It’s hard to think of a time when a salad dressing has been as dramatic as Olivia Wilde’s “special” vinaigrette. But according to a former nanny, the Don’t Worry Darling director’s signature dish featuring the dressing and delivering it to pop star Harry Styles was particularly painful to Wilde’s ex-husband Jason Sudeikis. One text message from Sudeikis to the nanny read, “Took her salad, and dressing and left them.”
The nanny’s retelling of the last days of her charge of the former couple’s two children also included an incident where the Ted Lasso star got under Wilde’s car to stall her rendezvous with new beau Styles.
The internet, as it does, went wild with the salacious details of Wilde and Sudeikis’ marital breakdown. The “special salad dressing” even inspired internet detectives to track down a salad dressing recipe that Olivia Wilde shared on Questlove’s Food Network show Potluck. The infamous vinaigrette includes dijon mustard, red wine vinegar, olive oil, honey, and garlic (which reads as a little too basic to be that “special”). More recently, Wilde shared a page from Nora Ephron’s 1983 novel Heartburn in an Instagram story with a similar recipe that omits the honey, salt, and garlic and calls for Grey Poupon specifically.
Kraft Heinz’s Grey Poupon is renowned for its dijon mustard and has taken the pop-culture-meets-cute-with-tabloid-rag-item as an opportunity to promote its signature product with limited-edition jars of “Don’t Worry Dijon.” The limited-edition mustard is a play on the name of the Wilde-directed film that stars the former One Direction member and the setting for the couple’s early courtship. A red feather boa gets draped over the jar in an Instagram post, and the salad dressing recipe gets included on the back of the packaging. The brand also suggests serving over salad and to “Savor with Style.”
“Grey Poupon is all about savoring joie de vivre and embracing life’s unexpected moments when they come along. After being called on and brought into #saladgate, how could we not enter the chat in a fun and playful way? At Grey Poupon, and more broadly, at Kraft Heinz, we are transforming our marketing to lean heavier on creativity and to be more breakthrough in culture to better connect with our consumers. We’re thrilled at the response we’ve received and are looking forward to getting ‘Don’t Worry Dijon’ jars into the hands of our fans,” said Sema Dibooglu, senior marketing analyst at Kraft Heinz.
Only 100 jars of Don’t Worry Dijon are available. Those looking to get their hands on one should start by following Grey Poupon on the ‘Gram.
