How All Dressed Up built a natural salad dressing brand from a kitchen table

From small beginnings to national listings, the strategy behind a salad dressing brand bringing natural ingredients & great flavour to an additive heavy category.

When you’re making salad dressing at home does it contain a whole list of unexplained additives? Obviously not. But shop bought brands do. Tess realised that too & lucky for anyone who likes real food she went about changing things. All Dressed Up started around a kitchen table at home with 10 bottles per batch & all labelled by hand. But one Christmas & 350 bottles later it was clear there was a market for an all natural salad dressing with ingredients you’d find in your own kitchen. A year after launch All Dressed Up was in Whole Foods, Bayley & Sage, Ocado & that was only the beginning…

After making a tahini dressing to serve with roast chicken, Tess’s boyfriend suggested there was a gap in the market for natural & delicious dressings. It seems obvious but at the time dressings were built for convenience not for flavour (or texture!). Tess had built a F&B focused career with time at The Coconut Collaborative, Sipsmiths & training at Leith’s. All that gave her the foundation to understand great food, sales & marketing. She began producing small batches from her kitchen table & shortly after that, was stocked in Whole Foods. 2 years later All Dressed Up is in Ocado, Co-op & Waitrose, while still growing rapidly.

It sounds easy but Tess was working in a full time job at the same time as building All Dressed Up & finding the right contract manufacturer is always a challenge, especially one without funding. Today, the brand sees itself as flavour first, using quality natural ingredients in a squeezy bottle, that stands out when most competitors are in glass. What began as a kitchen experiment is now a serious brand built on flavour & natural ingredients.

Watch the full conversation below to hear how All Dressed Up grew so rapidly while using none of the additives used by their competitors.

If you’re in the market for some great recipes, All Dressed Up has loads of inspiration on the recipe page of their website.