Dressing Formula Optimization

George Brown College’s Food Innovation and Research Studio (FIRSt) is collaborating with the Dressing Bar on a formula optimization project for their salad dressing recipe. The Dressing Bar is a start-up enterprise, located in Toronto. They have developed a unique salad dressing, based on a family recipe that they would like to formulate and commercialize as a retail product. Their current dressing recipe is made from all natural ingredients and avoids using thickeners and stabilizers commonly found in competitive brands. As final product, the Dressing Bar would like their dressing to be non-homogenized, refrigerated with no artificial ingredients, stabilizers or preservatives. They would also like to source local ingredients and have the dressing remain sugar-free. By keeping the dressing sugar-free, the Dressing Bar will have a unique selling proposition because most salad dressings on the market have additional sugar added for preservation purposes. In addition to the product development assistance, the Dressing Bar seeks secondary market research to determine the design of their packaging and secondary research that will act as the basis for their Business Plan. Principal Investigators, Winnie Chiu, M.Sc., Director, FIRSt, and Moira Cockburn, M.Sc., Senior Research Food Scientist, FIRSt, will use their extensive industry experience to complete this project, while working with students from GBC’s Culinary Arts program. Students from Business, Arts and Design will also collaborate with the culinary students to help determine the packaging and design of the product label. This will provide students with the opportunity to collaborate as an inter-professional team, while further developing their own industry specific skillsets. Upon project completion, the Dressing Bar will be enabled to commercialize their dressing as a retail product.