Customers have been deserting the shelf-stable salad dressing category for supposedly healthier, fresher refrigerated options, or they are simply making dressings at home in a back-to-basics attempt to cut fillers, gums, preservatives, and artificial flavors from their diets. Rather than a cause for despair, this can be the chance to revitalize your product line in a category that is ripe for a little tasty disruption.
Benefits of Healthy Ingredients in Salad Dressings
The steady, tidal shift away from fillers and artificial ingredients in our food has swept through nearly every aisle in the grocery store, and salad dressing has not escaped this change. The rise of interest in “healthy oils” such as extra virgin olive oil and avocado oil has propelled a move toward refrigerated salad dressings that consumers assume are healthier and contain more fresh ingredients than shelf-stable dressings.
There are always going to be trendy flavors that come and go, but larger trends can outlast a fascination with smoky chipotle peppers. The larger ongoing trend toward short ingredient lists filled with recognizable names of healthy vegetables and spices means new products hitting the shelves need to be stacked with real, nutritious ingredients.
This applies to all aspects of a product, including the color. While artificial colors have their place, increased customer wariness of artificial colors in food mean products like broccoli, beets, red cabbage, and carrots are now of more value than just their nutritional content. Adding vibrant color and extra nutritional bragging rights to your dressings can be a huge win.
Working with natural ingredients to color your products gives you a chance to beef up the nutritional credentials of your offerings, to be sure. It can also mean needing to take some different steps in the manufacturing process. Here, Silva has you covered with custom cut sizes to ensure the products you need are available in the exact size and consistency required to hone the look and flavor of your final recipe.
Steam Sterilized Ingredients
Food safety is not something to toy with, as a product recall can be devastating to brand reputation. This could leave you feeling boxed in when it comes to making choices about what ingredients you can include in your shelf-stable products. Thankfully, Silva has your back. Our certified steam sterilization process can open up a wide range of options with ingredients guaranteed to be safe in foods where refrigeration or a cooking step is not an option.
Steam sterilization, along with our ZerOx all-natural insect treatment, can give you the confidence to put natural, healthy vegetables, herbs, and spices in your recipes knowing they have been processed without some of the chemical treatments to which customers are increasingly averse.
Vegetables in Salad Dressings
Convenience will always be a factor when consumers purchase a salad dressing. After all, not everyone has time to buy, clean, cut, and blend a laundry list of ingredients to get a stunning, nuanced dressing. There is also going to be some amount of attraction to trendy ingredients that have captured the collective culinary imagination at the moment. Silva’s product line can ensure that you have the bases covered from old standards to new, catchy, on-trend ingredients people are sweeping off the shelves.
Beyond that, it is the subtle details of flavor and texture that will keep people coming back for that special something they can’t find anywhere else. Dressing, after all, can be a subtle business where the texture and consistency matters immensely. The right consistency of your product will help it to properly coat and integrate into a salad.
Silva’s extensive product line comes in as many standard powdered and cut sizes as possible for each of our ingredients, as well as offering custom cut sizes when needed. This can allow you to fine-tune not only the flavor, but also the texture of your salad dressings by honing on just the right size for each and every ingredient in your mix.
Cut size matters for appearance, too. A great-tasting dressing is not going to sell if it looks unappealing. The smooth, fresh green hue of a green goddess dressing may not need recognizable bits of chives or parsley, but having a few bits of something in your garden ranch that look like they came from a garden can help give a little confidence to your would-be customers that healthy flavors are waiting under a healthy-looking label.
New, Healthy Salad Dressings
The joy of food is in the constant inventiveness and surprise of limitless combinations of flavors. As consumer attention turns back toward healthy ingredients, the chance to distinguish your products through innovative combinations that catch the eye and captivate the palettes of buyers looking for a break from the salad dressing options they have come to know.
If you are interested in seeing how Silva can help bring life to shelf-stable dressings, and many other product lines, reach out to our customer relationship team today. From our spice and herb blends to our steam sterilized vegetables and fruits, we can give you the options you need when inventing your next line of flavors. We even offer samples of our products if you are itching to get started on your next break-out success.