TryTallow:beef tallow,rendered by hand,now in 450+ stores
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. Tens of thousands of customers later, by the brand's own count, it is still made the same way.
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.
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.
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.
A balm that started on a kitchen stove ended up on shelves next to brands a hundred times its size.
Word travelled the honest way, from friends, to farmers markets, to retail shelves across the country. National grocers like Sprouts started stocking it, and by TryTallow's own count more than sixty thousand customers have bought it, which makes it a rare thing: a genuinely handmade tallow balm sitting on national shelves, still poured by the people who started it.
Refusing to hand production off is the romance of the story and also its bottleneck. A balm that two people pour and label themselves does not scale the way a co-packed product does, and the strain shows up where it always shows up first for a small brand, in fulfillment. On Trustpilot a handful of buyers have reported slow shipping and orders that took too long to arrive, the predictable tax of selling more jars than a two-person kitchen can comfortably pour in a week.
It is the tension built into the founding decision. The same handmade model that earns the trust also caps the throughput, and every retailer that adds the balm to its shelves widens the gap between what people order and what two pairs of hands can pour. The honest read is that staying handmade is not a marketing line they get to keep for free. It is a constraint they have to keep solving, batch by batch, without becoming the kind of factory operation they started the brand to avoid.
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
- 2023Tired 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.
- MarketsThey 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.
- RetailNatural grocers start stocking it. By the brand's count, the handmade balm lands on shelves at Sprouts and 450+ other retailers across the country.
- TodayBy TryTallow's own count, more than 60,000 customers later, it is the rare handmade tallow balm carried by national retailers, still made in small batches by hand.
Two guys who started with a pot of tallow on a kitchen stove now answer to buyers in hundreds of stores and tens of thousands of homes, and the whole bet is that the part they refuse to change, making it by hand, is the part worth protecting. The reward is a product people trust enough to tell their friends about. The cost is a ceiling on how fast they can pour. TryTallow's next chapter is not about a better balm, it is about whether a handmade brand can grow into national demand without quietly becoming the kind of company it set out to replace.
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