How Martha Stewart Helped Shape Paul Newman's Iconic Food Brand

In 1982, actor Paul Newman and his friend, author A.E. Hotchner, started Newman's Own food company. You've likely seen some of its products on supermarket shelves, especially in the salad dressing aisle. The brand offers over 25 types of dressings along with cookies, sauces, beverages, snacks, and much more, with Newman's smiling face gracing every label. In fact, the line's Italian dressing is one of the best we've had. What's made the brand so iconic, besides quality, is the fact that every cent of profit is donated to charities, and has been since the beginning. Newman had been making homemade salad dressing for years for his friends, but when he was turning it into a business, he looked to his neighbor, Martha Stewart, for help.

At the time, Stewart ran a catering business in Westport, Connecticut, so she knew all about developing recipes. On an episode of "The Martha Stewart Podcast," she recounted a time when she, Newman, and Hotchner were recipe-testing, saying, "The three of us sat and I added stuff to the salad dressing ... they were just having fun, but I was very serious about it. I wanted it to taste like my vinaigrette, not like some crummy, out-of-the-bottle vinaigrette. And it was a good salad dressing. Then they came up with a whole lot of other products that I tasted and helped with a little bit." Later, she hosted a blind taste test of different salad dressings, and the one she'd made with Newman and Hotchner won. Initially, Newman's own sold its bottled dressings locally, and, to their astonishment, the company made almost $1 million in profit the first year alone.

By the time Paul Newman asked Martha Stewart for her professional opinion and input on salad dressing, he trusted her as a knowledgeable source about such matters as food and cooking. After all, he'd already hired her to cater a party that he and his wife, Joanne Woodward, had hosted. However, he likely had no idea that she almost ruined the food that night. Newman and Woodward hosted a Moroccan-themed buffet at their home and asked Stewart to cater the event. Stewart wanted to display eight beautiful bisteeya pies, sweet and savory pastries of chicken (Stewart made hers with pigeon that night), preserved lemon, warm spices, almonds, cinnamon, and sugar placed in phyllo dough. (As it turns out, Anthony Bourdain was also a fan of pigeon, being impressed by a dish he had in Cairo.)

She inadvertently left the pies in the oven for too long, burning the tops. Being the professional that she is, Stewart rallied, removed as much of the char as she could, and served slices of the pie on individual plates, rather than displaying them whole. Her famous bosses and their guests never knew about the blunder. We don't know if she ever shared the story with Newman, but she sure did her darndest to help him create the best salad dressing possible. By all accounts, her advice was great, and helped to create a brand that stands up to such dressing giants as Hidden Valley and Kraft.