When I was a teenager, my friends and I used to cosplay as adults by going to our local Starbucks and grabbing a drink to go. Too young for coffee and too hopped up on the special occasion-ness of it all to buy a simple cup of tea, we would instead pick up a whopping great cup of syrup, milk and cream (how adult!).
This beastly creation is known more commonly as a ‘frappuccino’, an entirely made up portmanteau of frappé and cappuccino, the kind of term sure to give any passing Italian an aneurysm.
After one to ten pictures had been obtained of me and my mates holding our frappuccinos, we would inhale them. Or try to, as anyone who has attempted to drink a frappuccino will know that it becomes a near impossible task two thirds of the way in. A real Bruce Bogtrotter chocolate cake situation. And yet we never learned.
Frappuccinos never did me any real harm. I don’t have a huge sweet tooth and it didn’t kickstart some kind of life-long obsession with milkshakes, though I will occasionally part with the £30 necessary to buy one from Five Guys. And yet, there is something about them so fundamentally wrong, so un-British, that I have loathed them from the moment my frontal lobe finally fully developed (last year, thanks for asking).
Luckily, it looks like the government feels the same. Ministers have published proposals for a new version of the sugar tax that would see a new threshold introduced for the sweetest of sweet drinks, such as those with more than 10g sugar per 100ml.
And for the first time, the sugar tax could be applied to milkshakes, sugary coffees, and the not-so-humble frappuccino. About time, too, considering that some frappès and frappuccinos have been found to contain more than an adult’s total daily recommended intake of sugar (as per research from consumer group Which?).
For me, this is great news. The frappuccino is one of the few food imports that has made this country worse. It can stay in the country that came up with it. Which, in case you had any doubts, is America, and definitely not Italy.
The concept of the frappuccino was invented by Andrew Frank, a marketing director at Coffee Connection, in 1992, after CEO George Howell instructed his employees to come up with a way of keeping coffee sales up during the summer months.
Starbucks then purchased Coffee Connection in 1994, buying with it the rights to the word “frappuccino” and all its creamy, sugary connotations. Since then, the drink has become a lucrative behemoth, surpassing an estimated value of $2 billion by 2012.
All of this: the size, the money, the sweetness, is just so unabashedly American, I’m almost embarrassed the frappuccino managed to take off here, in Great Britain. We should be opposed to such things. It just doesn’t fit in with our culture.
To me, frappuccinos are to be imbibed exclusively in an SUV, on the way from one industrial estate containing a Taco Bell to another industrial estate containing a Chick-fil-A. They are the bedfellows of those bulging Stanley cups — the kind that Americans accessorise with snack pouches, phone cases and wrist straps, instead of carrying a bag around their unwalkable cities.
Worse still, the frappuccino has given way to a strange kind of spawn, known as ‘babyccinos’ for your children or ‘puppaccinos’ for your dogs (I have no idea if there’s any difference in ingredients, Starbucks would actually go up in my estimations if there wasn’t).
So go ahead, treasury, tax Big Frap. You can get rid of them for all I care. It will be a glorious day for the country. The kids will find something else strange and pseudo-adult to obsess over anyway. Maybe Yorkshire Tea will have a real moment and the British teabag trade will thrive.
There are few things that I get all My Country, My Rules about, but this is one of them. The Frap has got to go.
