The smell plaguing Grafton and Millbury was so bad that some residents called the police

The area around the town line between Grafton and Millbury reeked so badly that some residents called the police.

One resident thought it was a dead animal, and was on the hunt for expired livestock. Another said the smell was like burnt toast, but foul.

Both were wrong. Dead wrong, it turns out.

The source of the horrific smell that one resident said left her “gasping” every time she stepped out of the house was actually a completely benign source.

It was tofu.

“What we found out over the last couple of weeks is that some of our food products smell a little bit more than others, and particularly the tofu was a little smellier than what we were expecting,” Alison Greenlee, CEO of FeedBack Earth told NBC10 Boston on Thursday.

Feedback Earth has a unique mission — turning food waste into meals for livestock. The business opened on Grafton’s Creeper Hill Road just a few weeks ago.

“We take in food waste, whether it’s from manufacturers, distributors, grocers,” Greenlee told the news station. “We mush it and turn it into a high-quality animal feed.”

It turns out, however, that it was smelly soy used in tofu that was the source of the stench. With the smell’s origin discovered, FeedBack stopped its tofu processing. It now hopes a new deodorizing system will make things less odorous, according to NBC10. The business is set to try the new system on Monday. It’s supposed to be tested with the state Department of Environmental Protection and the local Board of Health next week.

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