Lynn residents upset over soup kitchen's smell of cooked onions & garlic

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LYNN, Mass. - Some Lynn residents are fed up with the smells coming from the soup company Kettle Cuisine.

According to the company's CEO, most of the complaints center around the odor of cooked onions and garlic.

"Kettle was founded 30 years ago," said Liam McClennon, CEO of Kettle Cuisine. "Two years ago, we were notified by the town about a handful of complaints. It's been really hard to move from the subject."

Most of the time, the wind blows the cooking smells away from shore, but then there are times where the smell is blown right into the city.

Lynn City Councilor Richard Colucci called the smell "sickening."

"It's brutal, if you go to Alley St, your eyes water when they do the onion soup," said Colucci.

While McClennon understands the complaints, he believes a mixture of smells is to blame.

"There's the local dump, there are other manufacturers, the beach smells awful," said McClennon. "There has been a lot of overlap of a cooking smell, which we obviously sometimes have and other more noxious smells."

State environmental engineers have become involved in the situation, where McClennon says the plan is to install 90-foot tall chimneys to propel the smell high into the sky.

"The science is such that it dilutes and when it comes down to ground level, it's been diluted so much you can no longer detect an odor," said McClennon.

However, some residents say they actually like the smell and will miss it.

"I smelled it every single day coming into work, it's comforting to me," said one resident. "It reminds me to go eat."

The company expects to build these chimneys within the next few months, and the total construction time will take about 8 weeks. They say after that, nobody should be able to smell onions or garlic in the streets of Lynn again.

Cox Media Group