccino, published in 2015 to mark the drink’s anniversary. It wasn’t until 2002 that the Blended Créme beverages - Frappuccinos sans coffee or tea, and in flavors like Vanilla Bean or Strawberries & Crème - were launched. The drink was introduced to Starbucks locations all over the country in 1995 with the original flavors of mocha and coffee. Howell’s marketing manager, Andrew Frank, dubbed it the Frappuccino, a portmanteau of “frappe,” the New England word for a milkshake. George Howell, founder of the Coffee Connection, had dreamed up the drink two years earlier as a version of the cappuccino granita, an Italian frozen dessert. It was after Starbucks bought the Coffee Connection, an Eastern Massachusetts coffee chain, in 1994 that the drink became the Frappuccino. The Frappuccino was first tested in a San Fernando Valley Starbucks that same year: A few Starbucks managers had noticed smaller coffee shops in the area with blended coffee drinks, and they saw an opportunity for the chain to have a similar beverage during a hot, sticky summer. In 1993, when the first Starbucks opened in New York City, a latte was exotic enough to merit the New York Times defining the drink and explaining its pronunciation. But drinking it made me feel not just extremely cool I felt like I had taken a step toward the kind of urbane life I saw myself living outside my suburban town. ![]() It was all whipped cream and saccharine vanilla - the kind of tongue-coating sweetness that’s de rigeur as a kid and a little depraved as an adult. ![]() Staring at the drink menu, unsure of what a latte or a macchiato would even look like, I ordered what felt like the tasty-but-chic choice: the Vanilla Bean Crème Frappuccino. I was 12, and the first Barnes & Noble with a Starbucks cafe opened in my South Texas hometown. ![]() I don’t remember much, but I can vividly recall ordering my first Frappuccino. ![]()
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