She Took a Good Idea and Bottled It
Marti Jones Overcomes Odds with Popular Salad Dressings

by Heidi Henken

 

Somewhere near the beginning, a small business adviser tried to discourage Marti Jones from going into the salad dressing business. The adviser showed her statistics and sales reports, told her there were too many other dressings on the market and said her idea would never work.

“I guess she was trying to be a realist,” Jones reflects, “but I knew I had a good product.”

Jones is in the kitchen of her South Bay Drive home, a cup of coffee in front of her. Her youngest son, Johnathan, is crawling under the table at her feet, doing what 5-year-old boys do when they want their mom’s attention. Her other two children — Paul, 12, and Hannah, 9 — are still at school.

It’s getting close to noon and soon her mother-in-law, JoAn Jones, will be coming over.

The pair will walk through a kitchen door that leads to the back half of the building Jones and her children call home. Then, they will fire up a computerized Waukesha bottling line and begin bottling Marti’s Garden Fresh Dressings.

JoAn Jones comes over every Tuesday to help her daughter-in-law do the bottling. They can fill and seal 600 bottles, or 50 cases of 12, in three hours. The dressings will go to retail corporate giants such as Haggen, Inc., Costco and Brown & Cole, as well as smaller stores, including Fairhaven Red Apple, the Bellingham Food Co-op and Youngstocks. Marti’s Dressing is found in refrigerated produce sections across Washington state and in Oregon.

 

Spurred by friends

Marti’s Dressing is one of those remarkable success stories that come along every now and again. It’s the story of a woman who called herself “just a housewife,” takes her talent and a product she’s invented in her kitchen and, against all odds, turns it into a thriving company.

The story starts in 1989 when, after graduating from Western Washington University with a degree in geology in 1987, Marti Nelson of Ferndale married John Jones, a rhododendron grower. They moved into a house with a large barn-like shed next to it. It was at the southern edge of Whatcom County, giving them a Sedro-Woolley address and an Acme telephone number. They started their family and Marti cared for the house, their children and her garden.

In 1990, they hosted a friend’s wedding at their home and somebody forgot the dressing for the salad. So Jones picked some herbs from her garden and invented one. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, but the dressing was such a hit that she made it again and again for potlucks and friends. People kept asking for her dressing and kept telling her, “You need to bottle this.”

Finally, after enough prodding, Jones got a business license in 1993, rented a small public-access commercial kitchenette, carted her ingredients, bottles and funnels over there and went into the salad-dressing business.

First, Jones went around to business lunchrooms and put out samples. Then, she took her dressing to the Bellingham Farmers Market. Her strategy was to give away lots of labels and lots of samples. Jones knew if she could “just get it in people’s mouths,” the dressing would sell itself.

And it did. She sold out the first day; all 120 bottles. The next week she came back and sold 340 bottles. Every weekend she averaged another 340 bottles for the rest of the season. Customers really liked her dressing and Jones knew she was on to something.

No longer a hobby

As demand for the dressing grew, her husband built a commercial kitchen at their home, so she wouldn’t have to haul ingredients and equipment around. Still the business remained relatively small until 1998, when Jones lost her husband to cancer.

Jones was left a widow with three young children, a mortgage and Social Security benefits that just covered the children’s needs. Fortunately, she also had her salad dressing. She knew that in order to survive, she was going to have to start taking the business seriously. Her father, Connor Nelson, became a silent financial partner, investing enough to allow Jones to buy automated bottling equipment.

The metal shed on the property was remodeled into a building that was half apartment, half factory. Jones moved herself and her children next door to the house the family had been living in, and raised her annual income from her very first take of $350 to the year 2000’s gross of $38,000.

Sales soared last year to $60,000, even with a dip in sales after Sept. 11, after Jones hired a merchandising expert recommended by one of the stores that stocks her product. She credits Julie Ann Berry of J.B. Merchandising in Everett for the sudden increase.

Right now, with the exception of the merchandiser, Marti’s Dressing LLC, is still a family business. When her mother-in-law isn’t helping Jones bottle product from a 60-gallon vat, her children help out. If she gets much bigger, however, she may have to hire an employee.

Marti’s Dressing doesn’t have a Web site yet, either, but she’s been thinking about it. Just like she’s been thinking about adding a low-fat toasted sesame dressing to the current quartet of flavors: original garlic basil, low-fat garlic basil, low-fat Southwest and low-fat ginger Dijon. Jones already has added another 900 square feet to the existing 600-square-foot building that houses her salad dressing factory.

Marti’s Dressing may be a small, family business, but it’s also a growing concern owned by a woman with confidence in her product and the ability to overcome obstacles. For the salad dressing business, that seems to be just the right mix.