America Runs on … Bananas?

Kelsy Brown

Staff Writer

Like any other New Englander, I too find myself in the Dunkin drive through quite often, especially because nothing beats having a fun drink while completing homework. However, I had to do a double take after seeing the newly released Spring menu. As I am going down the new list of drinks, almost every drink contains the very spring flavor of…banana? Every new drink on the specialty menu, besides the new Dunkin’ Zero, contains an aspect of banana whether it be the Banana Puddin’ Cloud Latte, Banana Daydream Refreshers, Bananarama Iced Matcha, Banana Iced Protein Latte and many more.

Having very mixed (or should I say concerned) feelings about banana coffee, like any other good investigative journalist, I had to go try out the new spring menu for myself. I ordered the Banana Puddin’ Cloud Latte, and would not rate it very highly. The banana flavor was not overly strong, but the after taste was extremely artificial. It tasted like a liquidated banana Laffy Taffy which truly does not belong in any coffee. To me, the flavor profiles of coffee and banana just do not match and should definitely remain separate. Knowing I was a banana hater and would not drink the whole coffee, I also ordered another new Spring menu item, the Dunkin’ Zero Sunzest flavor. In this drink, there is a mixture of Tropical Mango and Peach flavoring in sparkling water which was surprisingly very good as it wasn’t too overly sweet and most importantly did not contain banana. 

Normally, Dunkin’ provides many different new flavors for their specialty menus as past spring drinks included pistachio, the signature Dunkalatte, and churro. In prior years, many different flavors were introduced rather than focusing the entire menu around one very distinct flavor. I may be banana’s biggest hater, but I wish there was more variety in the Spring menu rather than the extreme promotion of bananas.