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why are some mass produced soap makers

reformulating their soaps? some of them are removing tallow like speick, haslinger, tabac, etc and making them vegetable based. is there any chance the mass produced soap makers end up going back to tallow soaps if enough people complain to them that their newly reformulated vegetable based shave soaps aren't as good as the tallow ones? even cade which is a vegetable based hard shave soap reformulated their hard shaving puck soap and it seems to be worse now than the cade soap of a few years ago you could buy. I myself don't mind vegetable based shaving soaps, but if you got something that worked like the tabac, speick, and hasling tallow soaps, why change it? I know some factories shut down, but there has to be another way to keep making the tallow based soaps.
 
reformulating their soaps? some of them are removing tallow like speick, haslinger, tabac, etc and making them vegetable based. is there any chance the mass produced soap makers end up going back to tallow soaps if enough people complain to them that their newly reformulated vegetable based shave soaps aren't as good as the tallow ones? even cade which is a vegetable based hard shave soap reformulated their hard shaving puck soap and it seems to be worse now than the cade soap of a few years ago you could buy. I myself don't mind vegetable based shaving soaps, but if you got something that worked like the tabac, speick, and hasling tallow soaps, why change it? I know some factories shut down, but there has to be another way to keep making the tallow based soaps.

Exactly why I am giving Stirling Soap a try. Tallow and all.
 
Yeah, I think it's more of a cost-savings measure. There are a number of non-tallow soaps that perform well so I'm not terribly worried about that. Years ago I got my hands on some Klar Kabinett non-tallow soap that used to be produced in Germany and it opened my eyes to how good a non-tallow soap could be. I also think a number of traditional French shave soaps have been non-tallow for as long as I remember.

All that said don't mess with my Mitchells Wool Fat !
 
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JCarr

More Deep Thoughts than Jack Handy
Phoenix Artisan Accoutrements soaps are non-tallow...and boy are they slick!
 

Chandu

I Waxed The Badger.
Some, Williams, reformulated themselves out of business. I don't think Tabac and Speick will do that as their shaving soap sales are not a tiny speck on their balance sheet, they realize that for their company to stay healthy there soap has to stay good.

Animal product costs have been climbing. Mass produced things suffer first, some likely will see thier favorite artisan to pass on the increased cost of tallow soon or come out with a vegan base if they haven't already.

No soap techonology is the ONLY way. I've used excellent tallow, excellent vegtable and excellent melt and pour soaps. I'm not married to any of them categorically
 
I don't think Tabac and Speick will do that as their shaving soap sales are not a tiny speck on their balance sheet, they realize that for their company to stay healthy there soap has to stay good.
LOL, that was a good one! :laugh::laugh::laugh:

Mäurer & Wirtz with their € 180 m. annual turnover is just one of the three branches of Dalli Group. The second is Dalli Werke, Europe's second largest producer of white-label laundry detergents that turns over roughly € 500 m. per year, the third one is Grünenthal, a pharmaceutical company with a whopping € 1.3 bn. turnover p. a. So, with an annual turnover of approximately € 2 bn. for the entire Dalli Group, how much do you think, they really care about some wet shaving nerds in the US becrying the departure of tallowate in a shaving soap that they sell relatively successfully and that they will continue to sell successfully even when a few wet shaving nerds in the US threaten to switch to Arko - good luck with that offensively smelling "Turkish delight." :D

BTW, there's a very simple reason why Mäurer & Wirtz had to eliminate tallowate from their Tabac Original shaving soap. They received their supply of tallowate soap base from a company called Dreiringwerk in Krefeld (in the Lower Rhine area). That company went insolvent two years ago and, after an abortive attempt to save it, was finally shut down in June last year. Since alternative suppliers of tallowate soap base were not available, M & W had to reformulate their soap. Practically all users in German wet shaving fora agree that hardly any differences between the old tallowate and the new tallowate-free version could be made out. Many users admitted frankly that they didn't even realise that there had been a change in the formula.
 
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IIRC, some forum members posted that Haslinger has always wanted to move to a non-tallow based soap as the company had made only vegetable based cosmetics except for their shaving goods. It's only recently that Haslinger was able to achieve their goal after coming up with a vegetable based formula that works as well as their tallow based soaps.
 

Steve56

Ask me about shaving naked!
The views of an on-line shaving forum (most of us are older) offer one viewpoint, but might not be representative of most of the users of these reformulated soaps being discussed.

The new Tabac and the new ABC are great soaps. I’d have no problem replacing either of the older versions with the new, which I have. That said, I slightly prefer the old version of ABC and the new version of Tabac, but the differences are small. And that’s not to imply that the new versions are the same soaps as the old ones.

Haslinger is an excellent non-tallow soap as is La Toja. Just to keep things in perspective, it might be good to remember that almost no shaving cream has tallow in it and some creams are darned good, far better than most of the reformulated soaps under discussion.
 
Just my guess but going "vegan" is a popular marketing route now. Also, there seems to be a more vocal group with allergies to animal than plant products so that may also play a part.
 
The vegan trend seems to have caught on more in Europe than in the States. Unfortunately, many of the vegan soaps are based on palmitic acid. While such soaps can be quite slick, they tend not to be as protective. If you want to use vegan soaps, look for those with significant stearic acid content.

I have given away many of the vegan soaps in my collection as they do not perform as well for me as soaps that contain a variety of animal fats and milks combined with vegetable oils and butters. One vegan soap formulation that remains is Grooming Dept Nai which is the only vegan soap to make my super-elite list. It is based on stearic acid. Although not as good as Nai, Captains Choice and Caties Bubbles soaps are vegan soaps based on stearic acid, so I can also recommend them.
 
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