Few aromas are so much loved as that of bread when it has just come out of the oven. It’s difficult to describe, but it has a warming, comforting feeling whose powers have even been harnessed by supermarkets in their never-ending quest to keep customers buying.
The sense of smell is the first one which we develop, with doctors having found that it is already fully functional well before we are born. As a result, it’s the first means by which we can detect what’s going on in the world around us.
Why We All Love The Smell Of Fresh Bread
Favourite smells
A poll of more than 4,000 people in the UK found that bread was the clear winner when people were asked what their favourite smells were, with freshly-cut grass and clean bed sheets trailing in behind.
The same poll also revealed that nine out of 10 people believed that a pleasant smell had the power to change their mood.
The power of our sense of smell should not be underestimated. Scientists have found that the cells in our body through which we detect odours are renewed every 28 days. So unlike our tastebuds, or any other of our senses for that matter, our capacity to smell is being constantly upgraded.
We can also recollect smells more easily than experiences picked up through any other of our senses, with nearly two-thirds of things we smell capable of being remembered after a year, compared with us forgetting about half of what we see after just three months.
Smells link to emotions
The biggest factor for retailers when they want to capitalise on this is the fact that smells have been found to form the strongest link to recollections of emotions. And this, in a nutshell, is why retailers are so keen to capitalise on our sense of smell and give us pleasant sensations to ingest and process through our noses.
Yet despite this capacity to relate a smell to very specific experiences or occasions, our olfactory capabilities soon become de-sensitised if we spend too long in a place where a particular smell is in the air. That’s why the smell of fresh flowers or bread might be very obvious when we first walk into a shop, but we have become completely unaware of it by the time we reach the checkout.
Use of smell to encourage purchase
The use of smells by retailers to lure customers into buying things is also widely used because it’s women who do most buying, and scientists have proved that they have a stronger sense of smell than men.
A good sense of smell is also linked to the ability to follow a healthy diet. Those whose noses aren’t working at full capacity have been found generally to eat more things which are considered bad for them.
And it isn’t just at your local supermarket where smells are used to entice people to linger – several visitor attractions are now aiming to capitalise on the power of our noses by pumping specific smells through their ventilation systems to help visitors get a more realistic sense of the experience which they are trying to recreate.
But that bread smell lives with us throughout our lives, and its association with pleasant experiences is the biggest reason why so much time and trouble is spent creating it, either naturally or artificially, whenever we shop.
Guest post submitted by Sophie Jonas who is a baking enthusiast who has worked in the industry for over 5 years, she is currently writing on behalf of Aldi
