Post office in France rolls out croissant-scented stamp | Hacker News Reader

Post office in France rolls out croissant-scented stamp

ctvnews.ca

181 pointsohjeez93 comments

Unfortunately, WebSmell-o-Vision has not yet been unilaterally pushed by the dudes at Google to do this news justice, but as a croissant connaisseur I would have at least appreciated a webp of the thing instead of some random archive image. It’s a stamp, for christ’s sake.

There is a pic here and it’s quite nice imo: https://www.wopa-plus.com/en/stamps/product/&pid=105515

I'm holding out for a <smell> HTML tag.

Which any English person over 40 will spell <bucket> for reasons that likely make no sense to anyone outside the country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_Up_Appearances

And of course the `olfactoryFactory` component for Enterprise™ frameworks.

  function olfactory() {
      return document.createElement("ol");
  }

I bet the next version of Chrome will have that.

I can't wait for nasa.gov to let everybody smell Uranus.

Have a chat with your dog

But wopa-plus does even mention the essential detail?

https://www.laposte.fr/pp/c/timbre-croissant-au-beurre

Here I was misreading the article that it was croissant-shaped, not scented, until I saw a picture.

I was initially reading that it was a croissant with a stamp scent and I was confused...

Friendly counterpoint (I know, not actually responsive to your comment, but tangentially related): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ade4401

I can almost smell breakfast…

Yes, we also need a cappuccino smell stamp.

Has there ever been any sort of even-remotely-successful smell-o-vision? We can recreate input for many of our other senses - music, visuals, touch - so why not smell?

Presumably the volatility inherent to “volatile chemicals” makes it challenging to reproduce on-demand. I’d imagine you’d need something like dozens of base compounds, alcohols and acids to create esters and carrier media, some way of protecting all of it from oxygen, a hyper-accurate mixing device that can then by hyper-cleaned between each scent, since our noses would be too sensitive to allow even a small amount of cross-contamination…and then, why stop at smell? You basically already have everything you need for taste as well. Insert some lab-grown tissues and/or fibers, and we’ve invented the Star Trek replicator!

Back in the 1980s, there was a movie that was released where you could purchase a scratch and sniff card. It was dubbed “Odorama”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyester_(film)

As the movie played, a number would flash on the screen, you’d scratch that number and smell the spot on the card.

Ish. Our level of technology is limited to mixing a small set of base compounds on demand. That gives a range of possible scents about as small as you'd think. The problem is that your sense of smell is a complex chemical detector. There are a lot of unique molecules that you can detect.

We'd have to synthesize molecules on demand to get any reasonable range of scents, basically.

It's kinda odd that the first sense that evolution gave us will be the last we can record/playback using our devices.

Wonderful, I want one! Say what you will, the French have good taste.

Naturally, this also poses some serious questions:

- Will this lead to more croissants being eaten? Everyone within reach of such a stamp could be affected. Will bakeries have to brace themselves?

- How will this affect the stamp collector scene? Will they flip upside down to get one of these? Will they eat more croissants?

Only time can tell!

You can order them here: https://www.laposte.fr/pp/c/timbre-croissant-au-beurre

I'm quite sad that here in Belgium companies now often use stamps that aren't actual little bits of paper anymore but ink stamps on the envelope.

I hope that doesn't spread. I have a generational stamp collection that I'd love to keep expanding.

In the US businesses that send any significant amount of mail have used "postage machines" (which print right onto the envelope) for decades. Physical stamps (though they're self-adhesive now, no licking) are for very low volume mail users, like individuals.

In The Netherlands you can buy digital "stamps" online. They're nine characters you write in a square pattern on the envelope.

I wish we had croussants here in teh states (tiny speciality shops not withstanding). They are a rare. instead we get a weird butter flavored croissant shaped bread with nothing of the texture or aroma of the real thing.

Because most in North America are made with margarine or a mix of margarine and butter, so much of the butter "taste" is fake. That's also why the lamination is worse.

It's not just the states, pretty much all of Europe and even in France you'll find cheap croissants made with margarine. You always need to go to a real small bakery (tiny specialty shop as you say) to find real, freshly baked croissants. That's just a bit easier in France. The problem isn't where you live, it's where you shop.

This is correct, croissants are best the closer they are to the time they were pulled from the oven. A specialty bakery will have croissants made that day. Sometimes cafes will carry a local bakers goods, just ask.

It's not just about that, though. Some places make awful croissant-shaped things, for example just next door in Spain. You can get better croissants from Tesco Express in the UK, and I doubt they are made with butter.

Right that’s why you would ask.

Most bakeries offer the two types though: "au beurre" and "sans beurre". The later don’t necessarily needs to be made with cheap margarine, a good vegetal oil (or a combinaison) suits very well. The flavor is different and I prefer those than the butter ones. Freshness is a must obviously as peer said.

You're right, and I was simplifying. The problem isn't margarine per se, it's cheap margarine. Which is what you'll find in nearly all supermarket croissants. Even the ones advertising "all butter" in a supermarket will be using the shittiest butter that they're still legally allowed to call butter. Depends on the country but often has additives like food coloring and artificial butter flavor.

> It's not just the states, pretty much all of Europe

Everywhere you go pastries are not even 10% as good as in France. You can pick anything in a semi decent french bakery and it'll be miles ahead of the best pastries you'll find in most places

That's one of the greatest mystery of life to me, all they have to do is copy super simple hundred years old recipes. Why don't they make flans ? eclairs ? croissants ? madeleines ? sablés ? Everyone else seems dead set on baking the sweetest or greasiest things

Here is a recipe taught to students in bakung and pastries : it takes quite a lot of time to make them properly, hence the cost-cutting measures of a lot of shops ! https://encoreungateau.com/croissants-cap-patissier-recette/

The steps required to make proper pastries are anything but simple, and the ingredients are not particularly cheap (anymore!) either.

What makes a croissant a croissant is hundreds of layers of properly layered dough, with the right amount of butter between layers, for instance.

Cost is a big part of the reason.

A small-ish flan for 6 people costs more than than a "sponge" type cake for 12. And the sponge cake is massive in size comparison because of all the air.

And this is why Walmart, for example, will likely never sell proper bread, or other pastry products.

> even in France you'll find cheap croissants made with margarine

Rare. Most bakeries in France serve their local community, and they won't get repeat business if their croissants are shit. There is actually a standard and you can't call yourself a bakery (boulangerie) unless you make your stuff from scratch onsite.

https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/section_lc/LEGITEXT0000...

And even then, beware of scams, even in France. "Real small bakeries" is not a guarantee. Simple "croissants" don't have to use butter, and they often don't. "Croissants au beurre" have butter in it, but it may be only a small quantity, the rest being a mix of vegetable fats. They are usually better than the ones with margarine, but you still don't have the real thing. You need to make sure to get "croissants pur beurre", or even better "croissants pur beurre AOP".

Many bakeries have both, the "pur beurre" are more expensive, obviously.

When you look at the raw ingredient price, it makes a lot of sense that they want to use alternatives to butter. Margarine is about 4€/kg, fake butter 8€/kg, real butter 12€/kg, there is about 25g of it in a croissant. Considering that a croissant is about 1€ (outside of big cities / tourist places), that's a significant fraction of the cost.

Also, most bakeries in France don't make their own croissants, pur beurre or not. Even for those that make their own bread. It is quite a complicated process and most bakeries just buy them frozen from a factory and only do the baking. Now, it doesn't mean they are bad, I prefer it when croissants are fully made on site, but I can make do with industrial dough, "pur beurre" however is non negotiable.

Costco will sell you an implausibly large number of croissants. They're pretty good if you eat them the same day. They go bad very rapidly, which makes sense given that the minimum purchase size is something like 24.

They're still better than Costco's "bagels", which do not share any properties of bagels other than the toroidal shape.

I'm not a croissant expert, but I do like the Costco ones. I just need to convince 2-3 friends to split them with me, and then eat multiple per day, in order for them to make sense as a purchase.

Same with bagels here in the UK. Round bread with a hole in it, for the most part.

> I wish we had croussants

That's funny because the typo you made at "croissants" make it sound exactly like this guy says it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScSp4mGIrdE

Who said Europe can't innovate

Who said we can't have nice things?

Do they taste buttery when you lick them?

I maintain that croissant's are just sticks of butter someone accidentally spilled flour on.

That's how I would define kouign-amann.

Croissants are sugar-free kouign-amanns, then?

A story about a stamp with no picture of the stamp. Great journalism.

Here's the first search result with the actual picture of the stamp: https://www.thelocal.fr/20251009/french-post-office-rolls-ou...

Nice, we got 4 fruits in Switzerland: https://shop.post.ch/en/stamps-philately/philately/single-st...

I miss my concrete stamps... A bit rough on the tongue but still lovely

Has science gone too far?

I am holding off for the red wine flavoured one.

Better than the time that a utility company mailed out a gas-scented flyer to teach people what a gas leak smelled like. 911 was inundated with gas leak calls.

(Search is so fucking useless these days that I can't find anything about it, but pretty sure it was in New York.)

I remember a scratch-and-sniff version, rather than just scented (in western CT, in the 1970s - they must have bulk sent them, noone in the neighborhood actually had gas service so it wasn't in with gas bills.) That's enough to find https://hackaday.com/2024/12/03/scratch-and-sniff-stickers-a... and the search https://www.google.com/search?q=scratch-and-sniff+mercaptan&... actually turns up a bunch of present-day gas vendors that will send them to you on request!

Natural gas is odourless, so the smell of a gas leak is artificially chosen. They could have just made all the piped gas smell like croissants instead.

The sad part is France annihilated most of the last small independent bakers a few years ago when they they jacked up energy prices.

It is now quite hard to find a really good croissant there.

On the bright side the new Renault 5 looks fantastic [0]

- [0] https://www.renault.co.uk/electric-vehicles/r5-e-tech-electr...

> The sad part is France annihilated most of the last small independent bakers a few years ago when they they jacked up energy prices.

What? Source? "Last small independent bakers" What? France is full with bakers. There are bakeries everywhere, even villages have a bakery. Most are mom and pop shops.

And what do you mean "they" jacked up prices? There was a war that severely impacted energy markets, and France had to nationalise the national electricity provider to cover the massive gap because most of that price difference was passed on to consumers. From what I recall, France was one of the countries that isolated the most.

Annihilated is very much exaggerated, even if the bakery sector is changing for sure and is facing the same issues of inflation as everyone.

Number of bakeries is stable around 33 000 in 2025, down from 36 500 in 1990 [0][1] Revenues are up for both independant and franchised, and while the franchises grow faster than independants, they represent >90% of the total bakeries.

[0] article and data from 2025: https://boulangerie.org/economie/ [1] article from 2023, data from 2022: https://www.artisans-gourmands.fr/project/la-boulangerie-pat...

I don't know, The Hill reported [0] that:

> The renegotiation — brokered by the French government — comes as many of France’s 33,000 bakeries face financial ruin amid spiking energy costs spurred in part by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. > > Energy suppliers like TotalEnergies and EDF have agreed to allow the country’s bakeries to renegotiate their contracts if they struggle to pay their bills due to rising energy and crop prices, according to Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire. > > These companies have agreed in principle “to dissolve contracts when prices have risen prohibitively high and unsustainable for some bakeries,” Le Maire told reporters.

The precise number of 33 000 bakeries would mean that all of them faced financial ruin?

That's a bit much.

I remember this was at the time when there was this EU rule which mandate to align the price of electricity on gas. Only Spain and Portugal did not apply it.

We have to remember those oven use enormous amount of electricity and in fact many bakeries do not produce much of what they sell on-site. It is often made in factories.

Funny enough there is a better chance that bread you buy in a supermarket have been cooked on-site than in a small bakery.

- [0] https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/379737...

Not a new thing. French Post already issued chocolate or perfume scented stamps in the past.

Can't wait for the cheeses

not before the RATP series!

La Frenchtech at its peak.

I want one! Seriously, this should be a thing with more scents.

How are they going to discourage roaches from eating your mail?

Or is it that they made all croissants stamp-scented instead?

Also stamp-scented croissants?

Does the IRS use stamps too?

Try and find a good one in France. Harder than you’d think

> Try and find a good one in France. Harder than you’d think

In Paris? Sure. You're competing with tourists. Almost any rural bakery? No. You'd have to try to find something shitty.

In Paris, look for the little old ladies carrying half-baguettes and go in the direction they're coming from.

You also want to know when they’re fresh. Good bread, particularly in the unseasoned French style, stales rapidly once cool.

Yeah, buy one baguette once for the folklore, and then buy good (whole, optionally levain-based) organic bread that lasts days.

Like many people, I like baguette and I don't like whole bread (especially levain-based). Baguettes aren't for show/tourism, it's a staple of french food. It does mean you want to buy it on the day, which is fine for many people.

> Baguettes aren't for show/tourism, it's a staple of french food

Indeed. So much so it's often a pain to find good whole bread outside cities.

I was being a bit facetious.

More seriously, the issue with baguette / white bread, aside from drying very fast, is that it's rapid-absorption carbohydrates that are not very healthy and not very filling. Add jam and you have it all. Taking white bread for breakfast every day is not a very good habit. It increases the risk of having a crash in the middle of the morning and of making you nibble.

For this reason, it's a shame it's so spread. Bread used to be whole in France in the past. White bread and baguette appeared in France only at the end of 19th / beginning of the 20th century apparently. So, it's been a French staple, but only quite recently.

Of course I won't argue with taste. Especially that I understand both "sides" here. I used to prefer baguette / white bread and now I largely prefer whole bread (and like anything whole, you should buy it organic; if you don't, white bread might still be the lesser evil). It took some time to get used to whole bread. I still like the taste and the texture of white bread very much, but I don't like the consequences.

it's a bit harder, but if you find a local walking out of their home, and pass 6 or 7 boulangeries until going into one, you're probably at a good one (or at risk of a stalking accusation)

Not my experience with bakeries in rural France, which I have more experience with than Paris. I’ve spent much more time trying these things in rural France than in Paris. I can say that Nice was good though

It’s much easier to find better bread and cakes in Germany even in cities

In France, most of it is quite poor quality, rural or city

I would actually disagree. A typical characteristic about "food in the place it's famously from" is that the _median_ level of quality is quite high, and particularly in the case of anything involving bread - that it's fresh. The case of pizza in NYC is the same. There are certainly places selling shit pizza and shit croissants to tourists, but even in a fairly popular tourist hotspot it will likely be very freshly made and of surprisingly good quality. Even the bottom of the barrel (a $1.50 pizza near Times Square or Paris train-station chain boulangerie) is above the best thing you can get in countless countries around the world. Don't get me wrong, I'll happily go in search of The Best of whatever, but if just pick a place at random, it probably will be surprisingly good.

Legally, to even call yourself a boulangerie in France you must bake your goods on site, make the dough from scratch, ferment yourself, shape everything yourself... that alone guarantees a certain floor of quality: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/codes/article_lc/LEGIARTI0000... There are in fact quite strict laws about boulangeries in France... since a law in 1790 they are not even allowed to pick their own vacation days!

> The case of pizza in NYC is the same

That's more a question of taste, IMO. I found most pizza in the US to be way too greasy and sugary and salty for my taste; but that's what the local tastes expect.

Not really true. Most locals in most places will have opinions about the bakery you should go to and which one you should avoid, even if that means going to the next village over. Even if that means having to schedule because the good bakery is only open twice a week.

In my experience, the "bad" bakeries are on par with the average bakery in the rest of Europe (at least in countries that do not have a strong bakery culture): they're _fine_, but "fine" isn't really good enough for a such staple of food and culture. Of course, some bakeries are particularly bad and much worse than "fine".

Yes my French grandparents had to walk a long way to the next village every morning for actually good bread, but that bakery had to shut down because, ironically, the baker was allergic to flour. I will never forget the amazing bread from those first couple times I visited, and I thought it just meant the French bread was amazing. But no, when I come now, they get the bread from the convenience store in their village or from some other bakery, and it actually sucks.

La Poste might have invented the first non-vegan stamps in history.

I hope they don't turn rancid.

Given the normal process for making glue I wouldn't be so certain.

Most modern glues are synthetic. Super glue is usually cyanoacrylate, regular glue sticks might be Polyvinyl Acetate (PVA). Outside of specialty glues that are intentionally going for old school methods, it's not really a thing anymore

How recently were stamps with glue invented?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postage_stamp_gum

Apparently 1837, and the original adhesive was made from potato starch and gum arabic.

IIRC, envelopes still use adhesives derived from gelatin. Maybe stamps have modernized at some point?

There’s also PVA used there

Now this is the future I’ve been waiting for

Next up... "French officials baffled as to why raccoons are attacking mail trucks"

> artisan croissants [...] “emblem of French gastronomy,”

and yet italian cornetti are better grin

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