TryTallow:beef tallow,rendered by handin a kitchen,now in 450stores

Rey Rivera and his co-founder were sick of overpriced "natural" skincare that was mostly seed oils and made by factories pretending to be wholesome. So they went back to basics: grass-fed beef tallow, rendered slow, hand-poured into glass jars at a kitchen table in New Jersey. No co-packers, no white label. Sixty thousand customers later, it is still made the same way.

By Ruben Boonzaaijer
Reviewed by Maurizio Isendoorn · 5 min read

The thing that started TryTallow was not a market gap on a slide. It was a medicine cabinet full of "natural" skincare that did not feel natural at all. Everything Rey Rivera and his co-founder tried was either loaded with seed oils, smelled like a lab, or came from some faceless factory dressed up as a wellness brand.

So the two of them, in Neptune, New Jersey, did the least scalable thing possible. They went back to a single old ingredient, grass-fed beef tallow, the kind people put on their skin for centuries before the industry replaced it with cheaper oils, and they made it themselves.

The first batches were rendered slow on a kitchen stove and packed by hand into glass jars. No co-packers, no white label shortcuts, no corporate ingredient deck.

What came out was a balm with six simple ingredients, grass-fed tallow, honey, olive oil and beeswax among them. It made no claims it could not keep, and it cost more than a drugstore tub because it was made the hard way. It just worked well enough that the people who tried it told the next people, which is the only marketing a brand made by hand can really afford.

Made by hand, on purpose

Most brands that reach a few thousand customers race to hand production off to a manufacturer. TryTallow kept doing it the slow way, because the slow way was the entire point. A handmade balm made in small batches is harder to scale and easier to trust, and the founders bet that the second part mattered more.

What's in the jar

6simple ingredients, grass-fed tallow, honey, olive oil and beeswax among them

100%grass-fed tallow, USA made and sourced

4ozhand-poured into a glass jar, never plastic

It is the opposite of the model that made them start the company. Where the brands they were frustrated with hid behind factories and seed-oil fillers, TryTallow put a cow on the label, listed every ingredient, and made the product where they could watch it being made.

Tallow also turned out to be the right idea at the right moment. A growing crowd of shoppers had started reading skincare labels the way they read food labels, walking away from seed oils and synthetic fillers and toward single, recognisable ingredients their grandparents would know. TryTallow did not invent that shift. It was just built exactly for it, an old ingredient made honestly for people who had stopped trusting the new ones.

It wasn't trendy, it just worked. And word got out, from friends, to farmers markets, to retail shelves.

TryTallow

From a farmers market to the shelf

A balm that started on a kitchen stove ended up on shelves next to brands a hundred times its size.

Made by hand, sold everywhere

60K+customers who have bought the balm

450+retailers carrying it, from independents to Sprouts

1kitchen it all started on

Word travelled the honest way, from friends, to farmers markets, to retail shelves across the country. National grocers like Sprouts started stocking it, and more than sixty thousand customers have bought it, which makes TryTallow a rare thing: a genuinely handmade tallow balm sitting on national shelves, still poured by the people who started it.

The TryTallow Grass-Fed Tallow Balm jar.

The hero product

One balm, six ingredients

The Grass-Fed Tallow Balm is the whole company in a four-ounce glass jar: grass-fed beef tallow, honey, olive oil and beeswax, hand-poured in small batches in New Jersey, backed by a sixty-day money-back guarantee. It is the product that turned a kitchen experiment into something carried in hundreds of stores.

TryTallow, in four moments

The arc

2023
Tired of "natural" skincare that was mostly seed oils, two friends in Neptune, New Jersey, render their first batches of grass-fed beef tallow on a kitchen stove and hand-pour them into glass jars.
Markets
They sell it the only way they can afford to, jar by jar, from friends to farmers markets, letting the balm earn its own word of mouth.
Retail
Natural grocers start stocking it. The handmade balm lands on shelves at Sprouts and more than 450 other retailers across the country.
Today
More than 60,000 customers later, TryTallow is the rare handmade tallow balm carried by national retailers, still made in small batches by hand.

The throughline is the one decision they have refused to undo: make it by hand, and let the product do the talking. The brand that began on one kitchen stove now answers to customers in hundreds of stores and tens of thousands of homes, which is a good problem for two guys who started with a pot of tallow.

Featured by Ringly

Part of Spotlight, Ringly's series on brands building something durable on Shopify. Ringly is the AI phone team for Shopify brands, so the customer questions a handmade brand like TryTallow earns, about ingredients, skin and orders, keep getting answered even when the call volume does not sleep.

Reported by Ruben Boonzaaijer from public sources, including TryTallow's own site and product pages, its Amazon listing and retail listings such as Sprouts. The quoted line is TryTallow's stated mission from its site. TryTallow was offered a review before publication.

The Spotlight series

Stories of brands built to last on Shopify

We profile the operators behind the brands we admire, how they started, what they got right, and what made them durable. Reported like a feature, not a pitch.