Ranch dressing

Ranch dressing is a savory, creamy

Ranch dressing was invented by Steven Henson (1918–2007), a cowboy from Thayer, Nebraska living in the Anchorage, Alaska area, where he worked as a plumbing contractor and cook. In order to make vegetables more palatable, Henson created a dressing with buttermilk, mayonnaise, spices, and herbs.^[4]

After Henson retired, he purchased a guest ranch in San Marcos Pass in Santa Barbara County, California and renamed it Hidden Valley Ranch.^[4] Henson served the salad dressing he had created at the ranch, and guests bought jars to take home.^[4] The first commercial customer for ranch dressing was Henson's friend, Audrey Ovington, who was the owner of Cold Spring Tavern. By 1957, Henson began selling packages of dressing mix in stores.^[5]

Henson began selling the packages by mail for 75 cents a piece, and eventually devoted every room in his house to the operation. By the mid-1960s, the guest ranch had closed, but Henson's "ranch dressing" mail-order business was thriving.

The Hensons incorporated Hidden Valley Ranch Food Products, Inc., and opened a factory to manufacture ranch dressing in larger volumes, which they first distributed to supermarkets in the southwest, and eventually nationwide.^[6]

Commercialization

Manufacturing of the mix was later moved to San Jose, then Colorado, and then to Sparks, Nevada, in 1972.^[5][6]

In October 1972, the Hidden Valley Ranch brand was bought by Clorox for $8 million,^[2][5] and Henson retired.^[5]

During the 1980s, ranch became a common snack food flavor, starting with Cool Ranch Doritos in 1987. Hidden Valley Ranch Wavy Lay's potato chips were introduced in 1994.^[2]

During the 1990s, Hidden Valley had three child-oriented variations of ranch dressing: pizza, nacho cheese, and taco flavors.^[7][8]

As of 2002, Clorox subsidiary Hidden Valley Manufacturing Company was producing ranch packets and bottled dressings at two large factories, in Reno, Nevada, and Wheeling, Illinois.^[6]

In 2017, Hidden Valley Ranch made $450 million in profit.^[4]

Production

Ranch dressing is produced by many manufacturers, including Hidden Valley, Kroger, Ken's, Kraft, Litehouse, Marie's, Newman's Own, and Wish-Bone, as well as Heinz in the Middle East.

Variations

In the Southwestern United States, there is a variant from New Mexican cuisine called "green chile ranch" which adds green New Mexico chile pepper as an ingredient.^[9][10] Restaurant chains like Dion's produce and sell green chile ranch, as do others in the region.^[11][12][13]

Other variations include avocado, roasted red pepper, and buttermilk alternatives.^[14]

Ranch is also a flavor. Doritos, a type of tortilla chip, comes in a ranch flavor.^[15]

Trademark lawsuit

One side effect of the adoption of the name "ranch" for Henson's new salad dressing was that it resulted in a federal lawsuit over whether the phrase "ranch style" could be used to describe other competing salad dressing products. Since the early 1930s, there had already been an existing product called Ranch Style Beans, which is still sold by Conagra Brands today.

In 1975, Waples-Platter, the Texas-based manufacturer of Ranch Style Beans, sued Kraft Foods and General Foods for trademark infringement for their "ranch style" products, even though Waples-Platter had declined to enter the salad dressing market itself over concerns about rapid spoilage.

The case was tried before federal judge Eldon Brooks Mahon in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1976. Mahon ruled in favor of Waples-Platter in a lengthy opinion which described the various "ranch style" and "ranch" products then available in the 1970s in the United States, of which many had been created to compete against Hidden Valley Ranch. Mahon's opinion cites to evidence which indicates the lawyers had compelled Henson himself to sit for a deposition during the discovery process to testify about the history of Hidden Valley Ranch.^[16]

Mahon specifically noted that Hidden Valley Ranch and Waples-Platter had no dispute with each other, though he also noted that Hidden Valley Ranch was simultaneously suing General Foods in a separate federal case in California. The only issue before the Texas federal district court was that Waples-Platter was disputing the right of other American food manufacturers to compete against Hidden Valley Ranch by using the label "ranch style".^[16]

See also

• List of dips

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Ranch dressing.

Look up ranch dressing in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Hidden Valley Ranch Dressing history