“After spending the whole last winter in my kitchen testing and trying to get these products just right, I had to get it to some consumers and see if anyone was going to buy them,” Kraemer said.

Kraemer started a small Lake Oswego-based company called Dulcet Cuisine this year. Now she’s testing an Asian salad dressing, a balsamic vinaigrette, a lemon-mustard dill sauce and a curry sauce/marinade, all of which she hopes to take to retail shelves.

While some entrepreneurs go to costly lengths to test a product before attempting to retail it, Kraemer has been using farmers markets in Lake Oswego and Portland. Her cost: $30 to $35 a week, which she easily recoups in sales.

Her dressings, packaged in square 10-ounce bottles with simple labels from Office Depot, sell for $7. Her label reads, “Dulcet Test Kitchen: This product is currently in testing, please tell us what you think by emailing.”

“It’s funny, because I’m really getting feedback from people,” Kraemer said. “The markets have only just started, but I haven’t gotten any negatives yet.”

The markets also are a great place to test marketing strategies.

Kraemer has discovered that it helps to let patrons sample her dressing on a salad. For a recent farmers market in Lake Oswego, she made a colorful black-eyed pea salad with her balsamic vinaigrette. She also gives away recipe cards with the dressing she sells.

Because her recipes keep changing, she gets repeat customers, she said.

“The recipes are really a good marketing tool. People get home with a bottle of dressing, and they want to know what to do with it,” Kraemer said, adding that she’s still working on how to use the recipe concept when she goes retail.

Kraemer also has collected information about which dressings are the best-sellers. “The Asian salad dressing is the most popular, and that’s the one I’m going to start with,” she said.

Kraemer plans to launch her product line, including the dressings, curried cashews, crackers, bread sticks and a Chinese chicken salad kit, at the Aug. 25 Seattle Gift Show put on by Western Exhibitors.

“I’m targeting more of the specialty food business,” she said. “That’s why my bottles are a little bit fancier. For me to be in a grocery store, it would be hard for me to be competitive with large companies.”

Before her entrepreneurial venture, Kraemer was a flight attendant for 20 years. She began experimenting with salad dressings a year ago, after she took a severance package from Delta Air Lines because the airline closed its base in Portland.

While she was a flight attendant, Kraemer co-owned a restaurant called Sonoma Market Café in Calgary, Canada, in the mid-1990s. One of her specialties was gourmet salad.

“I thought, ‘Well, let me see if I can do the dressings and package them and see if they would sell,’” she said.

One of the biggest challenges has been the packaging. The dressings have to be heated to kill bacteria, and they must have a certain pH balance to be safe for the shelf, she said. She’s worked with a food scientist to get the formulas right.

The other challenge has been finding ingredients that have no preservatives, she said.

Some dressings are more difficult to get right than others. “My curry sauce, it likes to separate,” she said. “I have made the curry sauce so many times, I think it is permeating my walls.”