It's a hectic Tuesday night. You picked up a pizza for dinner on the way home from your oldest's soccer practice, but to make it a complete meal, you whip up a simple garden salad with whatever's in the crisper. For the dressing, you're grabbing whatever is already open in the fridge, and increasingly, that bottle is a store brand. Name-brand dressings carry a real premium, and as grocery prices keep climbing, store-brand Ranch and Italian are two of the easiest swaps to save money — if they actually taste good.

That's what we set out to find. At Stumptown Savings, my goal is to help you shop smarter by running regular blind taste tests. We've tackled everything from seltzer water to sushi, and this time we pitted seven store-brand salad dressing lines against each other — Ranch and Italian from each — to find out which ones are worth a spot in your fridge door.

This one's a team-up with Meg Cotner of Bridgetown Bites, timed to next week's Portland Salad Week. A version of this story will also run over on Bridgetown Bites next week. 

We tested store-brand Ranch and Italian dressings from six Portland-area stores (two house brands from one store):

We asked in Thursday's newsletter which store you thought would win, and 95 of you weighed in:

Which Store Do You Think Won Our Salad Dressing Taste Test?
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Albertsons/Safeway (3)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Fred Meyer/QFC (11)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Trader Joe's (44)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Target (5)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Whole Foods (14)
🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ WinCo Foods (18)
95 Votes

Trader Joe's was the clear favorite, taking nearly half the vote. But almost nobody gave Albertsons and Safeway much of a chance — both of their house brands got lumped into a single option that pulled just 3 votes combined. That's a mistake on our part, because those two brands aren't the same dressings wearing two labels. One of them finished near the top of our rankings. The other finished dead last.

A few of you also weighed in with predictions of your own:

"I think they have [some] of the best store bought salad dressings!" one reader said of Trader Joe's.

"I have had WinCo salad dressing and it is pretty good," another reader wrote in. "Fred Meyer is not bad either."

Keep reading to see exactly where all seven stores landed — and whether the crowd actually called it.

We took our usual blind-tasting approach: brands hidden until the final reveal. Since Ranch and Italian are different beasts entirely, we scored them separately — each dressing worth up to 7.5 points (based on flavor, consistency/cling factor, and value once prices were revealed), for a maximum store total of 15 points per judge. Across our four-judge panel, that's 60 points on the line for each store.

Dressings were served with leaves of Little Gems lettuce for dunking so judges could test how well each one actually clung to a leaf — a detail that mattered more than expected once the scoring started. This is a serious operation: at one point, Heather was timing exactly how many seconds it took each dressing to drip off the lettuce after a dunk, stopwatch and all. Some dressings held on for dear life. Others were basically water with extra steps. More on that later.

Open Nature bills itself as the "elevated" store brand at Albertsons and Safeway — the same tier as Kroger's Private Selection — but the panel didn't buy it. I found the Ranch's texture "gloppy," coming off the lettuce in chunks with "a wet glue" consistency, and awarded it zero on flavor. The Italian fared only slightly better, tasting like straight-up sour candy rather than vinegar. I landed on 3 points overall — my lowest score of the day.

Elsy was more forgiving at 9, though she still picked up nothing but sugar in the Italian and thick mayonnaise in the Ranch — "everybody gets a little credit because I'm a maker, I know," she said, extending some professional courtesy. Meg scored it 6.5: "the sweetness was like, really, something that stood out," she said of the Italian, and not in a good way. Heather gave it her low mark of 4 and dug into the ingredient list on the spot, finding dehydrated onion and garlic, dried red bell pepper, and — oddly — rowanberry extract. Her verdict: she needed the words "flavor" and "intention" tattooed on her forehead.

At $0.34 an ounce, Open Nature was also the priciest brand in the test, with none of the payoff.

Target's organic house brand split the panel more than most. I found a sour note running through both dressings and disliked the Italian more than the Ranch — my entire note on it reads, in full, "gross" — landing on 5 points. Elsy was more forgiving at 11, describing the Ranch as "very mayo forward" without much else going on.

Heather described a sweet, acidic, viscous Ranch, timing its drip at a full seven seconds — one of the slowest of the day — and found the Italian "just tasted like vinegar," for 4 points total. Meg called the Ranch stale with a dusty aftertaste but found the Italian "clean tasting," landing on 7 — and noted the bottle looked almost identical to Open Nature sitting right next to it on the table.

Being organic didn't buy Good & Gather much goodwill here — despite it being more affordable than several non-organic bottles — and it finished squarely in the bottom half of the test.

Whole Foods' house Ranch was, to quote myself, "one of the worst things I tasted" — it "almost tasted like I was eating vinegar and mayo." I gave it a zero on flavor. The Italian fared a little better on tang, but I still couldn't taste much beyond vinegar, earning the brand a 7 overall from me.

Elsy was kinder to both, calling out a balanced Ranch flavor and landing on 7.5 (though, to be fair, she started every store off with at least a 50% so it didn't earn anything beyond that). Meg matched her at 7.5 — the Ranch, she said, "smelled a little like marshmallows," which is not a compliment when you're expecting buttermilk and herbs. Heather rounded it out with a 7: "it was just sugar," she said of the Ranch. "The mouth feel is really gross."

The consensus: both dressings held together well on the lettuce — this was one of the more emulsified pairs in the test, which wasn’t quite a plus for the Italian — but with a higher price tag than half the field, that consistency wasn't enough to save it from a bottom-three finish.

Quick disclosure: I accidentally grabbed the fat-free Ranch instead of the regular version, which almost certainly worked against WinCo here — manufacturers typically make up for stripped-out fat with extra sugar, and that's exactly what came through. Sadly, I didn't realize my mistake until moments before the taste test began, so there was no chance to pivot.

I found both dressings quite sour, with the Ranch coating the inside of the cup in a jiggly, almost gelatin-like texture. "The ranch jiggles like jello," I said, watching it refuse to run off my lettuce leaf. I gave it a 6, reasoning that if you're genuinely trying to stretch a grocery budget, it gets the job done. Heather, true to form, was tracking the drip — same as she'd done with every dressing Ranch — and clocked WinCo's as leaving "a long, gooey string" behind instead of a clean drip, landing on 5 overall for these dressings.

Elsy loved it, though — WinCo pulled her highest score of the entire test at 14. "I feel like I could eat it over a piece of plantains and enjoy it," she said of the Italian, though she'd add a pinch of salt to the Ranch. Meg gave it an 8.5, picking up sweetness and a touch of fruitiness in the Italian.

At $0.11 an ounce, WinCo was by a wide margin the cheapest dressing in the entire test — and still climbed to 4th place, fat-free ranch mishap and all.