If you commute through Greensboro on I-40 near Elm Street, you've probably noticed it:
“Every so often, especially in the mornings or evenings, you’ll go outside and there’s this smell of buttered popcorn in the air,” said Greensboro resident Tim Leisman.
That scent is coming from the nearby Mother Murphy’s Flavors factory. For this week’s Carolina Curious, Leisman wanted to know what happens inside the facility and why the smell can be stronger at certain times. WFDD's April Laissle visited the facility to learn more.
As soon as you turn the corner into the parking lot, it hits you: movie theater butter, with maybe some caramel mixed in. It’s even more intense inside the warehouse.
“My briefcase, I mean, even in the hallways, okay, there's a Mother Murphy's — I'm not going to say smell — a Mother Murphy's aroma. There's no doubt about it," says David Wilhoit, Mother Murphy's vice president of sales.
Even after 14 years at the company, he’s still not nose blind. And he says butter is really just the tip of the iceberg.
Inside the massive production facility, the fragrance shifts from aisle to aisle. Butter turns into coconut, then peppermint, and then suddenly it feels like wandering into Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.
Wilhoit points to towering barrels of liquid and paper sacks of powder with labels like maple bark and St. John’s bread.
“As you walk through here, you will see anything with a yellow label and a number is a raw material," he says. "So this is an ingredient that goes into a flavor.”
Wilhoit says they use over 4,000 raw ingredients to create natural and artificial flavors for everything from protein bars to liquor. In the company’s 80-year history, its chemists have created more than 90,000 individual flavors.
On an average day, they produce between 55 and 70 batches of flavor. There’s no fixed rotation; sweet and savory can be made back-to-back. There is a notable exception, though:
“We do a garlic flavor. And we will run that product one time a month on the last Friday of the month, so that we can clean up the facility all weekend," he says.
Wilhoit says on one windy day, they heard from someone who said they could smell the garlic from Burlington, 30 miles away. The fragrance carries depending on the wind direction and strength.
As for why our question asker has been smelling butter more intensely? Wilhoit says it’s just one of those flavors with qualities that dominate, no matter what else they’re making that day.
“Certainly with butter, because it has that real sulfur smell. I mean, you know it right off the bat," he says. "Coffee flavors give off a distinct smell. Butterscotch, that kind of creamy vanilla-y, burnt sugar gives off a strong note.”
One study suggests humans may have evolved more smell receptors for sulfurous, cheesy, or sweet odors, possibly to help us decide which foods are safe to eat. Scientists can’t say for sure, though, as the research was conducted only in animals.
But as I get back into my car, it definitely feels plausible. As soon as I turn on the heat, that sweet smell starts swirling again.