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Following in the footsteps of Van Leeuwen’s extremely viral Kraft Macaroni & Cheese ice cream, other brands are getting in on headline-grabbing, extremely bonkers flavors. There’s a Nathan’s Famous hot dog ice cream, which is laced with caramelized bits of the famous meat (yum?) that shatter like crispy bacon between your molars. And I will never understand why French’s turned its respectable tomato ketchup into an abominable popsicle. I know that none of these batty products are really meant to become household staples. Still, when beloved Portland, Oregon, scoop shop Salt & Straw announced the launch of its “Culinary Perfume,” I simply had to try it.
The edible fragrances are designed to enhance the eating experience by imbuing practically odorless ice cream with a scent. In other words: Salt and Straw hopes you’ll spray this perfume on your ice cream. The morning the vials arrived on my doorstep, I spent a not-insignificant amount of time misting the Citrus, Floral, and Cocoa aromas over the various scoops of Salt & Straw I was already harboring in my freezer. How do they taste? Like not much, really. But flavor isn’t really the point of this strange ice cream gimmick, or any of the other absurdist scoops currently flooding the market.
Brands don’t actually expect you to adopt novelty products like these into your regular culinary arsenal, says Sarah Masoni, an award-winning dairy judge and ice cream innovator who works with food companies to develop new products at Oregon State University’s College of Agricultural Sciences. Wacky ice cream flavors are usually produced in a limited run and intended to get hyped-up customers in the door, she says, “because at the same time, they’re going to buy their favorite” scoops. In America, that’s good ol’ chocolate, cookies and cream, and vanilla.
Spraying Salt & Straw’s $65-a-bottle perfumes on its ice cream wasn’t bad, but it did feel unnecessary. As a kid, my justification for not eating wilted spinach was that it tasted like the smell of wet socks. These fragrances are similarly perplexing. The citrus scent paired with a creamy olive oil scoop made the inside of my nose smell faintly of limoncello. The floral perfume with a coconut sherbet was giving sunscreen vibes. And cocoa spritzed on salted caramel ice cream tasted like a shot of Baileys Irish Cream. Once I’d eaten the perfumed layer, the ice cream tasted like ice cream; a sensation so ephemeral I questioned whether those scented bites even really happened. The experience did make me want to buy more of Salt & Straw’s exceptional ice cream. So I guess, to Masoni’s point, the marketing worked.
Ice cream isn’t the only food category losing its marbles in name of sales: Taco Bell recently launched a tostada that’s stuffed with an enormous Cheez-It (okay, I want it); popular cereal brands are making breakfast-scented candles; and Oscar Mayer recently created a truly unsettling bologna face mask that precisely no one seemed to enjoy. But of all the branded oddities out there, ice cream seems most likely to fall prey to food marketers. It’s already an approachable food group, and Masoni says it contains three ingredients humans go nuts for: cream, sugar, and a touch of salt. Ice cream lovers are also comparable to hot sauce heads in that they’re almost obsessively competitive about constantly trying new flavors.
But in my experience, actually eating these food science experiments is akin to visiting a wax museum; something you really only need to do once—if ever. Macaroni and cheese tastes infinitely better than the ice cream version, which is like a cold, sugary lump of Kraft singles. “It’s really irreverent,” Masoni agrees. I would rather eat my bodyweight in saucy hot dogs like Joey Chestnut than the dairy-based approximation. And the Salt & Straw fragrances have transitioned to my cosmetics cabinet, from which I spray them on my actual person and not my plenty-tasty ice cream. Today I smell like a malted chocolate milkshake.