Barefoot Contessa’s chicken with 40 cloves of garlic. Your nonna’s branzino with tomatoes. These recipes produce amazing dinners, but the ingredients that make these at-home meals so special can also leave one’s kitchen smelling like garlic and fish long after the dishes are put in the dishwasher.

Enter Febreze’s new SKU: Febreze Air Kitchen.

This new formulation from the air care experts at Procter & Gamble has been designed to tackle even the toughest kitchen odor—think bacon, garlic, fish and whatever your college-age son made at midnight last night.

“Cooking odors are some of the most pungent and lingering odors in the home because the cooking process release billions or sometimes trillions of odor molecules into the air,” noted  Febreze Senior Scientist Morgan Eberhard.

To make matters worse, the scent usually expands beyond the kitchen.

“Additionally, with the rise of open concept floor plans, odors from the kitchen are free to travel throughout the home and settle into soft surfaces- only to then rebloom into the air.  While we know some people love the smell of bacon frying, it’s not so pleasant when you can still smell it throughout your home days after it’s all been eaten,” noted Eberhard.

Febreze Air Kitchen was specifically created to address this problem by tackling stubborn kitchen smells at the source with powerful odor fighting technology, according to the brand.

Doubling Down on Odor

For Febreze Air Kitchen, P&G studied the chemical makeup of some of the most common (and smelliest) kitchen odors, like the amine odor of fish.

“We then doubled the amount of odor fighting technology in our formula – like citric acid to neutralize alkaline fish odors,” she said.

“Since cooking causes more odor molecules than many other smelly household activities, Febreze Air Kitchen also contains 2X the amount of our odor trapper cyclodextrin and reactive odor converters than base Febreze Air. These technologies work together to tackle those kitchen odors like bacon and garlic that would otherwise linger,” she told Happi.

The new formulation, which is sold at Target, has a fresh lemon scent that Eberhard described as the “perfect opponent”  to fish, garlic, and even old leftover smells.

“Plus, lemons are already closely connected with the kitchen because of their many uses in cooking,” Eberhard added. “Lemons add the tartness and acidity to balance out sweet dishes, add brightness to bland-tasting foods, or garnish a beverage. The high association with both cooking and cleaning makes the crisp lemon scent in Febreze Air Kitchen the perfect final step to cooking a meal.”

Is Cooking at Home Still Hot?

Cooking at home became a must during the pandemic lockdown. And while US consumers have been returning to restaurants, home cooking hasn’t lost as much ground. In fact, NPD’s Future of Dinner report forecasts that in-home dinners will remain at a heightened level through 2024.