NASHVILLE, Tennessee (AP) — Ranch is the best-selling salad dressing in America, and it has been since it took the crown from Italian near the close of the 20th century. It’s still jazzing up iceberg and romaine. But ranch now competes with the likes of ketchup and other condiments, a creamy dip for everything from hot wings and fried pickles to — perhaps most controversially — pizza.It’s ubiquitous, a versatile staple of American foodways easily found in grocery stores, recipes and on menus. There are entire cookbooks and a restaurant dedicated to the flavor.
Beloved and maligned, ranch also turns up in the country’s cultural intangibles. Writers have labeled it the “Great American Condiment,” and less flatteringly, “extravagant and trashy.” It carries a nostalgia, said Nick Higgins, an executive for Hidden Valley Ranch’s parent company, which taps into that sentimentalism and fosters the ranch fandom.
A spoonful of ranch dressing in Phoenix, Wednesday, April 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)
The viral food fights their product inspires? They embrace those, too. “We love it,” he said. “It’s one of the things we can debate as people and it’s OK.”How ranch got to that mountaintop is an American story, a difficult feat that evokes the country’s entrepreneurial spirit.
