How many calories is my fiddly Starbucks order?

January 9, 2018 5:34 PM

I have a very fussy drink order and I can't figure out how many calories is in it. Current and former Starbucks barristas, can you help?

What I order (the app has changed my life because I would die of shame if I actually had to make an order this fussy in person):

Lightly Sweet Chai
Tall
2%
No water
4 pumps of the chai concentrate
1 pump of sweetener syrup
Light foam

My as-yet unanswered questions:
How many calories per pump is the lightly sweet chai?
How much actual milk goes into a tall milk-based beverage? (Steaming it makes it increase in volume, right?)

posted by soren_lorensen to Food & Drink (6 answers total)

According to Starbucks the standard version of the tall chai, lightly sweetened is 140 cals. Each pump of syrup is reckoned to be around 50 Cals by My Fitness Pal so I guess you can work it out depending on how much your syrup load differs from the standard?
posted by freya_lamb at 5:44 PM on January 9, 2018 [1 favorite]

That’s honestly not that fussy. I reckon the tall is 10 oz of actual milk (the tall cup is 12 ounces, less headroom/syrup space and foam volume, which will vary depending on the individual making it.) You can ballpark 10.5 oz for safety since it’s better to overestimate calories and be pleasantly surprised.

Syrup will vary slightly in calories but 50 per pump is the standard.
posted by blnkfrnk at 6:06 PM on January 9, 2018

If you go during a lull, the baristas will probably be happy to prepare the drink components into your own cups— bring measuring cups and explain what you’re attempting.
posted by blnkfrnk at 6:07 PM on January 9, 2018

Response by poster: Just to clarify, the Lightly Sweet Chai is a different product than the regular Starbucks Chai (which is indeed 50 cal per pump). It's (as the name suggests) barely sweetened and I'm not sure whether it even has any sugar in it at all or if all the sugar comes from however many pumps of sweetener you get.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:32 PM on January 9, 2018

Best answer: Honestly - I love math and I was a Starbucks barista for almost 4 years and the results of my attempts at back-calculating caloric (or caffeine) content of drinks based on amounts of ingredients that should be in different drinks plus information on the website have sometimes not made logical sense.

My best attempt at back-calculating this would be to look at the caloric content of a standard grande lightly sweetened chai latte (4 pumps lightly sweet chai syrup, probably a similar amount of milk to your *tall no-water* drink, and 4 pumps of liquid cane syrup) and subtract the calories from the liquid cane syrup and then add the calories from whichever sweetener you have them use.

A grande sweetened black ice tea contains 4 pumps of liquid cane syrup and supposedly contains 45 calories. Black tea on its own has a negligible caloric content.

The website says a grande lightly sweetened chai latte has 190 calories. This would imply that a grande lightly sweetened chai without the 4 pumps of liquid cane syrup (45 calories) would have 145 calories. If you then add 1 pump of liquid cane syrup, that would add approximately 11 calories (45/4) to bring you to ~156 calories.

I'm not sure which syrups are said to be 50 calories per pump but I don't think that could possibly apply to any of the syrups in your drinks.
posted by needs more cowbell at 6:56 PM on January 9, 2018 [5 favorites]

My general strategy for this is:
1) look at the standard version of the drink on the app and see what the app says goes into it and its nutrition
2) look up the nutrition for whatever I'm taking out (MyFitnessPal has the per-pump info for most Starbucks syrups, or you can go at a slow time and ask to see the packaging)
3) math it
4) make a custom food in MyFitnessPal with the results for future reference

For most sugar-free drinks at Starbucks the majority of your calories are coming from whatever milk you are getting.
posted by oblique red at 9:05 AM on January 10, 2018