Who wouldn’t want to smell like a pizza? The dough, the spices, the cheese, the greasy cardboard box — all that olfactory delight might be too much for one fast-food connoisseur to handle. But now you, too, can smell like the inside of a teenage delivery boy’s Honda Civic — if you’re one of the lucky 100 people who are fans of Pizza Hut and also live in Canada.
According to the Globe and Mail, the project started out as a joke by Grip Limited, Pizza Hut Canada’s social media management firm, who asked the chain’s Facebook fans in August to imagine the aroma of a fresh-delivered pie as a perfume — and to name it.
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“Do you love the smell of a box of Pizza Hut pizza being opened?” the post read. “We thought so. If that smell was a perfume, what would it be called?” Surprised by the enthusiastic response — fans chimed in with names like “Grease Lightning,” “Yeast Seduction” and “Eau de Pepperoni” — Grip Limited decided to take the joke a step further by hiring an aromachologist to design a limited-edition scent.
It was, to put it mildly, a challenge. “We did a couple of rounds … trying to get the right smell,” Beverly D’Cruz, marketing director for Pizza Hut Canada, told the Globe and Mail. “All of them were not fun … You’d think cheese smells nice. Not so.”
The final scent — dubbed Pizza Hut Perfume — includes “top notes of freshly baked, hand-tossed dough,” according to a company press release.
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At the end of September, the company announced the perfume’s existence on Facebook, offering a free bottle to the first 100 people to respond. In an hour the marketing team was inundated with more than 1,000 requests, four times the anticipated amount, the Globe and Mail reported.
Pizza Hut Canada will ship the scent this week so that the winners will receive their prizes before Christmas, according to the Globe and Mail. The chain also said in the release that it’s possible the perfume could appear in stores in the future.
Though Grip Limited’s tactic may make more than a few noses wrinkle, Pizza Hut isn’t the only culinary company to garner attention with odd aromas. Four years ago, Burger King offered a $4 meat-scented body spray for men, Flame by BK. Before that in 2006, Stilton created a perfume meant to mimic the scent of the pungent blue cheese.
So how does the eau de pizza smell? “It’s delicious,” Eric Vieira, Grip Limited’s director of digital strategy, told the Globe and Mail, although he quickly acknowledged that it’s not for everyone. “I hope some poor guy doesn’t give it to his girlfriend,” he said.