Ask where the fat goes on a beef animal and the answer turns unglamorous fast. A steer carries far more fat than any retail case wants, and suet, the dense fat packed around the kidneys, is near the bottom of the value list. Most of it sells in bulk for pennies. Craft Tallow exists in part because letting a material like that go to waste seemed wrong.
The ordinary fate of suet
Suet is a byproduct in the strict sense of the word. Cattle are raised for beef, the fat comes off during processing whether anyone wants it or not, and no animal's ever raised for its kidney fat. That fact sits underneath everything else in this post, and it's the reason I don't dress the sourcing up.
In most supply chains the fat moves by the drum to industrial renderers, where it becomes soap base, lubricants, feed ingredients, candle stock and fuel. The bulk market prices it in cents per pound. Industrial rendering is useful work. A material that ends up as pennies of soap base has still not been valued for what it is. Some of it never makes the truck, and gets thrown out at the plant.
What a direct purchase changes
Our render partner in Montana buys suet straight from the ranches, with no broker in the middle. A direct buyer at a fair price turns a low-value part of the carcass into a line item that pays, and it puts a name and a phone number on both ends of the transaction. The ranch knows where its fat went. We know which ranches the fat came from, which is the only reliable way to know that what shows up is suet and grass-finished.
Scale matters here, so let's be plain about it. Suet money is small money against a cattle operation, and this is one line item on a ranch's books rather than a rescue. What a direct purchase does is add value to a part of the animal that had almost none. Using the animal more completely is a small thing and a real one, and it's worth the trouble of a direct chain.
Grass-finished, and grazing that pays attention
Our cattle are grass-fed and grass-finished on regeneratively managed family ranches in Montana. Regenerative is a word that has been stretched thin, so here is the practical version: animals get moved on a schedule that gives each pasture a real rest, ground stays covered, and roots run deeper because they were allowed to. Grazing managed that way builds soil over time instead of mining it down to dust.
Diet shows up in the fat. Daley and colleagues, reviewing the research in Nutrition Journal in 2010, found grass-fed beef fat trending higher in stearic acid, omega-3 fatty acids and conjugated linoleic acid than grain-fed fat, with more vitamin E and beta-carotene along with it. Pasture-raised fat also carries traces of the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. Grass-finishing is the part that shapes the fat, since the final months matter most, and it's worth its own post.
What ends up in the jar either way is the same three fats doing the work. Per 100 g, USDA FoodData Central puts beef tallow at about 36 g oleic acid, 25 g palmitic and 19 g stearic. The beef tallow for skin guide covers what those do once they're on you, and what they don't.
What we can't do is hand you a soil carbon audit. We buy from ranches whose grazing practice we know and care about, and I'd sooner say that plainly than dress it up in numbers nobody measured.
Tallow skincare is not vegan
Rendered beef fat comes from an animal, and no amount of careful sourcing changes that. If you don't use animal products, our jars aren't for you, and we'd rather say so directly than bury it under a euphemism. Plant oils make excellent skincare. Shea, jojoba, squalane from olives and cold-pressed rosehip all do real work on skin. This post is an argument for using an animal completely once it has been raised, which is a different argument from whether to raise one.
Why a waterless jar travels light
Shipping water across the country is expensive and a little absurd. A conventional lotion runs 60 to 80% water by weight, which means most of the mass in the box, the fuel that moved it and the plastic around it exists to carry something that comes out of your tap. Our 2 oz jars carry no water at all, so what ships is the working material. The tradeoff is on you: an occlusive fat does its most pronounced work on skin that is still slightly damp (Sethi and colleagues, 2016), so you supply the water at the sink and the jar holds it there.
Skipping the water phase also removes the emulsifier and the preservative system, each of which is manufactured, shipped and packaged before it ever reaches a formulation room. One jar does several jobs, too: face, dry patches on elbows and shins, hands after every wash, lips at night, cuticles. One jar standing in for five bottles beats any recycling logo on a label.
None of that makes buying skincare an environmental act. Glass gets fired, boxes get printed and trucks burn fuel, whatever is inside the jar. What we can say is narrower: the fat was going to exist anyway, and the jar carries no water.
Where to start
The Starter Pair puts Honey Glow and Bare Silk in one box, which covers most skin and most weather. Honey Glow is the rich one, with manuka honey, oat oil and squalane, and it earns its keep in winter and on skin that drinks everything. Bare Silk runs five ingredients and no scent, for reactive skin. Nothing stands in front of the fat in that jar, which is the point of it. Both come with the 60-Day Skin Test, so you have 60 days to disagree and still get the product price back. Subscribing takes 25% off a first order and 10% off every renewal, ships free at any size, and can be paused whenever a jar is still half full.
Questions we hear
Does buying tallow do anything for the animal?
No. The animal was raised for beef, and a skincare order changes nothing about that. Buying suet changes how completely one animal gets used, and that's the claim I'll make for it.
Is a tallow balm better for the planet than one made from plant oils?
Comparisons like that depend on what you count. Byproduct fat carries a different accounting than a crop grown on purpose for its oil, and land use, water, labor and processing all vary by crop and by region. Anyone claiming a clean verdict in either direction is selling something.
Why Montana?
Ranches we trust are there, and so is the render partner who handles the suet in wet and dry steps at low heat. Fat that travels a short distance spends less time warm, and warmth is what drives the oxidation reactions that turn a fat stale (Dominguez and colleagues, 2019), which is why a short haul shows up in the smell. Blending happens in small batches in the Mountain West, and we check and ship every order from Cottonwood Heights, Utah.
Do you name the ranches?
Not publicly. Small operations get hammered when a brand puts their name on a shelf and the internet finds it, and their business is cattle. The shape of the chain is what we can share: family ranches, grass-finished, suet bought direct.
Go deeper
Suet, not trim covers which fat we buy. The chemistry that makes water optional lives in why there is no water in our balms. For the long view, one fat, five thousand years follows tallow from lamps and salves to a jar on a bathroom shelf. Meet Craft Tallow covers how this started. Tallow candles covers what they are and what the candle smoke studies found.
Sources
- Daley CA, Abbott A, Doyle PS, Nader GA, Larson S (2010). A review of fatty acid profiles and antioxidant content in grass-fed and grain-fed beef. Nutrition Journal 9:10.
- U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service. FoodData Central: Fat, beef tallow (FDC ID 171400). USDA.
- Sethi A et al. (2016). Moisturizers: The Slippery Road. Indian Journal of Dermatology 61:279-287.
- Dominguez R et al. (2019). A Comprehensive Review on Lipid Oxidation in Meat and Meat Products. Antioxidants 8:429.