Fancy a whiff of pasta water, tomatoes or garlic? Food-scented candles are smelling success

NEW YORK – There is a mild, wheaty aroma wafting from the host stand at the midtown Manhattan pasta restaurant Jupiter. It is not from the pasta.

A herbaceous, vegetal smell fills the bathrooms at Horses, a high-end bistro in Los Angeles. It is not from vegetables.

And that intense, buttery scent suffusing journalist Emma Specter’s apartment in Austin, Texas? There is no butter in sight.

All of these fragrances are facsimiles, preserved in wax. They come from candles designed to evoke particular foods at particular moments: the starchy water that remains after you have cooked pasta, a sun-warmed Roma tomato just picked off the vine and a fresh butter tortilla sliding out of the oven at the beloved Texas grocery store H-E-B.

Ms Specter, 29, acknowledged that butter tortilla is not the most universally appealing aroma. “It is right on the razor’s edge of a slightly cloying smell and actually smelling good,” she said.

But it transports her back to the time she moved to Austin and first tasted those H-E-B tortillas. “I get this weird feeling eating something I love,” she said. “This anxiety of, how am I going to remember how good this is?”

The answer, for many people, is a candle.

Food-scented candles may conjure up images of the retail giant Yankee Candle and its sugary offerings, like spiced pumpkin or vanilla cupcake.

But these new ones are different: Their aromas are savoury, they are sleekly packaged and they are formulated to appeal to the kind of people who splurge on fancy candles and expensive olive oil.

Sales of high-end candles in the United States have grown by 53 per cent since 2019, according to the NPD group. Thanks to that surge, the proliferation of food and restaurant merchandise and an increasingly knowledgeable dining public, the food candles have taken off.

Since wellness company Flamingo Estate introduced its Roma heirloom tomato candles in 2020, they have become its most popular item, with more than 20,000 sold.

At fragrance company Joya Studio, the best-selling candle smells of sauteed garlic – a 2022 collaboration with the acclaimed Brooklyn pizzeria Lucali.

A purple croissant candle by luxury scented-candle maker Overose is listed as a top seller on its website. Last year, the initial run of two Shake Shack-inspired candles – Burger in the Park and Shake N Fries – from home fragrance company Apotheke sold out in 48 hours, said its founder Chrissy Fichtl.

The candle and food businesses have long been intertwined, said Mr Todd Green, whose company Aromatic Fillers makes private-label candles.

The same fragrance houses that develop scents for candle makers also create flavours for food companies, he said. When pumpkin spice lattes were introduced at Starbucks in 2003, pumpkin-spice candle sales flourished.

But many of the newer candle makers are not following fragrance house trends, Mr Green said. They seek out less conventional aromas – turmeric, pork schnitzel, A.1. Original Steak Sauce – and see if the candles catch on.

Food candles hold wide appeal, he added. More than half of the candles he creates have a culinary bent. And they have more staying power than other types. “Food is always in the conversation for candles,” he said.

Not all of them sell, though. Mr Green produced a beet candle for Otherland, but it flopped. “Beet is very polarising,” he said, comparing the smell to mould or dirt. “You like them or you hate them.”

During the early pandemic lockdowns, many people bought candles to make their homes feel more inviting. Candle companies began selling hyperspecific food scents that channelled what consumers might be missing. A backyard barbecue. Pizza from a New York City slice joint. A freshly baked croissant from a patisserie.

Acting on that premise, Ms Erica Werber started her company, Literie, in early 2021.

Her candle scents include “pizza from a guy named Joe”, a slightly sweet, earthy smell redolent of freshly snipped basil, and “hot roasted nut cart”, a dead ringer for the smoky aroma of roasted nuts sold by street vendors.

“They are not just buying it for the scent,” she said. “They are buying it for the memory.”

Harold McGee, a food-science writer and author of Nose Dive: A Field Guide To The World’s Smells, said many of the new candles are enabled by technology that has made it easier and more affordable to isolate specific scents.

To make Apotheke’s burger candle, Ms Fichtl used ScentTrek, a portable box that captures and identifies environmental smells. She and her team placed a hamburger in the box, which traced its various scents, including griddle smoke and beef. (The candle, fortunately, smells more botanic than bovine.)

At D.S. & Durga, perfecting the pasta water candle – a joint effort with the restaurant Jupiter – was more like tinkering with a recipe. Ms Jess Shadbolt, a Jupiter chef and owner, poured boiling water over semolina flour.

“It surprisingly had a really gentle sweetness,” Ms Shadbolt said.

The resulting formula is a hotchpotch of scents, said Mr David Moltz, a D.S. & Durga founder: salt water, a herbal element, “something that smells yellowy to make it seem like you are smelling pasta or a starchy kind of thing, and something that is a little buttery”.

The pasta-water candle has sold briskly, he said. But he does not expect that savoury scents will ever outpace classics like vanilla.

“At the end of the day, the majority of people, whether they admit it or not, do like sweets,” he said. NYTIMES