A company in Russia’s Leningrad region recently laid a small section of strawberry-scented asphalt as an experiment to help solve the problem of unpleasant odors.

I don’t know if you’ve ever smelled hot asphalt when road sections are being laid or fixed, but it’s not the most appealing odor in the world. Luckily, we may not have to put up with it for much longer, as companies are beginning to come up with solutions to this issue. Just a few months after a Polish company came up with floral-scented asphalt to improve working conditions for the people working with it on a daily basis, a Russian company has successfully laid a 700-meter-long stretch of road using strawberry-scented asphalt.

Photo: Max Andrey/Pexels

“The contractor came up with this solution, this was their own initiative,” Russia’s Interfax news agency announced. “Many people do not like the smell of overheated bitumen, which spreads during the repair process, so they decided to try it.”

Laid on June 30th, in Leningrad’s Vsevolozhsk district, the 700-meter-long strawberry-scented asphalt road is part of Russia’s Safe High-Quality Roads national project. About 300 tons of strawberry-scented asphalt mix were produced for this experiment.

It’s unclear how successful the experiment actually was, or how long the scent of strawberries lasted, but the contractor did mention that the strawberry scent does not affect the quality of the asphalt at all.