Starbucks Holiday Menu Returns Thursday With Tiramisu Drinks and a Pup Cup

Starbucks' holiday menu lands Thursday, and it's a bigger play than nostalgia. The Seattle-based coffee giant is stacking returning seasonal drinks, three new tiramisu-inspired beverages, new food items, redesigned cups and a merch calendar that runs into December.

What's actually new this year? The lineup leads with the Tiramisu Velvet Latte, hot or iced, which layers espresso, milk and vanilla syrup under Velvet Mascarpone Cold Foam and a cocoa dusting. The Tiramisu Velvet Cold Brew runs the same formula on cold brew base. Both extend a cold-foam platform Starbucks has leaned on heavily, since foam add-ons attach to drinks customers already order.

Two more newcomers fit the red-and-green palette: the Apple Pomegranate Refresher, with popping pomegranate-flavored pearls, and the Snowy Apple Drink, a coconut-milk-based creamier version. Returning favorites — Peppermint Mocha, Sugar Cookie Latte, Caramel Brulée Latte and Gingerbread Chai — get iced variations this year in the Iced Sugar Cookie Cream Matcha and Iced Caramel Brulée Cream Chai. That's menu engineering in its purest form: keep the anchor flavors, then sell them in new formats and dayparts.

The cups carry their own story. Starbucks introduced its first holiday cups in 1997, when a handful of people designed them about two months before they hit coffeehouses. This year's designs took two years of work, according to the company's website. The 2026 to-go hot cups feature holiday trees, garlands and bows on red or white backgrounds; the cold cup carries evergreen boughs and red bows.

For the first time, guests can buy a specially designed pup cup — a 3.5-ounce cup, available for a very limited time and only in company-operated stores. The dog illustrated on it is modeled on a real-life beagle named Junie. Note the channel distinction: franchised and licensed locations won't carry it, which makes the item a company-store traffic hook.

What does the food side look like?

New items include a Braised Short Rib Grilled Cheese — cheddar, mozzarella and Parmesan with caramelized onion jam on sourdough — and a refreshed Turkey & Stuffing Sandwich on a new baguette baked with cranberries in the dough. Sweet additions include a Bearista Cake Pop: vanilla cake, buttercream frosting, chocolate icing, decorated like the Bearista bear. The Cranberry Bliss Bar, Snowman Cookie and Sugar Plum Danish make their annual return.

The merch calendar keeps customers coming back on specific dates:

• Nov. 10: a surprise collection of Bearista Glass Cold Cup characters arrives, each package holding a mystery character.
• Nov. 17: Red Cup Day, a tradition since 2018. Buy any handcrafted holiday beverage, get a reusable red cup to refill all season and keep as a collectible.
• Dec. 1: the original Bearista Glass Cold Cup with the sporty green cap returns.

Red Cup Day is the traffic play that matters most. It converts a single-visit beverage purchase into a collectible drop, and reusable cups tie directly into Starbucks' broader sustainability push while giving customers a reason to return and refill through the season.

The strategy is straightforward: limited-time flavors drive check attachments, mystery merch drives repeat visits on fixed dates, and the pup cup gives company-operated stores an exclusive. Expect the usual seasonal queue to start Thursday, with the Nov. 17 cup drop as the next measurable traffic spike.