Best Food Writing 2015 Read Online Free PDF

He couldn’t let it go.
    At 44, Dukes is old enough—barely—to have grown up with Starbucks. As a kid his mom would take him shopping at the QFC in University Village and give him the decidedly adult responsibility of selecting the coffee, plus a piece of chocolate for himself. He left Seattle to study economics (and play basketball) at Stanford, then went on to work in accounting before an MBA recast his path. He arrived at Starbucks in 2001. In the spring of 2003, he found himself pondering pumpkin as he prowled other coffee shops and paced the aisles of local grocery stores in the name of research.
    The orange gourd is so tied to our cultural identity that Americans of all backgrounds, in all climates, feel compelled to go pick them in the patch, attend festivals in their honor, or set one on the front porch for an entire month, even though we seldom actually eat it. When you get down to it, the flavor is pretty mild.
    Dukes noted a subtle distinction, but an important one: The blend of spices that go into a pumpkin pie—nutmeg, cinnamon, a bit of clove—isdeeply familiar, almost primal to consumers, but new ground for flavored drinks . . . or any other flavored product. Not only do the smell and taste of those spices evoke all the nostalgia that goes with the season, Dukes realized, they answered the questions raised back in the liquid lab: “The spice is important because it brings out the pumpkin and the espresso.”
    Now he had to select which flavors made it to the next step—with his boss’s approval. The world of brand management is a jargon-filled one, and bench top is the term for what happens next. Product managers like Dukes join forces with the research and development team and prepare actual steaming, frothy prototypes of each drink. Mocking up multiple versions of 20 seasonal lattes would be prohibitively expensive, so it was Dukes’s job to put forward four contenders from that original list—four drinks worthy of analysis, scrutiny, and tasting over and over again.
    Three of the drinks he presented to a team headed by Michelle Gass, then the vice president of beverages, were unimpeachably logical—they ranked at the top of the customer survey. There was a chocolate-caramel concoction, a latte with orange flavoring and spices, and another dubbed the cinnamon streusel latte that would later be released as the cinnamon dolce latte. Then there was his fourth and final recommendation: that drink with pumpkin pie flavoring.
    Gass was skeptical. Those mediocre customer survey results didn’t exactly telegraph “wildly successful fall beverage.”
    Her approval was key, not only because of her title, but because she was a rising star at Starbucks. The former chemical engineering major was just 35 at the time, two years older than Dukes, but had already made a name for herself as the marketing manager for Frappuccinos, expanding the line beyond the original coffee and mocha flavors and taking it from a tiny slice of Starbucks’ profits to more than $2 billion. (It was her idea to promote the Frapp as an afternoon indulgence and to add the almost hedonistic cloud of whipped cream.)
    But Dukes stood firm against his boss’s push back. “Trust me,” he told her. “Let us play with it. I’ve seen what’s out there in the market, and there’s nothing like it.”
    What followed was a three-month odyssey of mating pumpkin with spice. The R&D team targeted four possibilities for the drink—high pumpkin, high spice, low pumpkin, low spice—and versions with high and low levels of both components. They tested. They refined. Joinedalong the way by a few others, the same gang that sampled pumpkin pies beneath paper turkey decorations in the liquid lab gathered again two or three times a week, tasting their way through these prototype versions. They jotted notes on sheets and went around the circle sharing feedback on each drink,