Do You Know Where Your Salad Comes From? My Trip To Monterey Bay With Dole

The food brand Dole, specifically Dole Fresh Vegetables, welcomed bloggers for the FIRST ever Dole Salad Summit – and I was lucky enough to attend!

The Dole Summit took place in Monterey Bay, California (absolutely gorgeous!), where I joined other food bloggers and learned a lot about where Dole lettuce comes from, what goes into their brand, the varieties of leaves – and of course, we ate a lot of salad!  But not only salad in the traditional sense (in a bowl with produce), salad was incorporated pretty much in everything:

From breakfast quiches:

to butternut squash pizza:

to dinner (I forgot what it was called ;/):

Besides eating delicious food, we took a tour of the Dole lettuce fields.  Literally watched workers pick, chop, and bag YOUR lettuce.

It was a surreal experience to see it first hand.

Yup had to wear a hairnet and gloves!

This big machine moves to keep up with the workers – surprisingly they move pretty fast!  We had to keep moving back, because every time you turned around or looked behind you, there they were – creeping up.

We then took a tour of the lettuce plant where the lettuce is washed and packaged.  We weren’t allowed to take pictures inside for security reasons, but it was fascinating.  I never saw a factory like that!! To see how intricate it was and how the machines decipher good lettuce versus bad lettuce – it was mind-blowing.

Then we took a quiz on the different types of lettuce in the “laboratory”:

I FAILED miserably!  I think I only could recognize Iceberg lettuce and Romaine – everything else I swear looks the same!

Honestly, I did learn a lot in a very short time — and although I wish I could regurgitate everything back to you — I can’t.  However, what I can say and attest to, is that Dole is committed to providing fresh and nutritional health products to Americans.

Some of the products I enjoyed were:

• The All Natural Salad Kits: Endless Summer Salad, Spinach Cherry Almond Blue, and the Perfect Harvest.
• And of course tasting some of the Salad Blends – especially in our Lettuce 101 course.

Stay tuned! We are going to be posting some fab Dole inspired recipes in the weeks to come.

For more information about Dole, visit www.dole.com.