Foreign soccer fans visiting the United States have fallen for an unfamiliar sauce. As international tourists who tasted ranch dressing for the first time during the 2026 FIFA World Cup tried to stock up on it for their trips home, only to have it confiscated at airports, local airport shops have launched a novel marketing push to seize the opportunity.
According to reports by Fox News and other US outlets on Thursday, a photo posted on the online community Reddit drew attention, showing ranch sauce piled up alongside official World Cup merchandise at a souvenir shop in New York's JFK International Airport. The unusual scene unfolded as the sauce, somewhat unfamiliar in Europe and Asia, gained explosive popularity among foreign tourists during the tournament.
Ranch is a creamy sauce made with a base of buttermilk and mayonnaise, mixed with garlic, onion, dill and parsley. It is believed to have originated with Steve Henson, who first made it to accompany workers' meals while working as a plumber in Alaska in the 1950s. Henson later opened a ranch in California and served the sauce to guests, spreading by word of mouth. In 1972, Clorox acquired it for 8 million dollars and mass-produced it as a bottled product, establishing it as a nationwide sauce.
Currently in the United States, ranch is regarded as a national sauce rivaling ketchup, with around 40 percent of respondents naming it as their favorite dressing. Its uses are wide-ranging, covering pizza and chicken wings as well as french fries, vegetable sticks and snacks such as Doritos. Recently, spicy ranch with added heat has emerged as a new trend, and variations on the recipe continue to grow.
Foreign fans who encountered ranch for the first time without knowing this background became captivated by its distinctive savory and salty flavor and tried to buy several bottles, only to run into trouble. As most ranch sauce is classified as a liquid, it fell under the volume limits for carry-on baggage, resulting in a string of cases where it was confiscated in bulk at airport security checkpoints.
As such incidents repeated, the US Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officially issued guidance stating that large containers of ranch sauce cannot be brought aboard as carry-on baggage.
Airport shops pinpointed exactly the gap in this rule. Noting that liquids purchased at shops inside the airport after passing through security checkpoints can be brought on board without volume limits, they began displaying ranch sauce in large quantities at stores past the checkpoints.
The strategy is said to be drawing considerable response, coinciding with a period when more foreign spectators are heading home as the World Cup tournament continues. Locally, it is being assessed as a prime example of niche marketing that did not miss out on the World Cup boom.
