A New Business Idea: Take Your Smell Home From Your Travel Destinations

There are many good ways to remember and share the memories of a trip. Plenty of people take pictures of sights and food, many others record videos of the sounds, the people, and their reactions, and a few, like yours truly, write down thoughts and reflections in prose. But these remembrances cannot fully do justice to how wonderful or awful a trip was. For all the audiovisual and mental recollections that can be registered and replayed, the tastes and smells of the place cannot. Plenty of storytellers try to do their best job to verbalize the olfactory and gustatory; none can beat the real thing.

At the same time, the tastes and smells are key parts of a trip. Many travelers miss the taste of new foods they had where they traveled to, but cannot be found in their home countries. Others recall the distinct aromas of the place as distinctive. It could be the whiff of spices, meats, seafood, chemicals, or incense in markets, streets, or temples. Or it could be the salty air, tropical greenery, animal droppings, and blooming flowers amidst different kinds of nature. They can wax lyrical as much as they want to friends back home; those friends likely won't share the enthusiasm until they get the same taste or smell themselves.

Today's partial solution is exceedingly, well, partial. Plenty of tales abound of travelers who loved the local food so much that they decided to open up eateries serving up the exotic fare that they came across after they returned to their home countries. There is media coverage of those who do succeed. However, most people do not have such drives for entrepreneurship. Starting a food business is costly, the market for unknown foods from little-known countries has limited demand outside their native lands, and travelers have full-time jobs to return to that they are not willing to throw away for the sake of a foreign experience.

And even when travelers do manage to bring back a piece of the taste and smell of a foreign land, the replication can only be limited in scale. A night market or a bazaar is made up of dozens of shops, teaching serving up something different. No entrepreneur without the systematic financial and cultural support of some big company or government authority has the knowledge, means, and resources to recreate all of that in a new place just after a few trips. The uncertainty of the local market will only help to curb the enthusiasm.

An alternative, and potentially more cost-effective, way to share may be small devices that capture the smell of a place for easy transport. The "device" in question can be quite low-tech: a compressed canister of odored air, a scented candle, or peel & smell papers. Their light weight and ability to hold a scent for a long period without an expiration date ensure that once the smell can be mass-produced, they will be reasonably priced and carried by travelers for souvenirs to take back home. Sold at airports, they are guaranteed to be best-sellers for something departing passengers will exchange some spare change for.

Alas, scent technology has not advanced to the stage in which complex scents can be captured flexibly by manufacturers of scented products. Experts in fragrance and flavor sciences rely on their own memories to recreate scents through trial and error. The emerging field of digital scent technologies has a long way to go before they can easily transport any smell somewhere far away. After all, should such a technology exist, the likes of Google and Meta would happily help their customers smell what is shared by their friends or searched on the internet.

Of course, we can always dream of such a world when technology does become accessible to everyone. With the advancement of artificial intelligence, the day that big data in the form of tastes and smells can be used to train large language models to analyze and replicate the ingredients of any complex smell may not be that far away. When that day comes, average Joes sitting in their homes would be able to partake in their favorite smells whenever they want, without having to rely on actual scents being carried to them by friends or mailed as a package of scented products.

That world will be a world where fully immersive experiences will finally be possible. Those with 3D goggles seeing the sights would be able to hear, smell, and taste those sights. Without stepping out of their living rooms, they can finally be transported to those exotic locales that their friends and family members rave about. The lack of time, money, courage, and energy would no longer be an impediment to experiencing a faraway land in full. The mental burden from the fear of missing out when scrolling through social media will finally be gone. Wouldn't that be great?