Advertisement

🎄 Order by Monday 7 December for Christmas delivery · 45 days to change your mind

Home & Kitchen · Reader story

Updated 3 November 2026

Our MD opened the office fridge in front of a client. The client said “wow”.

Lisa, 42, clears the office fridge every Friday. Here's what stops it smelling by Wednesday, without 34 people having to remember anything.

By Lisa, 42 · Reader story

Our MD opened the office fridge in front of a client on Thursday. The client said “Wow.” Not the good kind.

I'm Lisa, 42, office manager for 34 people in Reading. One kitchen. One fridge. Everybody's fridge, so nobody's.

I've been here six years. I do the post, the payroll queries, the fire drills, the Christmas party and the toilet roll order. And the fridge. Nobody ever wrote “the fridge” in my job description. It's just become mine, the way these things do.

I don't mind most of it. I like keeping things running. But the fridge is the one job everybody notices and nobody thanks you for. When it's fine, nobody says anything. When it smells, it's mine.

Thirty-four people means thirty-four lunches, most days. Salads, soups, leftovers, and a lot of Monday meal prep in tubs that nobody remembers by Thursday.

Every Friday at 4pm I clear it. Rubber gloves, a bin bag and a roll of kitchen paper. It takes about forty minutes, because I check every label I can find and I don't bin anyone's lunch without a good reason.

I've found things in there you wouldn't believe. A whole birthday cake, untouched, three weeks after the birthday. A tub with the name of someone who left in March. Once, a single sprout in a sandwich bag, labelled “DO NOT EAT”.

The Friday after the client: 11 tubs, a tuna pasta dated 28 September, a takeaway curry with white fuzz on top, two open pints of milk and a yoghurt swollen like a balloon.

By Wednesday it smelled again. Every week, like clockwork.

On Mondays it was fine. On Tuesdays you noticed it. By Wednesday afternoon, people opened the door, grabbed and shut it in one movement, like they were feeding a lion.

I've tried the A4 sign on the door. Then the laminated one, with a cartoon. I've sent the all-staff email with the subject line in capitals. I've tried bicarb. I bought a plug-in air freshener for the kitchen counter that made the whole room smell like a hotel toilet. People still hold their breath to get their milk.

I'd even started putting a sign on the meeting-room door saying “Clients in today”, as if that would make people tidy the fridge. It didn't.

Then the Thursday. Thursday 8 October.

We had a new client in, the biggest we've pitched for all year. I'd booked the meeting room, done the biscuits, printed the packs. Our MD, Richard, offered her a coffee and took her into the kitchen himself, because he likes to show people round.

He opened the fridge for the milk. She said “Wow,” and stepped back. Then she laughed, the polite laugh people do when they don't know what else to do, and said she'd have it black, actually. Then she spent the next hour in our meeting room, across the table from Richard, drinking a black coffee she hadn't wanted.

I was standing right behind them, holding the meeting packs. Nobody looked at me. I wanted to climb into the fridge and shut the door.

I heard about it in the next team meeting. Richard said, lightly, “Can we make sure the kitchen's presentable when clients are in?” Everyone nodded. A couple of people glanced at me.

Later, at the coffee machine, one of the sales team said to me, “Was that the fridge, with the client?” as if I didn't know. Then, trying to be kind: “It's not your fault, Lise. It's that lot.”

Nobody said it was my fault. Nobody had to. The fridge is my job.

I went back to my desk after that meeting and sat there with my coat still on for ten minutes. I'd run that office for six years. I'd never felt so useless.

It isn't your fault, and it isn't your food

Most fridge advice assumes the fridge is yours. Clean it more. Check the dates. Wrap things properly.

But plenty of fridges belong to more than one person. They belong to four flatmates, nine students or thirty-four colleagues. Or they are yours, but the smell comes from somewhere you can't change: a power cut while you were away, the Christmas Stilton, a nose at 11 weeks that picks up everything.

In every one of those fridges, you can do everything right and still open the door to a smell that isn't yours.

Nobody can control what other people put in a shared fridge. Nobody can stop a trip switch going while they're on a beach.

What can change is what happens to the smell once it's in there.

What it costs to leave it

That night I worked out what the fridge actually costs us, because I had a feeling someone was about to ask.

Forty minutes every Friday is about 32 hours a year of my time, just clearing out other people's lunches. The plug-in freshener refills were £6.99 a month, so £83.88 a year, for a smell nobody liked. We pour away at least two pints of milk a week that taste of the fridge, at £1.45 each. That's around £150 a year in milk.

And people buy coffee out instead. One Wednesday I counted the cups on desks. Nine from the café over the road, at £3.40 each. Not my money, but it tells you something about our kitchen. Nine coffees at £3.40 is £30.60 in one day. If that's every Wednesday, it's well over £1,500 a year of people's money going over the road because of our milk.

Then Richard asked me, quite seriously, whether we needed a new fridge. I priced it. About £600, plus someone to take the old one away. And a new fridge would smell exactly the same by its second Wednesday, because the problem isn't the fridge. It's 34 people and a lot of forgotten tuna pasta. Richard said, half joking, that we should just ban food from the fridge. Thirty-four people would have walked out. Our cleaning firm offered a weekly fridge deep clean for £25 a visit. £1,300 a year. It still wouldn't have fixed Wednesday.

I did the maths again on the way home. Thirty-two hours a year clearing it, £84 on refills, £150 in milk, and a client drinking black coffee. All for one fridge.

The real cost was the client. We don't know if the fridge made any difference to her decision. We'll never know. But I know she drank her coffee black, and I know what she'll remember about our kitchen.

And there's me. I used to like my job. By October I was dreading Wednesdays. I'd check the client diary on a Monday just to see how bad the timing was. My Friday afternoons had gone too: everybody else winding down at four, me in rubber gloves.

If I did nothing, it would happen again. We have clients in most weeks, and every one of them gets offered a coffee. Every Wednesday, that fridge is ready to embarrass somebody. And I'd be the one standing behind the client again, holding the packs, waiting for someone to say “wow”.

A smell in the fridge never stays where it started. It drifts into the air, and everything else in there is sitting in that air.

The butter picks it up first. Then the milk. Then the cheese, the fruit and the leftovers in their tubs. Food that's well in date starts to taste of somebody else's dinner, and it goes in the bin anyway.

So you pay twice. Once for the food. Then again for the bicarb, the lemons, the scented fresheners and the sprays that cover it for a few days and give up.

Then people start living around it. They hold their breath to get the milk. They keep food in a carrier bag in their room, or buy a meal deal rather than open the fridge. They stop asking people round. Some start pricing a new fridge, around £600, and the next strong cheese or forgotten curry arrives in that one too.

None of this sorts itself out. Every week it's left is another week of binned food, another tub of bicarb, and another moment at the door hoping nobody else opens it first.

The people using a fridge don't always change. The air inside it can.

What doesn't work when it isn't your mess

It works without anybody's help

Noova is a little steel cylinder that fits in your palm and sits on any shelf.

Inside is a catalytic core. It breaks smells down instead of soaking them up, so there's nothing to fill up and nothing to replace.

Think of bicarb as a sponge: it holds on to the smell until it's full. Noova breaks the smell down, and the core isn't used up doing it. That's why one keeps going for 5 years.

Nobody has to change a thing, remember a thing or even know it's there.

No plug, no batteries, no refills, no button. It works anywhere in the fridge, at the back, in the door or in the salad drawer, and one covers a fridge up to 500 litres.

1. 1
   Put it on any shelf.
2. 2
   It starts working on its own.
3. 3
   Open your fridge. Smell nothing.

No scent. Nothing added.

Most fridge fresheners work by adding a smell. Lemon, “fresh linen”, “ocean”. The idea is that you smell that instead.

In a closed fridge, that second smell has nowhere to go. It ends up in the butter and the milk, on top of the first one.

Noova doesn't smell of anything. No fragrance, no chemicals. It's food-grade SUS 304 stainless steel, and it never touches your food.

It takes smells away instead of covering them with another one. So nobody opens the door to a new smell either: not the flatmate, not the client, not the person in the house who can smell everything right now.

The milk tastes of milk. The butter tastes of butter.

---

I can't make 34 people remember their lunch. I've tried for six years. I needed something that works without anybody's help.

I mentioned it to my sister on the phone, mostly to moan. She manages a hair salon in Bracknell with a staff fridge every bit as bad as ours. She said, “Get a Noova. I've had one since the summer.”

I asked how she knew it worked. She said, “Because my girls stopped moaning.” In a salon, that's proof.

Noova is a little steel cylinder that sits on the shelf and breaks fridge smells down instead of masking them. It fits in your palm. One covers a fridge up to 500 litres, which is more than our big office fridge, so one does the lot. No plug, no batteries, no refills.

No plug mattered more than I expected. Our kitchen has two sockets, and one of them is the kettle. I wasn't going to win a fight over the other one.

I read the page properly before I bought anything, because I'd be the one answering for it. Food-grade SUS 304 stainless steel. No chemicals. It never touches the food. Those are exactly the questions people ask in an office, and I wanted the answers ready.

And no scent. That mattered most. After the hotel-toilet freshener, the last thing I wanted was another smell. Noova doesn't smell of anything. No fragrance, no chemicals. So the milk doesn't taste of air freshener.

My sister explained the how, roughly. Bicarb is a sponge. It soaks smells up until it's full, then stops, and you never know when. Noova has a catalytic core inside. It breaks the smell down instead of soaking it up, so it never fills up. The core isn't used up doing it, which is why it lasts 5 years. In office terms: no reorder, no reminder in my calendar, no line on the budget every month. The plug-in freshener needed a new pot every month, and I was the one who had to remember. One less thing on my list.

My doubt was whether 34 people would even notice. And whether Richard would sign off £29.99 for “a bit of steel”. I didn't ask him. I put it on the office card under kitchen supplies and got the 2-pack, with free UK delivery: one for the main kitchen and one for the little fridge in the meeting room. £27.50 each, and 45 days to change my mind if they did nothing.

It came on a Monday. I put it on the middle shelf, behind the communal milk, and didn't send an email about it. That was a first.

I told one person. Dee on reception, because she'd have asked. She looked at it and said, “Is that a speaker?” I said no. She said, “Shame.”

Wednesday was the test. By 11am on a normal Wednesday, you can smell that fridge from the kitchen door.

That Wednesday I made a coffee at eleven. I opened the fridge and got the milk out, and halfway through I realised I hadn't held my breath. I stood there with the milk in my hand for a second, like an idiot.

Someone from accounts came in behind me, opened the fridge and said, “Oh, has it been cleaned?” I said no. Because it hadn't.

By Friday, three people had asked if I'd done something to the fridge. I said I'd moved a few things round. Which was true, in a way.

I'd half expected to have to defend it at a team meeting. Nobody asked. Nobody's asked since. In an office, that's how you know something's working. My sister texted, “Well?” I sent her a photo of the A4 sign in the recycling.

I still do the Friday clear-out. Somebody has to bin the swollen yoghurts. Noova doesn't stop people forgetting their lunch, and nothing will make 34 people label a tub. There's the same amount in there on a Friday. I'm just not clearing it with my breath held, in a hurry to get it over with.

But on Wednesdays now, people open that fridge without bracing themselves. The plug-in freshener has gone, and I've cancelled the refills. There are fewer cups from over the road, too, though that might just be the weather.

The second one went in the little meeting-room fridge, where we keep the milk for clients and the odd bottle of fizz. This week it had a bottle in it for someone's birthday. Dee has stopped calling it the speaker. She calls it “Lisa's thing”. I've told two other office managers about it at the business park breakfast. One of them ordered before her coffee was finished.

Last week Richard made a client a coffee again. Same kitchen, same fridge. He opened the door, got the milk out and poured. The client said thanks. Afterwards Richard put his head round my door and said, “Kitchen's looking good, Lisa.” It didn't look any different. It just didn't smell of anything.

Nobody said “wow”. Nobody said anything, which is exactly what I wanted.

“It does what it says it get rid of horrible smells in fridge”
Fiona, verified review

Bicarb, fresheners or Noova?

The usual fixes, side by side.

	Bicarb / charcoal	Scented fresheners	Noova
Breaks smells down (doesn't just soak them up)	✗	✗	✓
Adds a fragrance to your food	none	yes	none
Needs replacing	every few weeks	every few weeks	nothing to replace for 5 years
Plug or batteries	no	some do	no
Chemical-free, food-grade steel	—	✗	✓

Rated 4.81/5 from 232 reviews

Here are a few of them, copied exactly as they were written.