Tallow Balm Quality Alert!

Buyer beware!

As you may know, we have researched other brands of tallow-based skincare and found that many of those products are made in other countries, particularly China, even if they pretend to be made in the USA, and many brands use gimmicks to try to draw attention to their products. Furthermore, many brands that make their products in-house simply buy tallow that is on the market rather than sourcing suet from trusted ranches and rendering it themselves using best methods and in-house quality control like Vintage Tradition does.

But there is an even more fundamental issue with other brands that has come to our attention. Many brands are using outside manufacturers, providing them instructions and receiving the finished product back, with little or no control or even knowledge on how their own products are being made or what chemicals are being introduced into the products, including cleaning and sanitizing chemicals. Some don't even have a knowledge of the raw ingredients that are used in the products that they call their own.

How did this issue come to our attention? Well, we received emails from a manufacturer soliciting our business. They said:

"I'm reaching out from [Factory X]. We're a top-tier manufacturer specializing in beef tallow skincare, proudly producing over 50% of the market for standout brands like [Brand A], [Brand B], [Brand C], and many others. With award-winning chemists and a state-of-the-art facility right here in [a US city], we're behind some of the most innovative and best-selling products on the market.... We're the #1 beef tallow rendering facility in the U.S., and we already produce for some of the top brands in beef tallow products. Because of the massive scale we run at, we can get your beef tallow moisturizer below $6 per unit."

Here at Vintage Tradition, we have seen videos of Factory X's semi-automated production line with advanced machinery (which certainly require cleaning chemicals) as well as the owner of Brand A visiting the factory to see how his commissioned product was turning out. It is concerning to see companies using marketing to make a handsome income without a commitment to quality.

Marketing materials of Factory X include these phrases:

"Let the experts at [Factory X] guide you through the process of creating your own line."
"Starting a skin care line doesn't have to feel overwhelming."
"With private labeling, you get ready-made products customized with your brand's name, logo, and vision."

Essentially, anyone can contact Factory X to begin receiving product ready to sell. Of course, this isn't the only manufacturer that is doing this. We have always maintained that tallow balm can't be mass-produced without ruining it because the ingredients would have to have their goodness refined out of them in order to be uniform enough to be able to be mass-produced. We refuse to sacrifice quality for efficiency and profit.

We wondered where the all the tallow for Factory X's "massive scale" could be coming from and how it is rendered and what their products are like, so we ordered a jar of Brand A as well as other brands that have done a lot of business through marketing.

All brands make the claim of "grass-fed, grass-finished" tallow, but the color and softness of Brand A and others made us suspicious of the quality of the beef fat and the rendering process. Industrially produced tallow, for example, comes from offal from slaughterhouses, undergoing pulverization, steam-heating, refining, bleaching, and deodorizing, with the final addition of chemical preservatives such as BHA, BHT, and propyl gallate. Ironically, this is called "edible tallow". A process like this might be why Brand A and other brands were white in color. Vintage Tradition Tallow Balm has a healthy, nutritious, beige color to it. In any case, mass-produced tallow is often cooked in big kettles with water and including trim fat and animal material besides the actual fat. That's not how we render ours. No matter how big our company becomes, our process will always remain the same without product-damaging economies of scale!

Furthermore, Brand A and other brands were extremely soft even after melting and re-solidifying the whipped product, so soft that there was no resistance to putting our finger to the bottom of the jar and therefore no "need" for the balm to have been whipped in the first place. What a soft balm signifies is that the tallow is not highly saturated and therefore not highly nutritious and/or that too much of the non-tallow ingredients are being used, diluting out the nutrition of the tallow. Both issues make the balm greasy and not easily absorbed into the skin. Vintage Tradition Tallow Balm is firm while still being easy to spread due to our special and painstaking process that does not involve any additives. Thus, our Tallow Balm is non-greasy and highly absorbable.

The kicker with Brand A is that the 4-fl-oz jar says that the net weight is 180g, but the contents actually weighed only 63g. And after melting the whipped product down, the jar was only 2/3 full, so 1/3 of the jar was just air.

For the above and many other reasons, we of course recommend that people use Vintage Tradition Tallow Balm Skin Care Products, which are the original and still the best!