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Pizza Hut Canada unveils dough scented perfume

A Pizza Hut perfume that smells like fragrant warm dough.

It sounds like a joke, and in the beginning it was. The idea for Pizza Hut perfume started as a question on Pizza Hut Canada's Facebook page: What would a Pizza Hut scent that smelled like a box of pizza being opened be called?

It was a question dreamt up by the staff at Grip, a Toronto advertising firm that handles Pizza Hut Canada's marketing strategies.

"At the time our only intention was to create an engaging post that would get our fans thinking," says Bryden McDonald, Grip's account manager for Pizza Hut.

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It quickly became the highest performing post on the Pizza Hut Canada Facebook page to date.

"There was this huge stirring of comments and people giving ideas about what it would be called," says McDonald.

Suggestions for names of the perfume included "cheezy desire", "Meat Lovers and Meat Lovers for her", "Salivation" and "Dough Days."

While people posted their pizza scent fantasies, members of the Grip creative team were in talks with an aromatologist to see if making the perfume would be possible. When they were told it was possible, the team waited until the Facebook page hit 100,000 fans, and then announced they would make 100 bottles of the perfume and send them to the first 100 people to write in. They received more than 2000 direct messages requesting the perfume. The 100 bottles have been mailed, and the messages continue to roll in.

This isn't the first food-related perfume. In 2008, Burger King released "Flame", a four dollar perfume touted as smelling like "flame-broiled meat" and which one critic described as an "acrid, eye-watering scent."

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Stilton Cheese has also had a go in the world of scents. Eau de Stilton was released in 2008, claiming to "recreate the earthy and fruity aroma" of the powerful cheese "in an eminently wearable perfume". Though the perfume made headlines, it was generally denounced by critics as, well, stinky.

So how does it smell?

"We went through a few rounds to get it smelling okay," admits McDonald. "It actually does smell like fresh dough. It's a novelty item more than anything else, I don't think it's really meant to be worn."

So will there be additional runs of the perfume, considering it's surprising popularity?

"I'm not sure at this point," says McDonald with a laugh. "If we were going to do that there would have to be some reason besides just making more perfume."