The Unicorn Frappuccino returns to Starbucks for the first time since 2017, and whatever you think of a drink made from mango syrup, sour blue flavouring, pink powder and cream, the numbers are hard to argue with. According to Yahoo Finance, Starbucks sold more than 2 million Unicorn Frappuccino Blended Beverages across its North America company-operated stores over the weekend, making Saturday its biggest North America company-operated sales day ever.
So yes. The drink everyone claims to hate is back, viral again, and apparently shifting units at a historic clip. You have to respect the audacity of it, if nothing else.
Why the Unicorn Frappuccino Returns Starbucks to the Conversation
The original Unicorn Frappuccino was a creature of 2017: a colour-changing, crème-based concoction that looked, as has been widely observed, like someone put a My Little Pony in a blender. It contains 59 grams of sugar. It was introduced for a brief period, went viral largely because people hated it, and then disappeared. That was more or less the point.
The drink was never designed to taste good. It was one of the earliest examples of food engineered primarily to be photographed, memed and spat out on camera rather than actually consumed. Ragebait in a cup. A beverage as content strategy. And it worked in 2017, and it is working again now, with TikTok and Instagram full of people grimacing through sips so they can either dramatically spit or deliver a contrarian “actually it’s not that bad” take.
The business logic behind the revival is clearer still when you look at Starbucks‘ recent trading. Yahoo Finance reports the company posted same-store sales growth of 7.9% in the latest quarter, comfortably ahead of the 5.7% growth Wall Street had expected. The Unicorn’s return fits a broader pattern too: more than 60% of Starbucks’ new beverages since 2024 have featured a fruit flavour, suggesting the chain has been leaning deliberately into bright, photogenic, sweet-forward drinks for a while now. The Unicorn Frappuccino is not an anomaly. It is the logical conclusion of that direction.
Elsewhere in Youth Culture This Week
The Unicorn Frappuccino is not the only piece of nostalgic nonsense doing the rounds. There is a broader pattern here: a generation getting misty-eyed not for goldfish-swallowing contests or raccoon coats, but for weird Tumblr subcultures, terrible Starbucks drinks, and forgotten Saturday Night Live sketches. The good old days, apparently, peak at about 2010 to 2018.
TikToker @babytoni99 has become internet-famous this week for her decade-long obsession with the character of Peter Pan as portrayed by performers at Disneyland. She has posted hundreds of videos of her interactions with those performers over the years, with captions along the lines of “10 years ago I met my lost boy for the first time at Disneyland, little did I know how much he would change my life for the better.” Much of the internet has concluded she is a stalker. The comments are not kind. The more measured read is that she is a Disney Adult doing what Disney Adults do, just more visibly and more often than most.
On a different corner of the internet, Minecraft is generating conversation again, which is not exactly unusual for a game that still draws up to 225 million active players a month despite being released in 2009. The current talking point is the Verity Mod, made by ThatMob. Verity presents itself as an AI companion: a yellow smiley face that follows you around, does you favours, hands you items, stops you getting lost and chats to you when the game gets lonely. It is, in fact, a horror mod. Verity’s helpfulness is a set-up. Something is wrong, and the slow realisation of that wrongness is the whole point. Whether it says something about how Generation Z actually feels about artificial intelligence is left as an exercise for the reader.
And then there is the viral video of the week, which is not new at all. “The Other Cavaliers” is a sketch from Saturday Night Live’s 2018 season, cut from the original broadcast for time and now circulating widely on TikTok. The premise: a promo video for the players on LeBron’s team that season who are not required to be especially good at basketball. It has become useful shorthand for anything or anyone decorative and peripheral. If the numbers on the Unicorn Frappuccino keep coming in like this weekend’s, nobody at Starbucks will be calling themselves the other Cavaliers any time soon.
