Drink Your Dessert With Starbucks' 6 New Fan Favorite Fraps
Starbucks is throwing quite the 20th birthday party.
— -- The Frappuccino is all grown up. This year marks the beverage’s 20th birthday, meaning you can no longer call this drink a teen.
The drink has, until now, not felt the need to much explore its personality; rather, it’s pretty modestly kept to only a few standard flavors (mocha, caramel, java chip, etc.) within the United States. But now that it’s 20, Frap is busting out of its chaste childhood and donning lots of outfits to celebrate its adult status.
Starting today, Starbucks is throwing quite the birthday party by debuting six new frozen drinks based on customers’ favorite flavor combinations. The dessert-inspired drinks – Lemon Bar, Caramel Cocoa Cluster, Cupcake, Red Velvet, Cotton Candy and Cinnamon Roll – are all joining the menu at U.S. and Canada stores for a limited time.
The drink has come a long way from its birth in 1993. Created as a response to hot California customers’ requests, the original Frappuccino was coffee-flavored and offered in only one store in Los Angeles. By the next summer, 10 southern California stores were selling the drink, which was later dubbed the “Frappuccino” as a mix of the names “Frappe” for frozen and “Cappuccino” for the milky coffee contents. (Fun fact: The name was actually a holdover from The Coffee Connection in Boston, which Starbucks acquired, but their Frappuccino was a different drink.)
The year 1995 saw the nationwide launch of the Frappuccino in coffee and mocha flavors to great success. It accounted for 11 percent of Starbucks’ summer sales that year in its 500 stores across the country. The high sales prompted the coffee chain to bottle the beverage and sell it in supermarkets just one year later.
“We were so confident of our product that we didn’t even test-market it,” Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz wrote in his book, “Pour Your Heart Into It.”
The company “ramped up production as quickly as possible, but even then we could supply only West Coast supermarkets for the summer of 1996. We couldn’t make it fast enough.”
Today, there are more than 36,000 different possible drink combinations, and fans have taken to creating their own flavors with such fervor that there’s an entire website dedicated to such possibilities, such as chocolate-covered raspberry or cake batter. The six new flavors launching today are based on the most popular fan combinations.
“Frappuccino really epitomizes two things: one is that we offer Frappuccino really in response to what customers were asking for. Starbucks listens to our customers. That beverage is a great example of us listening to our customers and offering them a beverage they were looking for,” Starbucks spokeswoman Erin Shane told ABC News.
“It also epitomizes innovation for Starbucks. When this product was introduced in 1993, the ice coffee blended beverages were a new thing and regionally specific, so it does epitomize the innovative spirit we have as a company but staying true to our coffee roots as well.”
Customers can try the fan flavors and vote for their favorite through June 19. On June 26, the top three will be narrowed down and fans can again vote for the winning flavor to be announced on July 3. To celebrate its blue ribbon status, Starbucks will then offer the top Frap in a grande from July 3 through 6 for $3 from 2 to 5 p.m. local time.
It’s an all-out promotional celebration for the 20th anniversary, and who knows what next year will bring; maybe we’ll get to legally add alcohol, since it will be 21 and all.
