Fork. Spoon. Life.: Salad dressings.
After working 23 years as a waitress, Kathy Taft spent nine years running her own bakery. When she closed the bakery, she had no intention of owning another business.
She found work at a wine and cheese shop and started bringing lunches. She almost always included her homemade dressings. After the owner got a taste, they ended up on the menu and requests kept coming. Either she had to look into bottling and selling the dressing, or the wine shop would.
She took the leap, and in 2006 started Sasha’s Salad and Sandwich Dressing with Ken, her husband of 50 years. They started with two sweet dressings, ecstatic when they had 13 customers sampling at their first event. Now the Mukwonago-based couple handmake seven styles of dressing. Dressings are sold to retail outlets around the country, and the couple travel the Midwest selling at events. All the dressings are vegan, gluten free, soy free and dairy free, and two are salt free.
First flavor
Kathy: Sweet and savory, that was our first recipe. I’ve had the recipe for about 15 years. I made it for myself to eat at home. Ken liked Italian dressing and that was it. I just made dressing for myself. One day I put it on his salad and he said it was good. He’s a picky eater, so I knew it might be good for others. Ken: We hand-make, bottle, cap, seal, label and distribute all of it. Kathy and I do everything. I’m 70 and she’s 69. We have about four very part-time employees.
Not so secret ingredient
Kathy: I use fresh onions in all our salad dressings.
Finding her flavors
Kathy: People come to our shows and markets and ask for French or a Roquefort or Thousand Island dressing. That’s not our plan. We tried to make salad dressings that you didn’t find 100 of in a store. Our latest is Sweet Amore, an Italian-inspired. That was our first venture trying something that you find readily in stores.
Fresh flavors
Kathy: Everything I put in my dressings is free of anything artificial. We make a pineapple with fresh lemon, and we handsqueeze the lemon. I don’t use bottled lemon juice because that has an ingredient I don’t want in my dressing.
Spices vs. salt
Kathy: Most dressings are loaded with salt. It is much cheaper to put salt in a dressing rather than spices. If you’re going to have a nice fresh salad, I believe it is good to have spices and dressing to top that, not salt.
Our dressings are vegan, gluten, soy and dairy free, and have no artificial preservatives. There is no xanthan gum in our dressings.
What’s in a name
Ken: We made two dressings in the beginning. We were looking for names. The descriptions of the dressings, sweet, sultry, sour, really describe our daughter and the attitudes she has. That’s perfect, why don’t we call it Sasha’s Salad Dressings? That is our daughter, Sasha Marie.
We also have a son, and we didn’t want him to not feel a part of the things. The company is KenJr LLC doing business as Sasha’s Salad and Sandwich Dressing. As it turns out, neither are involved in the business at all.
Starting point
Extra virgin olive oil, canola oil and apple cider vinegar. Those are the basics in all the dressings. There are no cream dressings.
By the batch
Kathy: We make about five to six bottles at a time. We pour very fast; we’ve gotten very good at it after all these years. Ken: She may make 500 to 600 bottles in a day, all by hand.
Giving up the garage
Ken: Our home is licensed by the State of Wisconsin as our warehouse. We transformed the garage from parking our cars.
Kathy: We haven’t parked our cars in the garage for years.
Recipe development
Kathy: People don’t realize, they think I just make the dressing and bottle it and sell it. It is longevity in the bottle. When you make a dressing, it is good when you first make it. Try it a few weeks later, not so good. I had to try with all of them to give it a few weeks, taste it, keep trying. I spent a year developing some of these.
Salads they eat in a week
Ken: We eat salad pretty much daily. Every single day, and you’re talking to a guy who prior to Kath making dressings, I’m a meat and potatoes guy. I’d eat iceberg lettuce with French dressing. Kath would look at me and say no, darker greens and healthier dressings.
Creative customers
Ken: Our dressings are used at least 40% of the time for marinating and dipping. That didn’t come from us at all. That came from customers. That was a surprise.
Lesson learned
Kathy: Learning from the bakery business, I’d never again do anything that wasn’t shelf stable.
Flavor flop
Kathy: I worked on some raspberry dressings. A lot of the raspberry flavoring, if you just put real raspberries in something you just don’t get a strong flavor.
Growing a business
Kathy: We love the way it is right now. We had more employees, but when you have more employees it gets more difficult to keep control. We decided to slow things down and enjoy the ride.