WASHINGTON: Trick or treat! While youngsters dress up as ghosts and goblins and go door to door for Halloween, grown-ups across the United States are indulging in all things pumpkin spice.

What started a decade ago as a seasonal Starbucks coffee flavour — which curiously isn’t made of pumpkin — has blossomed into something of an autumn American obsession.

Supermarket shelves are bursting with pumpkin spice cookies, chocolates, marshmallows, waffles, bagels, pasta, potato chips, Greek yogurt, hummus, granola and pudding, to name but a few.

Trader Joe’s, a hip grocery chain, features “pumpkin-spiced pumpkin seeds” among its arm’s length list of edible Halloween offerings.

Craft brewers are tapping into a growing market for limited-edition pumpkin-flavored beer. Bartenders mix pumpkin spice cocktails that might go nicely with a pumpkin spice e-cigarette.

“Now, everything from your morning coffee to salad mix has some type of pumpkin flavouring,” food writer Samantha Bakall of the Oregonian newspaper in Portland, Oregon reported.

In a bit of investigative lifestyle journalism, Bakall set out to sample every pumpkin-flavoured product she could find. She stopped after 26 items, leaving 17 more untested.

“I’ve heard of realtors using pumpkin spice candles when they are staging homes as a way to make prospective buyers feel more at home,” added Karen Mishra, a marketing professor at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Mercifully, no one — at least, not yet — is marketing pumpkin spice tampons, after a convincing Photoshop image of a spoof pumpkin-scented Tampax box went viral online.

Halloween is big business, with American consumers expected to drop $7.4 billion this year on costumes, decorations, candy and more, the National Retail Federation has said.

Some of those greenbacks will be spent on real pumpkins.

Published in Dawn, November 1st , 2014