Strawberry Spinach Salad

Our Strawberry Spinach Salad recipe is topped with chicken, blueberries, pineapple, strawberries, glazed pecans, and poppy seed dressing!

We love eating salad for lunch with a bowl of soup or as a dinner side dish with pork chops, steak, or chicken!

The Panera Strawberry Poppyseed Salad is one of our favorites. Unfortunately, it’s only available seasonally, but we decided to make a version you can enjoy all year long!

Ingredients Needed and Substitutions

The ingredients needed to make a strawberry spinach salad at home are readily available at grocery stores. Bonus tip: Buy presliced fruit, ready-to-eat lettuce, and pre-cooked chicken when short on time!

• Lettuce: We used a spinach blend lettuce mix for this salad. You can choose your favorite blend or go with all spinach.
• Fruit: We added sliced strawberries, blueberries, and diced pineapple. The Panera version also includes mandarin oranges.
• Cheese: This recipe calls for shaved parmesan, but you could also use blue or feta cheese crumbles if you prefer.
• Chicken: For this recipe, we made chicken in the air fryer, but you can also use rotisserie chicken, grilled chicken, or oven-baked chicken.
• Dressing: We used homemade poppy seed dressing (find our recipe here), but a store-bought one is a good option if you are short on time.
• Pecans: The strawberry poppyseed salad is topped with glazed pecans (find our recipe here)! We made ours, but there are also widely available if you want to buy them premade. You can also use walnuts or sliced almonds.

How To Make Strawberry Spinach Salad

If you have all the ingredients prepared, making this salad only takes a couple of minutes! Simply assemble the salad, add the toppings and enjoy!

• Assemble: Put the spinach in a bowl and add the fruit and chicken.
• Toppings: Top the salad with cheese, poppyseed dressing, and glazed pecans.

Variations

Very Veggie

If you want to include more veggies, try adding grape tomatoes, shredded carrots, diced avocado, and sliced cucumbers.

Fruit Lovers

Want more fruit in your salad? Add mandarin oranges, thinly sliced apples, diced mango, and fresh raspberries.

Extra Protein

Wondering how to add more protein to salad? You can increase the protein by adding more nuts, sliced hard-boiled eggs, bacon crumbles, and extra chicken.

Storage

This salad doesn’t save well, so only make as much as you plan to eat. If you want to prep the salad ahead of time, cut up the fruit and chicken and store them in containers in the refrigerator. Then, when you want to have a salad, everything is ready to go!

Frequently Asked Questions About This Recipe

Want more salad recipes? Try these next

• A flavorful Chipotle Chicken Salad includes chicken, veggies, beans, corn, hot honey, and chipotle ranch dressing.
• This creamy Broccoli Salad recipe has chopped broccoli, diced onions, crumbled bacon, and craisins in a tasty dressing.
• Our Cobb Salad includes cubed chicken, sliced hard-boiled eggs, bacon crumbles, tomatoes, sliced avocado, cheese, croutons, and homemade ranch dressing!
• Our crowd-friendly Taco Salad has tomatoes, corn, beans, taco meat, onions, cheese, and homemade creamy salsa ranch dressing on top.