WARHORSE: Soap from a 55-Gallon Fire Kettle
I started 20 years ago
I love to learn and like challenges. While teaching high school, I discovered from a student’s chemistry project that I could learn to take restaurants’ used kitchen oils and turn it into biofuel for vehicles with diesel engines.. After 6 months with lots of chemistry, building a biofuel setup with the help of my husband, and a local mentor, I was making 40 gallons of fuel per week from used restaurant oils. Woohoo. I pumped biofuel into my family’s diesel cars, truck, tractor, and lawnmower. This process left me with lots of buckets and containers to clean.
Then I learned I could make a good cleaning soap from the biofuel’ leftover fats (lipids) and glycerol . The glycerol backbone is a universal "building block" for lipids in humans, other mammals, and plants—used for storing energy and building cell structures. These fats and glycerol can produce a good soap that my hands enjoyed using. I made a lot of this soap. I called it WARHORSE—fierce clean, gentle care.
I gave away my free cleaning soap. I made soooo much soap because I had soooo much leftover cooking oils → schools, vets, neighbors, horse farms asked for more. Over the next few years, I gave away hundreds of gallons.
Since I learned so much about soap saponification of oils for a good cleaner, I decided to make a new recipe with better plant oils that would work for cleaning mammals and their stuff. Just one soap to do it all.
My new recipe cleaned so well, I bottled WARHORSE, got testing, certifications, bar codes, and some sales. I took a leave from teaching, scaled to a bigger soap kettle in a rented industrial building, got my husband to help me build a bigger setup, gathered a team, and started cooking soap in 300 gallon batches.
Several years later, I tried to get WARHORSE to more people, more stores. Teamed up with more key people. Sell, Sell, Sell. Marketing brochures, new bottle labels, exporting, free samples, social media gurus.
I traveled too much. Then grandchildren on the way. Tired. All money went back into the business to grow more. Came home. Done. Closed up the WARHORSE shop, all manufacturing, all sales. This took several years to tie up all loose ends.
Then my husband and I revived my little soap shop, and I got back to cooking it the way I started—in a 55 gallon drum over a fire. Now, I can take care of the animals and my grandchildren help with the soap and the farm. I rarely travel outside my local area, except for a flounder or red fish fishing adventure.
Now, I cook every batch myself over an open fire on my little North Carolina farm, the way I started.
Same focus on well known, functional ingredients. Same fierce clean, gentle care.
Try it. Love it. Or I’ll refund you.
Shop Now → WARHORSEsoap.com
Proof? The Journey in Pictures and Old Press
If you're curious about the biofuel days, the high school program, or how all this began, here are some pieces of the story:
