Shops wish their customers a smelly Christmas
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Shopping will soon smell entirely different in Britain because of new research which enables stores to choose the scent with which they want to entice customers and get them in the right mood to spend money.
The technology to deliver thousands of smells to order has been developed by the BOC Group, Britain's biggest manufacturer of industrial gases. It means that pubs can spruce up their image with an attractive aroma, and supermarkets can introduce the scent of baking bread, even though it is made nowhere near the premises.
BOC's first big customer is Woolworths, where a whiff of cinnamon and a subtle hint of cloves will be in the air this Christmas. Woolworths does not sell alcohol but has decided to put a mulled-wine smell into the air-conditioning system at its 20 biggest stores to get shoppers into a suitably mellow and festive mood.
Evelyn Shervington, BOC's business development manager, said: "We have been working on this for some years but it is in the last 12 months that we have developed the [necessary] innovative technology."
BOC buys artificial smells from fragrance manufacturers, who can offer them up to 17,000 different scents. The company then dissolves tiny quantities of the scents in liquid carbon dioxide, which is stored in ordinary gas cylinders. These are connected to the air-conditioning system and a timer controls release of the gas.
BOC is hoping to move into the growing virtual reality business so that smells can be introduced to make computer games seem even more real.
Smells are already used in some museums and historical displays. At the Yorvik Centre in York, which depicts Viking life in the area a thousand years ago, visitors smell everything from fresh fish to pig sties and cesspits.
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