Many recipes have come close to recreating the Starbucks pink drink. Some dubious hacks were as simple as combining store bought juice with coconut milk. Higher quality imitations required detailed prep work. This recipe has the best of both worlds. It tastes exactly like the Starbucks drink, but only requires you to mix together four pre-made ingredients.

Why Make it at Home?

First, making a pink drink at home is significantly cheaper than buying it. The ingredients that make up this recipe only cost $1.57! And that’s to recreate a drink that usually costs 5 or 6 dollars!

Second, it’s actually faster to make it from scratch. This recipe requires no prep work! Just throw the ingredients together and shake! Forget being quicker than buying it from the store, this recipe can be made faster than you can put your shoes on to leave!

How did I crack the code?

I first came across a TikTok stating that Ocean Spray Cran-Strawberry juice mixed with Silk coconut milk recreated the pink drink. I was suspicious of this, so I tested it side by side with a Starbucks pink drink. The result was as expected, it was clearly a different tasting beverage…

But it was surprisingly close! Close enough to make me think it was possible to bridge the gap using this two-ingredient combination as the base….

The First Draft

The first thing I did was fix the obvious: Starbucks’ pink drink used freeze dried strawberries, this recipe had none. So I added some, and the results were promising. After shaking the drink with a small handful of freeze dried strawberries, their unique taste combined with the existing drink to make something very close to the Starbucks’ version…

But there was still something missing. Taste-wise I felt the Starbucks’ drink had a hit of acidity that was missing from my version. I tried adding lemon juice. It tasted closer, but it didn’t match the flavor profile.

The Final Prodcut

It wasn’t until I looked closer at the ingredient list that I found my answer: green coffee bean extract. I ordered some and gave the powder a taste. That was it! That slightly acidic and earthy flavor was the exact flavor I was missing. And as an added benefit, it caffeinated the homemade drink just like the Starbucks version.