Rouses_May-June-2018

EAT LOCAL

[ABOVE] Sensation Salad with Hanley’s Sensation Dressing; photo courtesy Hanley’s Foods [LEFT] Kate & Richard Hanley, Hanley’s Dressings; photo courtesy Hanley’s Foods

words “Sorry! Back next week!” he knew he had a hit. He doubled the batch — 12 hours of work — and returned to the farmers’ market, and the same thing happened again . Suddenly, he had a big decision to make. This thing — well, it could be something! But … salad dressing? Was that something people even devoted their lives to? He and his wife, Kate, talked it over. It was crazy, but it could work! They were still young. It was a big gamble. They had two little girls. But they decided it was now or never. He quit his job and they moved in with his parents. His wife quit her job the following year.They were doing this.They were going to make a successful food company. And Hanley’s Foods was born.

“We went from the farmers’ market to the grocery store with a smile and a bottle of Sensation,” says Hanley. “I was begging taco truck owners, saying, ‘Hey, I’ll wash your truck if you let me make some dressing in it on the weekends.’ I was just trying to find a way where I could mass-make this.” He eventually teamed up with the Louisiana State University AgCenter’s food incubator, a business support center for new food ventures. There, he found access to such hardware as 100-gallon vats and special refrigerators to test shelf life, as well as on- campus food scientists and nutritionists. “We got our start here, and we’ve taken it from farmers’ markets to about 800 stores across the United States. We want to be the global leader not only in specialty salad

dressings, but to make Sensation the next big flavor: Ranch. Sriracha. Sensation.” It wasn’t as easy as that, of course. Devel- oping a recipe is hard. Scaling it is harder. Hanley says it took a lot of mistakes and a lot of experiments. “I had many late nights of oil and vinegar stacked to the ceiling.Me, just playing around with it, hacking things, testing different techniques, experiments, trying different ways of cooking it, making, it stirring it, tweaking it, until I got the fla- vor profile I was looking for.” From there, he moved to spreadsheets to figure out how to turn a recipe for one bottle into a recipe for 10,000. How much oil is necessary? Vinegar? Cheese? How do you make every bottle taste like the first one?

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