The biggest change to our product is happening right now though.
Over the years, Palm oil has become more and more controversial as its demand has caused deforestation which endangered and destroyed the habitats of many creatures (in particular, orangutans) while contributing to climate change. We really do not want to encourage, even on our small part, these unethical practices and we hear from many of our customers that they don't either. We have attempted to acquire sustainably harvested palm, but find it not only difficult to find, but hard to validate.
As a result, for some time, we have been experimenting and researching, trying to figure out how to change our soap formulation to keep the quality the same while removing palm oil from our recipe.
At the beginning of the month, we started making our soaps with rice bran oil replacing the palm. Because palm added to the hardness of the bar, we also added a small amount of sodium lactate to each batch which helps to harden soap.
