A brief history of ranch
- OJFC
- Nov 7, 2023
- 2 min read
Ranch dressing, served in restaurants worldwide, its tang used to liven up everything from fried foods to vegetable sticks, was the brainchild of one Steve Henson in Santa Barbara, California, after he purchased the Sweetwater Ranch on San Marcos Pass in 1956. He soon renamed the property Hidden Valley Ranch.
Hidden Valley was a guest ranch, offering fishing, riding, hiking, and other outdoor activities. The ranch also offered hearty home-cooked meals. Guests were particularly taken by the unique dressing that graced the salads. Henson had first come up with the recipe while working in Alaska. The dressing was made with buttermilk and mayonnaise and was enlivened with herbs and spices.
Word began to spread about this wonderful product. Henson mixed up a batch for his friend, Audrey Ovington, owner of Cold Spring Tavern, and the tavern became the first establishment away from the ranch to offer the dressing on its menu. By 1957, Kelley’s Korner, a store at Hollister Avenue (now State Street) and La Cumbre Road, was selling small packages of the dried herbs and spices and could not keep them on the shelves. In one two-day period, the store sold more than 140 packages.
Obviously Henson was onto something. He began a mail order business at the ranch with packages selling for 75 cents apiece. It was not long until the operation had taken up every room in the family home. By the mid-1960s, the guest ranch had been completely taken over by the mail order business. By the late 1960s, the Hensons were filling orders from all 50 states and more than 30 countries.
By the early 1970s, Hidden Valley Ranch dressing had grown much too big for its home. Processing had to move offsite, and the ranch became the corporate headquarters. For a time, the dressing mix was blended at Griffith Laboratories in San Jose then shipped down to Los Angeles to be packaged in a 65,000-square-foot facility at the rate of 35,000 packets every eight hours. Operations were later set up in Colorado and in Nevada.
In 1972, Henson sold the business but ranch dressing’s popularity only continued to grow until, in 1992, ranch became the best-selling dressing in the U.S.
