How We Make Foaming Soap

Hopefully we aren't spilling too many trade secrets here, but we love sharing more about our products. Since soap and hand washing is taking center stage with the coronavirus, we thought it might be interesting to share more of how we make our most popular soap -- the Castile foaming soap.

The process of making our foaming soap takes several months. Here's how it begins. It starts with organic castor oil, coconut oil, and olive oil. The oils are melted, and the sodium hydroxide (lye) and water is added. This causes a chemical reaction which saponifies the oils. We use the hot-process method and we pH test the soap to make sure all of the lye is used up in the soap-making process. So even though we have lye listed in our ingredients, there's no lye left in the final product. We dump the hot soap into a big pile and let it cool. After it's cooled, we cut it into long bars.

We let the bars air out, rotating the bars as time passes. Then we feed the bars through our shredder to shred the bars of soap. This allows the soap to dry out and cure more quickly. ​

We load the shredded soap onto large ventilated trays so the soap can continue to dry out. We rotate the trays and spread the soap around to even out the drying process. Then it's back to the shredder to chop the shredded soap into pellets.

We store the soap pellets in food-safe buckets until we are ready for the final step in making the liquid soap. Finally, we dissolve the soap pellets into distilled water and add our desired essential oil or fragrance. ​

Each fragrance reacts a little differently with the soap base. You'll notice that some soaps are darker, some are lighter. That's due to the different fragrances. The scents that contain vanilla will darken more than others, for example. Our Warm Flannel and Cocoa Butter Cashmere fragrances both contain vanilla. This darkens the final soap product. 

So there you have it! We are proud of what's in our soap (and what's not!) and how the whole process works. Remember that our foaming soap refills are 25% off for the month of May -- no coupon code needed. Thank you so much for supporting our soap-making business! See you at the market!