As far as I can tell, patient zero was a Swedish 24-year-old named Elsa Thora. “Why did no one tell me ranch sauce is like crack?” she posted to X earlier this month, apparently hours after landing in Indianapolis for a monthlong World Cup trip. “EUROPE WE NEED RANCH ASAP.” The post received 49,000 likes and propelled Thora to a very specific kind of fame. (“I guess I’m that Ranch girl now,” says her bio on Instagram, where she is also doing sponsored content for a Curaçao-based online casino that takes only cryptocurrency. She was also, as my colleague Will Oremus recently pointed out, a star of both OnlyFans and the British tabloids before any of this.)
Soon enough, ever more World Cup visitors were being charmed by ranch, and more Americans were being charmed by them being charmed. By late last week, the TSA had issued a statement: “If you’re visiting for a very large sporting event & you happen to discover RANCH while you’re here… pls pack it in your CHECKED BAG on the way home” (92,000 likes). Shortly thereafter, Kraft posted a partially AI-generated image of supposedly-TSA-compliant mini-ranch packets, plus a promise that more details on how to buy them would be coming soon. No matter that the product did not actually exist yet, and that the desire for it had been ginned up in the internet’s post-truth hall of mirrors; news stories about Kraft’s stunt sprouted up like weeds after a summer rain. The cycle continued: more videos, more coverage, more social-media posts. There’s no real reason that a police department in suburban Northern California needed to post on Facebook about “a coordinated international enthusiasm for ranch dressing,” except for the obvious: They wanted to get in on the fun.
Ranch mania is broadly endearing because it combines so many of the internet’s favorite things—influencers, AI slop, food opinions, low-stakes cultural differences, close-up shots of fatty liquids spilling out of their containers, feel-good narratives, dumb new things to buy. The news stories are too credulous and the influencers are too savvy, but I find that a little winsome too: It’s as though the internet is putting on a play and everyone is working desperately to make sure it goes right. Coordinated international enthusiasm is hard to come by these days, after all; the only two things that reliably seem to bring it are food and sports. And ranch is, truly, one of America’s great indigenous foods.
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In the early 1950s, Steve Henson was living in Alaska, working as a plumbing contractor. He also sometimes cooked for his crew, but he had trouble finding fresh herbs or dairy up there, so he had to make do with what he had. He made a dressing with buttermilk, mayonnaise, and various dried herbs and spices, notably onion and garlic powder. The blend came home to his native Nebraska with him and then to the dude ranch in Santa Barbara that he and his wife later founded, which they called Hidden Valley.
Their patrons loved it. World War II–era technology had recently enabled the easy packaging and preserving of food; this was the era of the boxed cake mix too. So the Hensons started selling powdered ranch by mail. It became so popular that every room in their house was soon filled with packets and they had to close the dude ranch. In the early ’80s, the home-products company Clorox—which the Hensons had sold their business to—helped pioneer shelf-stable liquid ranch, which quickly made its way to grocery-store shelves around the country. A few years later, snack-food makers began putting the spice blend on chips. By the early ’90s, ranch officially overtook Italian to become America’s best-selling salad dressing. It still is.
At a restaurant in St. Louis, every entree item—including nachos and mac ’n’ cheese—contains ranch. At the Minnesota State Fair, you can buy ranch-flavored cream cheese that is coated in panko and deep fried, then dusted in ranch powder. Just this past weekend, when the Dallas Cowboys’ tight end Jake Ferguson got married at the Biltmore Hotel in Miami, he presented his guests with a ranch fountain. In season 12 of The Simpsons, when Homer is dying of carbon-monoxide poisoning, he hallucinates himself as a sultan, surrounded by dancing concubines. But that’s not actually the fantasy—eventually, he barks, “Enough! I grow weary of your sexually suggestive dancing. Bring me my ranch-dressing hose!” And then he takes a fireman’s hose of it straight to the face, happily.
Some 75 percent of Americans like or love ranch, according to a 2025 report from the food-industry analyst Datassential. (Per that same report, it is the only dressing that’s becoming more popular at restaurants every year.) Meanwhile, packaged-food manufacturers have gotten very good at reworking ranch into novel flavor combinations and familiar products: Hot Pockets, lip balm, ice cream. The U.S. loves ranch so much that it has become a metonym for the country itself: Overseas, Cool Ranch Doritos are called “Cool American.”
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That the international soccer fans and social-media grifters currently falling in love with ranch can typically experience it only in that form—powdered atop a chip—is one of the prosaic tragedies of our market-driven global food system. Ranch just isn’t popular enough outside the U.S. to justify shipping and stocking it elsewhere, beyond a few specialty stores and the odd “American” aisle. Other cultures have similar-ish sauces—Indian raita, Greek tzatziki, English salad cream—but there is nothing exactly like ranch: gloopy, dilly, cool, perfect.
In 1995, the social psychologist Michael Billig coined the term “banal nationalism” to cover all the mundane ways we live out our national identities. Sports is one of them, incidentally, but so is food. The ways that we buy, sell, consume, and talk about food “can demarcate and sustain the emotive power of national attachment,” the sociologist Michaela DeSoucey writes.
Americans like ranch because it’s delicious, and because companies are good at selling it to us, and because it’s ours. We like the recent wave of ranch stories because they are funny, but mostly because they make us feel good. They remind us that this country can serve as a source of delight for the rest of the world, that we can make things that feel worth taking back home and sharing. Compared with European food, American food tends to be liked but not respected—and that’s only when it’s not being blamed for actively immiserating the world. The ranch memes are like the photo negative of Fyre Festival: Visitors come from all over the world for a massive entertainment event, but instead of being disappointed, they are amazed by something totally tangential. Bring me my ranch-dressing hose.
The post What Is It About Ranch Dressing? appeared first on The Atlantic.
