Liquid Gold

Trim The Fat

It's common to have mini failures all along the way. Sometimes that's just the way it is. I've had great ideas that honestly just never took off, but then sometimes you fall into something good you didn't really plan for either. As I am on a mission to be truly Free by Fifty, i've got about 6 years left. I will confess I am a bit further along than I am chronicaling here, but Im doing this for the benefit of someone who may not have even started yet.

Anyway, when I last left off I spoke about having about $40 bucks from selling the free shoes I had and used like $4 on laces. It took a while but they sold. In the midst of all this I am always maintaining my small business of Central Harvest Farms. It had finally reached the time to take our steer to the butcher. He had reached adulthood and then some. When I was filling out the paperwork for the types of cuts to get, it listed a section for bones, organs and fat. Im not one to waste and I knew that people usually ground the extra fat into burger and etc. But I also knew there would still be some left over. I looked around for different uses and came across tallow. In fairness I had known about it before but never used it and so I had forgotten over the years.

If you don't know, tallow is just the more purified fat after rendering. (when you heat it up, by itself as just the fat and not the meat, then filter it and let it cool down). It makes a glorious white fat that is shelf stable for like a year. And while this was cool, it wasn't a money maker by itself. However, tallow has taken off in the last year or so in a bunch of ways. One of the great things you can make from it is called tallow balm, which is a cosmetic product like lotion but much more hydrating. You see not surpisingly animal fat has a compositio very close to the oil our skin produces. And consequently it absorbs the same way, extremely well. But it's fat....and so by itself it's got the smell of fat.

Now the real interesting thing is that if you heat it up and filter it several times it becomes very pure and white with almost no smell, and when it cools it becomes hard. Right before it gets fully cured, you can blend it up and it becomes this fluffy white cream, pretty much indistinguishable from other cosmetic cremes. Now mix in some fragrance and a little olive oil, jojoba or coconut oil and you've really got something great. Image here shows a roast but the white fat portion is what you want to slowly melt down in a slow cooker.

Now as crazy as it is that you can do that. What's even crazier is what it costs. Go online and look up tallow balm on Amazon. It's like $15 an ounce for many many of the products. Well this I couldn't pass up. So I put out a post on my Central Harvest Farms facebook page about making a test product to see if there was any local interest in it. I think i had more interaction on that post than any other I've done. The response was powerful and so I went to use the $40 I had to purchase the ingredients.

Now this is important. I could have just waited to get a bunch of the fat back from my steer being butchered but that wouldn't create a scenario most people can replicate. So I decided to buy the first batch of meat. It was like $11 bucks or something for a big bag. Now it wasn't pure fat, I had to continue to cut off pieces of meat to get the pure fat. But that was excellent dog scraps too. Anyway I melted it down slowly and strained it a few times. It is a horribly messy process but not difficult. When it became cool but still liquid I added some olive oil to aid in the creamy fluffy factor and some fragrance. Then the hard part......waiting. I am highly impatient by nature and although I am very good at being patient it is an internal battle every time. I put it in the fridge to cool faster and noticed a problem in the edges all hardening while the center didn't, so I took it out and finally just let it cool as I was supposed to. It was a few hours until it really set up good.

I finally got to whip it up and it was kind of unreal. It goes from this opaque, almost yellow type color to fluffy white. It really is amazing how it transforms. Anyway I originally had some little 4 oz canning jars to use as testers and I got them all bottled up. I noticed though that it was too creamy and it wouldn't stay in a cream state but very quickly turn to oil when set out. I did some research and discovered many people using beeswax to maintain that more chapstick type consistency. So I went and got some and made about 5 little batches with different fragrances, fats, oils, with and without beeswax. Anyway after several trials I finally posted some tester jars online to these groups for $5 each if they would give feedback. I didn't get half the feedback I was going for, but the feedback I did get was very very good.

I realized I could charge $15 for the 4 oz containers and do well both online and locally. Online is a bigger market but I dont quite have the full setup to go crazy yet. We'll see how it takes off here. Anyway, I sold all 18 of the testers giving me $90. Well past my $60 goal. And that was just the testers. The feedback I got led me to look at getting 4 oz tin containers instead of jars for several reasons. The biggest was that many people said they wanted to carry it with them. It's dry and hot here in the desert and people carry hydration everywhere they go. So I looked on amazon and found these cool green colored tins for like $24 bucks. I already had fragrance, olive oil, labels from my microgreens business and so $24 in tins and about $19 in fat ( i got several batches ) gave me about a $45 dollar total with tax. So I got $360 of sellable inventory for $45 dollars.

Now I realize not every single piece of the puzzle I had to pay for. And I hope that's true for you too. I really hope you don't have to pay full retail for every single endeavor you get into. Sweat equity is powerful and favors are even better if you're prudent about cashing them in, lol. But all in all if I had to purchase everything including labels, I would have just scaled down the amount and not actually tried to do a batch of 24. Just smaller batches until I could buy material for bigger batches. Am I going to go full in on tallow?.....NO. It's a great side hustle but I can see it being fickle with the market or just too saturated at some point. That just happens.

But for now as an early adopter strategy. Going from $45 to $360 is a very very good flip. And I like the fact that I can turn it on and off. It's about a full day to get the fat (cooking it down slowly) is the longest process. Probably 6-7 hours of slow cooking. Then straining, cooling, discarding the bad and repeating that cycle a few times is another few hours. But whipping, putting into a can and labeling is only hard the first time. After that, it's a few hours to do quite a bit. And now with some experience I know that I would take some extra time each day to do one of those tasks. Like tomorrow I'll print several sheets of labels and have them placed on new tins. It'll be all I do with it that day and i'll have other things to get to. Then in a day or two I'll focus solely on getting one big batch of fat rendered. Then another day do all the in between, that way I can keep a about a $360 inventory per week for about 6-8 hours total work spread over several days.

I'll see how far I want to take it, but I can see it getting me near a thousand dollars before local saturation kind of sets in. Then I can focus on making about 3 times that amount to sell on Amazon if it sells readily I'll attempt to keep that going. If it struggles to sell I know I can sell it locally or semi locally over the course of several months and be done with it. The great news is that it's a good product, it's easy to stop and start at will, it's low barrier of entry and it's easy to repeat. For now I am committed to selling the full $360 to about $500 I have in inventory (should take about 4-5 days) and then Im probably going to move onto something different.

Am I asking everyone to go get into making their own tallow or candles or something else? heavens no, this was almost an accident for me. But I knew with the response I got, that I could at least flip my investment for double. I didn't know it would be almost 10x. But part of this journey for me is doing things out of my comfort to try and give a broad spectrum of ideas for people. I need to take some more conventional turns with things that nearly everyone can do that are near guarantees. That is usually the case around the 1-2k mark. So we're doing a lot of creative little things along the way.

Freedom is worth fighting for in various avenues and sometimes financially comes behind our health our families, our nation, etc. But forcing yourself to be actively looking for opportunities to prosper. As I was wrapping up my last tin container for the day, I looked over and realized the soda cans were about ready to take to the recycling again. Right back to start another income stream. Never stop hustling, that's what old age and reflection is for....and we aren't there yet.

May 28th, 2025