Starbucks customers are pushing the boundaries of drink personalization to the extreme in certain instances, resulting in changes that some baristas describe as “excessive,” “ridiculous,” or “disgusting. “Over than a dozen former and present baristas from throughout the United States and Canada told Insider that they were tired of creating excessively complex lattes, cold brews, and Refreshers, as well as so-called TikTok cocktails like the $7 iced white mocha, among other things.
The majority of bespoke drink requests are straightforward. According to an Insider interview with a Starbucks staffer, 75 percent of the personalized drinks at Starbucks had less than three distinct changes.
Personalized Drinks Have Gained Popularity, But They May Also Be A Recipe For Disaster
TikTok trendsetters became viral for posting off-menu, customized drink recipes to try at the coffee shop, each more outrageous than before. Baristas turned to social media to publish the most outrageous modifications, calling out their clients and sharing war tales.
The addition of more caramel drizzle, whipped and heavy cream, cinnamon syrup, and seven pumps of dark caramel to an order that already contained syrupy caramel mixed with coffee and topped with caramel sugar resulted in a laundry list of additional charges.
Marie-Pierre St-Onge, an associate professor of nutritional medicine at Columbia University in New York, said that nutrition experts are now eager to have their say on the long-term effects of this syrup-pumping, cream-swapping craze. “It makes me shudder,” says the author.
“It’s a terrible habit to get into, for sure. “Beginning with the drinks they purchase directly off the menu at their favorite places, St-Onge advises consumers to exercise care since they may already be high in empty calories. This includes coffee drinks, tea drinks, and other popular sugary beverages. The changes and additions to the recipe will only exacerbate the situation.
Without the addition of sweets or heavy creams, coffee is an excellent source of antioxidants, and frequent intake has been linked to several health advantages, including a reduced risk of Type 2 diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, among others. Adding heavy cream and often more than a dozen pumps of flavored syrups are recommended in many of the recipes that have gone viral.
This summer’s most popular off-menu orders, according to Vadiveloo, are based on fruit drinks, which may be deceptively healthful due to their high sugar content. She claims that juice has gained a ‘health halo’ due to the association between it with fruit. However, we do not make up for the calories in juice in the same manner, we do with whole fruit. Therefore it is not recommended. Furthermore, when we just drink juice, it removes the fiber and part of the
water content that helps keep you feeling satisfied, making it more likely that you would overindulge in both juice and sweets at the same time.
The Journal of the American Heart Association published research last year. They discovered that women who consumed one or more sugary drinks per day had an 18 percent increased risk of coronary artery disease. In yet another study published in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation, researchers discovered that sugary beverages are linked with a higher risk of mortality from cardiovascular disease and, to a lesser degree, cancer.
You can retrain your taste buds to enjoy a healthier version of your favorite beverage if you’ve been experimenting with some overly sweet recipes you’ve seen online and if you’ve acquired a sugary habit as a result. The fear of missing out (FOMO) is probably the most hazardous of all the toxic ingredients that are contributing to the spread of drink recipes on the internet. Many of these beverages are items that people take pretty regularly, on top of the fact that they are already not eating a heart-healthy diet. They are then elevated to a glamorous level using the ‘secret menu’ and other consumer psychology techniques.