The tallow cost

In the tallow business, I am often confronted with "You have priced your tallow too high. I can buy it somewhere else for a much cheaper price and it is the same quality."

I would like to unpack this one a little bit. Unless you have been doing this for a while from the beginning to the end and have a little farming experience this is hard to comprehend. I liken it to those wanting to buy a car and wanting a Corvette for a Ford Fiesta price, without seeing what goes into the making of each. For those not as old as I am and do not know what a Fiesta is, it was a very small inexpensive car with a tiny engine. One blew off the Mackinac Bridge in a wind storm decades ago and is one of the reasons they shut down bridges like the Mackinac Bridge and the Golden Gate Bridge in high wind storms.

That being said, just because a tallow states it is grass fed/finished does not make its quality comparable to a Corvette for the Fiesta price. I will unpack just some of the reasons.

1) The phrase grass fed/finished can describe a cow recently bought at auction from a 100% grain fed feedlot and put on pasture for a few weeks before butchering. It is important to know your source of suet, their practices and integrity.

2) Many "grass fed/finished already rendered tallow" sold online contain Trim Fat and Lard, a less healthy fat that is cheaper and lowers the price of making tallow. This is not the same vitamin/mineral rich fat as the fat around the kidneys. The kidney fat is the nutritional fat with all the healthy vitamins and minerals that make tallow exceptional for the skin. This is why I sought out a source that I researched and then rendered myself. Beware that you almost always have to pay the Corvette price to get the Corvette, instead of the Fiesta price being advertised as a Corvette.

3) Many tallow renderers use water and salt to get the beef smells out during rendering, which also removes much of the nutrients. I have discovered some even use bleach. Ours is dry rendered and does not need the bleach or water to remove these smells because of the quality of the suet we source.

4) Essential oils are not all the same quality. Cheaper brands tend to be used in the cheaper tallow and are allowed a percentage of other oils before requiring it to be shown on a label. An essential oil typically only needs a minimum of 5-10% of that essential oil to be labeled as that particular essential oil. Scary.