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Bottling and marketing salad dressings

post #1 of 3
8/2/09 at 11:13pm
Thread Starter 
Hello All,
I'm new to chef talk and had a question re: salad dressing marketing and bottling. I'm a chef at a brand new steakhouse in Wyoming. I've had quite a few customers comment on my salad dressings suggesting that I bottle and sell them. Any pointers out there?

Thanks James
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post #2 of 3
8/3/09 at 3:32am
Don't know what your health laws are there, but usually you need a special license to bottle and market preserved foods for sale to the public. You more than likely don't have the equipment or space for it, so look around your area for someone else who processes food for resale. You give them your recipe, they make and bottle the product with your label. You pay them an agreed-on price and then resell the product at a profit. Bottling things changes how they taste, so you will probably have to tweak your recipe to compensate for it. Your other alternative is to post a sign saying your dressings are available for take home and pack them in containers on site with an expiration label. Kind of like bying things from the deli. That would probably be the easiest to implement and should give you an idea of how popular the item actually is before entering into a production contract with a third party. Usually if you have someone else produce the product, you have to order a certain amount in order for them to do it. If the stuff doesn't sell, you're stuck with it. However, if you have a wildly popular product, third party production is usually the best way to go as opposed to buying your own equipment and trying to do it yourself. If you have a whole line of products you want to sell, then setting up your own production site may pay off.
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post #3 of 3
8/3/09 at 5:06am
If you're confident that the products will sell, than a contract bottler is the way to go. In addition to knowing all the appropriate packaging and labeling regs, they will happily serve as consultants, suggesting changes to the formula so that what's in the bottle tastes like what you mix by hand, whether adding preservatives makes sense, etc. They'll also help with label design & production, and all the other minutia of packaging.

However, as Greyeagle notes, the minimum order sizes from contract packagers can be rather high. So it only makes sense to do a test; perhaps, as he suggests, offering it for sale over your counter in bulk.

Keep in mind, too, that if you go that route it might have an effect on your liability insurance. So check that, too.
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