Food Theory: The Secret Dunkin Donuts DOESN’T Want You To Find Out!

stop the bus is there was there a dunkin donuts around here because i smelled it on the bus and now i'm craving it something fierce why there hasn't been the dunkin donuts here for ten years no although i don't think you smelled an actual dunkin donuts location see they secretly put an artificial scent dispenser like this one inside the bus to make you crave dunkin donuts at certain stops oh that makes sense yep i'm really craving dunkin donuts now but this one hasn't dispensed artificial since for 10 years [Music] hello internet welcome to food theory the show that would smell as sweet by any other name but wouldn't have nearly as much brand synergy with the other channels yes friends today we're talking about our sense of smell why would a food channel discuss such a thing you ask because companies are using odors to trick you into buying food that's why see in addition to being a sister sense to taste smell is arguably the most powerful sense that we possess it's processed in our olfactory system which interacts with regions of our brain that are responsible for strong emotional memories you ever catch a whiff of some perfume and flashback to the girlfriend that used to wear it or maybe catching a whiff of some food that flashes you back to a good home-cooked meal by grandma point is smells can easily become linked with certain experiences but that comes with a problem hunger is one such experience and now companies are using scent marketing to trick you into spending more money and the thing is this strategy actually works really well a little too well as it turns out and whether you think this marketing tactic stinks as a business practice or reeks of genius food theory's here today to air everything out so join me won't you as we explore the delightful legal gray areas of using smells to manipulate your emotions and ultimately sell a product see our olfactory system can very easily drive our eating habits how many times have you found yourself drawn to the kitchen by the scintillating aroma of cookies as they emerge from the oven or conversely had your second semester of college ruined when your roommate drunkenly puts popcorn in the microwave for 30 minutes instead of three almost burning down the room and embedding burnt popcorn smell into literally every fabric for the next six months no was that just me alright it was my microwave too man jerk never paid me back anyway for early humans smell was one of the main methods they had for telling good food apart from food that had gone bad so it's little wonder that smell is such a big part of what gets us in the mood to eat and i think it's safe to say that we've all had that experience of walking near a bakery and finding ourselves ever so slightly more enticed by the aroma as we get near the point is this enticing you with delicious aromas is the kind of thing that bakeries could theoretically do on purpose in order to draw in customers oh wait they already do exactly that at least some bakeries do panera bread is by far the biggest bakery chain in the u.s doing 5.89 billion dollars in sales in 2019 more than 10 times as much as their next closest competitor einstein brothers bagels and as america's most successful bakery chain panera knows about the importance of smell to the point that they have actually restructured their restaurant operations around it for instance in many panera locations it used to be that the bakery staff would work an early shift before the restaurant opened so as to make the most efficient use of the kitchen space however panera realized that customers respond really strongly to the smell of freshly baked bread as it comes out of the oven so to deliver on that experience in 2014 they switched to having the baking staff work the day shift that's more cooks in the kitchen at the same time but apparently it's worth it when it comes to maximizing the impact of those freshly baked odors in fact panera's head baker went so far as to create a special show oven that doesn't have a hood you know the oven hood the thing that kind of works like a vacuum for the kitchen sucks up the hot air the moisture the smells things like that anyway this is the sort of thing that landlords hate since the oven's hood is specifically designed to capture things like moisture things that day after day can cause long-term damage to the structure of a building but when the hood captures the air coming out of the oven it's also capturing some of that delicious smell panera's special hoodless oven when permitted by landlords allows the air from the oven to then vent directly out into the store where the smell of fresh baked goods can be enjoyed by the customers in turn getting them hungry and in the mood to buy more and i think that goes to show that the good smells that you get when you step into a bakery like panera aren't just this happy accident of the baking process they are the kind of thing that are the result of deliberate planning and in some cases specialized setups engineer to get more dollars out of your pocket of course when it comes to businesses that win over customers with the smell of fresh baked goods there's few that can hold a candle to cinnabon which takes things to a whole nother level have you ever noticed that most cinnabon locations tend to be in places like malls and airports according to cat cole former president of cinnabon that's an intentional choice because these are locations that get a lot of traffic from passersby who can be ensnared by the enticing odors and importantly airports and malls are indoor locations where the scent of the freshly baked cinnamon rolls can linger around you unlike outdoor spaces where the smell would dissipate quickly not only that but cinnabon takes it one step further caring about where in the mall or airport their franchises are located according to a wall street journal story from 2014 one of cinnabon's favorite spots in a mall is on the ground floor near a stairwell so smell wafts to the floors above and cinnabon fights hard to keep their aroma maximizing strategies alive because during least negotiations with the landlords quote the mall constantly tries to insert clauses to limit the aroma coming out but cinnabon keeps finding new ways to push even more smell out of its little booth like oven placement once again according to former cinnabon president kat cole they experimented and found that putting the oven near the back of the store significantly lowered sales so cinnabon placed the ovens as close to the front of the store as possible which in turn makes it all the more likely that you're gonna get a whiff of what they're cooking as you walk by not only that and this is the one that absolutely shatters my mind but when it comes to oven hoods the company's executives instruct cinnabon franchise owners to buy quote the weakest hood possible while still staying in compliance with local laws so that the least amount of smell gets sucked out of the building that's not going quite as far as panera with their no hood approach but cinnabon is intentionally encouraging franchise owners to keep things as barely legal as possible just to get more smell particles up into those nose hairs of yours who knew the kitchen design would be so intense once you know what's actually going on here it feels so aggressively targeted at you and your pocketbook but at least these are real scents coming out of real ovens wait until you hear about the black market weaponry of fake sense the question of whether restaurant owners can use the power of smell to drive sales by using artificial sense isn't hypothetical it's already happened we even talked about it on one of food theory's debut episodes last year there are supermarkets that install machines that are designed to circulate scents through the air like a grapefruit scented smell dispenser in the produce section and a chocolate scent in the candy aisle but these artificial scent dispensers don't just have the power to get you to spend more money once you've entered the store they actually have the power to draw you into the store case in point in 2012 dunkin donuts paid to have buses in south korea spray the smell of donuts and coffee during people's morning commute using devices that function a lot like air fresheners they called this quote flavor radio so how did the flavor radio work well they found that dunkin donuts locations that were located near seoul bus stops rose by 29 this despite the fact that the smell on the bus obviously couldn't have originated from an actual dunkin donuts store i'd like to think that we humans aren't that simple but then again i'm the person whose irrational brand loyalty is strong enough to keep me impulse buying diet coke even after conducting a scientific taste test that concluded i actually prefer generic diet cola from a regional grocery store now dunkin donuts is hardly the only business to use artificial aromas to draw in customers at some doubletree hotel locations you might get a whiff of chocolate chip cookie at the front desk only to get you into the mood for the real thing when bam that's when a doubletree employee provides you with an actual chocolate chip cookie as a gracious act of hospitality the cookie odor though isn't necessarily natural at some doubletree locations it's a fragrance sold by a company called scent air designed to mimic the smell of an actual chocolate chip cookie other hotels have been making use of the same center technology like the hard rock hotel in orlando where they installed a center device to dispense a waffle cone scent which paid off when their ice cream shop saw a sales increase of get this 45 in the six months after the device was installed and when you consider that some hotels typically rely on their food and beverage operations to bring in around 20 of the revenue that also translates to some big money so since this is the secret weapon that's helping increase sales in hotels and restaurants i decided to look a little bit deeper into scent air scent air sells over a thousand different fragrances and if you're a business just looking to buy a pre-made off-the-shelf odor might cost as little as 100 a month to have an air freshener style device dispensing an on-brand smell to promote your business it's not just restaurants that are cashing in on this either according to a forbes article published back in 2006 dozens of sony retail stores use a vanilla and mandarin aroma just because the pleasant scent puts people in a good mood and ever so slightly more likely to spend more time browsing or you know plop down two thousand dollars on a brand new tv but the real money for centair is in their custom made sense where some businesses will pay upwards of twenty five thousand dollars for a custom blend let me tell you something businesses aren't spending that kind of money on smell-based advertising for the funsies they're doing it because it works in a world where companies are spending less and less money on traditional forms of advertising like radio of course and print advertising which declined to less than half of where it was even a decade ago and tv advertising which is expected to decline by several billion dollars over the next few years there's a lot of ad budget that's looking for whatever the next big thing is as we discussed in our recent episode on advertising the big thing that we're seeing emerge is digital influencer marketing and while i as a youtuber am the direct beneficiary of the bigger spending on digital advertising and highly encourage any advertisers in the audience to keep sending those ad dollars our way it's hard to deny when you look at the data that smell based marketing works really well but as i alluded to earlier that brings up a lot of gray areas sure well the smell-based appeal might be an honest way for businesses like bakeries to broadcast a hint of what's cooking away inside their ovens the truth is that companies are under no obligation to use cents that actually reflect the product that they're selling based on the ftc policies that i researched and believe me as an influencer it gets a decent chunk of my income from brand deals i read that ftc website for way more time than a normal person would consider reasonable after all if sony stores can use the scent of vanilla and mandarin oranges to try and put you in the mood to buy a tv anything goes unless of course sony's televisions actually taste like vanilla and orange i'll admit i've never actually tried it hold on a second nope nope yeah not great anyway in a world where advertising is already so strictly regulated it's not hard to imagine how those regulations might someday need to be applied to smell which is just insane if you think about it like how would you even go about doing something like that well if the ftc or any other regulatory body wants to regulate smells first they'll need to classify smells that is to say they need to be able to point to any given smell and say hey that smell is i don't know 15 different from the smell of the product that it's selling or wait a minute that odor is 20 mat pats over the legal limit now top minds have been working on ways to objectively quantify odors for decades now so it's probably only a matter of time before somebody cracks in in the meantime i'd like to direct the ftc's attention to our food theory on lickable screens in that episode we described the norimaki synthesizer prototype a so-called taste display that's supposedly capable of recreating any taste imaginable the normaki synthesizer accomplishes this by releasing the five basic tastes sweet salty sour bitter and umami in different proportions similar to how an rgb screen can achieve any color by supplying different proportions of red green and blue light so can a similar approach be applied to smells well the answer to that is maybe over the years different researchers have come up with different basic smells research published in 2013 for instance suggests that there are 10 basic aromas fragrant woody slash resinous fruity non-citrus chemical minty peppermint sweet popcorn lemon pungent and decayed i think that popcorn just has a category all unto itself as you can probably tell based on that list there's still a ton we don't understand when it comes to odor coding so the scientific community hasn't reached consensus on the best way to classify smells and given that humans can distinguish over a trillion different odors classification of this is going to be no small task in short regulation of smell marketing is probably a ways off so in the meantime you got to be careful out there friends the next time you catch a whiff of something that smells freshly baked and delicious take a moment to ensure that what you're really smelling isn't some fishy business practice but hey that's just a theory a food theory and right now i'd like to give a huge thank you to the sponsor for today's episode skillshare skillshare is an online learning community that has thousands of inspiring classes for creators and i know we've got plenty of creative folks out there in the loyal theorist community come on let's see those hands people if you're looking to explore new skills deepen existing passions and get lost in creativity then definitely follow your nose on over to skillshare and it doesn't matter if you're a dabbler or a pro a hobbyist or a master they have classes for all skill levels honestly they've got classes for basically every creative venture under the sun at this point i've taken skillshare classes and everything from cookie decorating to video production to productivity most recently i took the ultimate self-care playbook discover and nurture your centered self taught by jonathan van ness from the show queer eye because gotta admit this theorist could definitely benefit from a bit more self-care in his life the class was super entertaining and really drove home the importance of routine though gotta admit bit more yoga involved than i was expecting long gone are the days where i could just pull out the splits my friends so with that i got a quick question for you theorists can you smell what matpat is cooking breathe it in friends cause i'm about to drop a tasty deal right into those nostrils of yours the first 1 000 of my subscribers to click the link in the description will get themselves a one month free trial of skillshare so you can just start exploring your creativity today go in there take advantage of that month and just watch everything you can possibly consume i honestly cannot recommend it enough the skillshare community is amazing and it's curated specifically for learning meaning there's no ads and they're always launching new premium classes so you can stay focused and follow wherever your creativity takes you so again the first 1 000 theorists to click the link in the description will get themselves a one month free trial of skillshare hop to it and start bingeing those videos my friends thanks again to skillshare for all their continued support of the channel and as always thank you all for watching until next time bon appetit

Channel: The Food Theorists

Views: 2,367,671

Keywords: dunkin donuts, dunkin, cinnabon, panera, panera bread, dunkin donuts mukbang, cinnabon recipe, smell, marketing, illegal, dunkin donuts korea, dunkin donuts commercial, snl dunkin donuts, cinnabon cinnamon rolls, cinnamon rolls, panera bread soup, food theory, food theorists, matpat, food theory panera, eat the menu, eat the menu dunkin, eat the menu panera, illegal marketing, babish, dunkin donuts coffee, donut, smell marketing, game theory, film theory

Id: dxC7gMfoI-M

Length: 14min 50sec (890 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021

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[u/Conscious_Ad_1072]

Already watched it amazing video

[u/SuperGamingBro_XCVI]

What about using it in a more unorthodoxed way, like an air freshener in a standard home or apartment. Sure, it would be weird that my house/room smells exactly like the Kroger's bakery across the street (as an example) but would I be able to live without any side effects?

Like, would my nose become blind to that specific smell, weakening that store's power on me, or would to strengthen their power since the smell not only connects to something good that the store specifically sells, but also home sweet home? And what about health? Presuming it has no cleansing abilities like Febreze, would it have dire consequences on my body, like say an increase in bacteria or whatnot?

(Also Febreze is apparently spelt like that, not "Febreeze". Am I the only one who didn't know that, or was that just another case of the Mandela effect?)

Also, what effect would it have on the community? Like if it were strong, would it become a thing where you could smell my "sweet" house OUTSIDE it's intended location? As funny as it would to be the guy whose house smells like the electronics store a few blocks down, I kinda don't wanna be known for that (that is if I'm crazy enough to do it in the first place.)

[u/Meme-Replacement]

Bro I just went to Dunkin’s today and I don’t know if I should be scared or happy

Also good bot

[u/Tdog123-get-clapped]

What a good Theory