Product Review: Girard’s Premium Salad Dressings

Please note: The company wrote me and told me the bottles are usually sold for around $4 each which makes much more sense!

When I received four bottles of Girard’s Premium Salad Dressings to review I was so excited! They were beautiful triangular bottles with gold sparkly tops with fantastic flavour names like Peach Mimosa Vinaigrette. The question is, can you trust a salad dressing by its packaging? If so, these were going to be the best dressings I have ever had.

I began with one of their new dressings, Apple Poppyseed. Recently at a pub I had what I thought was a similar dressing on a spinach salad so I made a big one and adding the dressing which took a very pretty picture. The taste? Sickly sweet with a harsh vinegar kick to the head. I looked down at my beautiful salad and thought to myself, how on earth am I going to eat that whole salad with that dressing? OK fine, so I did not like one of them, maybe I will prefer the Creamy Balsamic Vinaigrette which is more my foodie profile:

I made a much smaller salad with cucumbers, tomatoes and feta and sat down to enjoy it for lunch. Again, way too sweet. And still had a harsh edge although not as harsh as the Apple Poppyseed. It was time to look at the ingredients. The Apple Poppyseed’s second ingredient is high fructose corn syrup and in just 2 tbsp of dressing there are 110 calories! I know a lot of calories come from fat but it is clear that a lot of them are coming from nutrient-dead corn syrup when they could be coming from high quality honey. The vinegar in the Apple Poppyseed is cider vinegar which is the harshness I was picking up. The third ingredient in the Creamy Balsamic dressing was high fructose corn syrup over the balsamic vinegar. No wonder it was so sweet!

To avoid disappointment, I was no longer going to make full salads to test the last two dressings. I got some lettuce and dipped it in the Peach Mimosa dressing and I was close to being pleasantly surprised. Still ridiculously sweet, this dressing had the least harsh edge out of all of them. I could see how someone would use this dressing on a salad that had a little fruit on it on a nice hot day. I checked the label and discovered that once again high fructose corn syrup was the third ingredient, after water and soybean oil. Wait, water?! Why is water the first ingredient to the Peach Mimosa Vinaigrette? Hey, it is also the first ingredient to the Creamy Balsamic Vinaigrette! I have never in my life made a homemade dressing and added water to it.

I moved on to the Champagne dressing. I think this was the worst one out of the bunch. Harsh and sweet again, I looked at the bottle. The dressing is made with wine “preserved with sulfites” which is the double harshness I picked up on. No thank you!

It is not as though I am a bottled salad dressing snob, I make salads with them all the time which is why I was so excited when these salad dressings arrived at my door. Overall, I personally would never use these again on my salad. That said, if you still want to try these yourself you can go to this link to receive a $2 off coupon.

Oh I had such high hopes for this product! I am sad to say that I can only give it one out of five wooden spoons.