Our Story

Our Story

Salad Girl sprouted from my first summer job at Madden’s Resort on Gull Lake in Brainerd, Minnesota, where I worked as the “Salad Girl.” My job was to whisk up all the made-from-scratch dressings for the resort and to clean & prep piles of fresh produce. 

That Summer I fell in love with eating & crafting fresh salads and creating fun delicious vinaigrettes!

Those early kitchen skills carried me through art school and into the Twin Cities restaurant scene. After graduating, as a young wife, mom, and freelance artist, my husband Jim and I launched a small weekend organic catering company called Obscene Cuisine.  I designed each menu around a fresh seasonal organic salad with a matching homemade vinaigrette.  Soon, customers began asking to buy bottles of my dressings as gifts—and I started to dream about bringing a line of fresh organic dressings to market someday.

That dream took root in an unexpected way, when I gifted bottles of my dressings to the owners of Kowalski’s Markets after completing a mural painting for them. Maryanne Kowalski invited me to come in and pitch my fresh organic dressings for fresh organic greens to their head produce buyer and new product development manager. They loved my innovative fresh whisked, flavor combinations, and the idea of having seasonal flavors of a fresh organic dressing for fresh organic greens shelved conveniently right next to all the salad fixings on the refrigerated produce shelves of all 8 of their beautiful boutique stores! 

In 2006, Jim and I took that encouragement to heart and decided to jump in, (carefully), to take a leap of faith, and to bring our fresh organic dressings for fresh organic greens to the Mill City Farmers Market to see if they would sell!

To our delight, our fresh organic dressings for fresh organic greens were a hit and we sold out every weekend!  We started getting great reviews from food writers in the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and before long, more Twin Cities grocery stores and co-ops began to reach out!

Luckily, in the summer of 2007, the folks from Mello Honey stopped by the market to see what we were creating with all the organic honey we’d been buying from them. They loved what we were crafting and offered to small-batch co-pack our dressings for us, allowing us to scale up production. That partnership, by sweet coincidence, helped us transition from hand mixing & filling bottles in small batches in our small commercial kitchen, to scaling up our production with our new co-packers at Mello Honey, which enabled us to fill our very first order for all eight Kowalski’s Market stores!

In March 2008,  Salad Girl became the first certified organic fresh dressing for fresh organic greens on the refrigerated produce shelves in all of the Midwest! 

 We started with just eight stores—and today, we’re proud to be on the shelves of more than 500 stores across the Midwest! 

Still woman-owned, family-run, and Midwest made.