Bob's Anecdote of "PLN's Salad Dressing" Beginnings

For several years on race weekends, Paul would barbecue out at the track while the crew worked on the race cars on Saturday evenings. He would buy hamburger meat and the groceries for a picnic, plus the ingredients for his special salad dressing. He talked frequently about wanting to go in the salad dressing business. (Restaurants and food businesses are difficult to run and be profitable, in my unknowledgeable opinion.) However, he said that Joanne and he wanted to give the profits to charity.

At Christmas time Paul and buddy A. E. Hotchner would make a batch and fill "split" (half-sized) wine bottles with his own salad dressing. Even the kids loved it.

I suggested to Paul that we contact my good friend Stew Leonard, who was in the food business, and offered to set up a salad-for-lunch meeting for the 3 of us. Stew gave Paul and me a tour of his "largest dairy store in the world" and introduced us to his key employees. Then we went upstairs to Stew's office and had salad, while chatting about the prospect of Paul's salad idea.

Stew suggested he call Ken of "Ken's Steak House" in the Boston area and invite him to come down for lunch the next week. We did and Ken suggested to Paul that he pick one of the 3 salad-dressing bottle designs he had in inventory, rather than a wine bottle, which would have needed to be corked. All Paul needed was a label for Newman's Own. Sam Posey's wife Ellen, who is a well-known artist in her own right, came up with a design that incorporated a caricature of Paul.

Stew offered to give a minimum order of a gross of cases to start the procedure. Ken would play with the fancy Italian Olive Oil (top quality, but not so expensive as to out price the product). And "Newman's Own" was born.