A French restaurant on a downtown San Francisco block and a house French dressing.

Girard’s is an American brand of salad dressings and vinaigrettes, sold in supermarkets by the Marzetti Company of Columbus, Ohio. Its story begins far from Ohio, in a restaurant in downtown San Francisco, and its name is that of the chef who ran it.

The food writer Carolyn Jung, in a post on her Food Gal blog in September 2011, said Girard’s dressings got their start at Girard’s French Restaurant in 1935, on the third floor of the landmark John’s Grill. There, she wrote, the Girard family first made their French dressing. The International Directory of Company Histories, in a history of the T. Marzetti Company published in 2004, named the founder as the chef Pierre Girard, and said he began with a recipe for an Original French dressing and then added other varieties.

The Marzetti Company tells the story in the same way on its brand page today. It says the dressings were created in San Francisco by Chef Pierre Girard, who started with a French dressing recipe and gradually added others.

The address gives the brand some of its colour. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on 21 December 2008, in a piece marking the restaurant’s centennial, that John’s Grill opened on Ellis Street, off Union Square, in 1908, and had stayed on the same site ever since. The Chronicle described it as a wood-panelled meeting place for retail barons, financiers, private investigators and newspaper people.

The building also has a place in fiction. The Chronicle said Dashiell Hammett, who worked for the Pinkerton detective agency in the Flood Building next door in the 1920s, ate and drank at John’s Grill, and mentioned it in his 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon, where the detective Sam Spade orders chops, baked potatoes and sliced tomatoes there. Five years after that novel appeared, according to Food Gal, the Girard family’s French restaurant was serving its dressing on the floor above.

From a family recipe to Girard’s Fine Foods, Lancaster Colony and the Marzetti Company.

The dressing did not stay a restaurant sideline. Food Gal wrote in 2011 that the Girard family’s French dressing was marketed and eventually sold to a large conglomerate. By the time of that sale the business traded as Girard’s Fine Foods, a maker of salad dressings, according to the International Directory of Company Histories.

The buyer was Lancaster Colony Corporation, of Columbus, Ohio. The Directory’s 2004 history of T. Marzetti says Lancaster Colony acquired Girard’s Fine Foods in 1991, one of several acquisitions in the early 1990s that widened the range of its food group. The same history lists Girard’s salad dressings among the shelf brands of the group in the early 2000s, alongside Cardini’s dressings, Inn Maid noodles and Romanoff caviar. The company, now named the Marzetti Company, has owned Girard’s since 1991.

Lancaster Colony was not a food company to begin with. A separate history of the corporation in the International Directory of Company Histories says it was founded in 1961 by the Ohio entrepreneur John B. Gerlach as a holding company for businesses making stemware, plastic housewares, glass components and work gloves. Its food business came from Columbus. The Marzetti history says Teresa Marzetti, who had emigrated from Florence in 1896, ran an Italian restaurant in Columbus whose dressings customers wanted to buy, and that the restaurant bottled its first product for sale outside its doors in 1947. Lancaster Colony’s own history says its purchase of the T. Marzetti Company was completed in 1970.

From 1991 the two restaurant-born dressings sat in the same group. The 2004 Directory history describes Marzetti dressings sold in the produce section of supermarkets, and Girard’s among the brands on the shelves.

The parent now carries the Marzetti name. The company’s website, in 2026, presents Girard’s as one of the brands of The Marzetti Company, and directs shoppers to a dedicated Girard’s website.

There is also a second Girard’s, for restaurants. GFF, Inc., of City of Industry, California, sells Girard’s Food Service Dressings, made-to-menu dressings and sauces for kitchens. GFF says it is a stand-alone company that licenses the Girard’s name for the manufacture of mayonnaise, salad dressings and sauces, and that the name is a licensed trademark of the T. Marzetti Company.

Design and documentation.

Dried pasta, mustard and salad dressing are pantry goods that sit side by side on a grocery shelf, and each category has settled into a familiar kind of pack. Dried pasta is often sold in a printed paperboard box or a clear bag, so the shape of the noodle and the name on the front have to work together. Mustard usually comes in a glass jar or a squeeze bottle, where a narrow label has to carry the name, the style and the colour of the condiment at a glance.

Salad dressing is most often sold in a tall bottle with a wraparound label, and the dressing itself can show through the glass or plastic. Across all three categories, the label tends to do much of the work that a logo does elsewhere: it names the product, marks the flavour or shape, and signals the brand behind it.

Each guide in this group looks at who started a brand, who owns it now and where its products are made, separating what independent sources record from what a company says about itself.

A triangular bottle, a specialty-shelf position and a range named for champagne and Venice.

The shape is what most shoppers notice. The Marzetti Company describes Girard’s dressings as offering a variety “as distinctive as its triangular bottles”, and says the range is sold in the specialty dressing section of grocery stores rather than among everyday dressings.

The names on those labels lean towards the restaurant. The brand’s website lists dressings such as Champagne Dressing, Olde Venice Italian, White Balsamic Vinaigrette and Greek Feta Vinaigrette, and suggests uses for them in recipes such as a grilled watermelon salad and a summer pasta salad. Food Gal reported in September 2011 that four of the dressings, Light Champagne, Olde Venice Italian, White Balsamic and Greek Feta Vinaigrette, had just been reformulated.

The brand’s website keeps the chef in the picture: its headline asks shoppers to inspire the meal with a chef’s touch.

The foodservice line speaks to cooks rather than shoppers. GFF’s Girard’s Food Service Dressings site presents culinary dressings made to menu, offers to develop custom dressings and sauces with its culinary team, and suggests uses beyond salad, on tostadas and flatbreads.

For a design guide, Girard’s shows how a restaurant origin and an unusual container can position a bottled product: a triangular bottle and a set of bistro-style names keep a supermarket dressing close to the dining room where it began. Compare it with Marzetti, the sister brand that grew from a Columbus restaurant, and Hidden Valley, a dressing named after a guest ranch. For this guide we use bistro green, champagne gold, linen white and vinaigrette red with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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