COMMERCIALLY VIABLE SOAP RECIPE

Hello participants, in today's 2 part presentation we will formulate a recipe and production method that is viable for commercial production without affecting the quality of the soap.

We often hear people say that there is no profit in laundry bar soap making, if that is true, why do big names in the industry continue and thrive in the business? That is a question that needs answering.

In this part one, we will discuss a controversial aspect of soap making and formulate the recipe and in part two we will put the formulation to practice.

This controversial aspect is:
1. how temperature affect your soap.
2. how much water you can add to your soap

Different soap maker have different answers to what temperature and how much water to use in production and they are equally correct. It all depends on their production goal.

The degrees of hotness or coldness of your Oils is vital to the formation of soap during production and it's efficiency. High temperature in soap making increases the rate of collision of the reactant molecules thus increasing the reaction rate and giving room for water tolerance. Technically speaking there is no upper limit to the amount of water you can use in soap making.

We will also look at the Fatty Acid profile of your oil/fat and Addictives

In our lectures, we have always stressed the importance of understaning the fatty acid profile of your oils and fat. Knowing this will help you formulate a recipe with the properties, performance, and appearance you want.

For this recipe, we will use palm oil because of its fatty acid profile, cost, availability and especially, it's water tolerance level.

It's a known fact that some oil/fat tolerate higher water quantity than others. We will look for a way to add water to this recipe without compromising the integrity of the finished product.

The addictives will help to compensate for any deficiencies resulting from the fatty acid profile of the oil/fat or quantity of water used.pppp0ppp0p0p0ppp


Addictives
In this formulation, we are not really doing anything new, we will still use caustic, water and oil/fat which forms the actual soap. We will only combine them in a certain way.


We will use
Fillers, Hardener, Foam booster, pH regulator and optionally Colour and Fragrance

The filler and hardener because of the quantity of water, the foam booster because of our oil and the pH regulator because of possible excessive lye.

We will focus on the actual soap in this presentation and deal with addictives and their measurements in the next one.

Measurement
Palm oil 3 parts
Caustic soda 1 part
Water 7.5 part

That is if you are using 6 kg oil, you use 2 kg caustic and 15 kg water.


Procedure
Make the lye solution by dissolving the caustic soda in the water and allow to cool to room temperature.

Heat the palm oil to between 250°C and 308°C which is it's flash point and remove from heat source. The flash point is when the oil becomes highly flammable.

Slowly add the palm oil to the lye solution while stirring.

As sited before, heating the oils disintegrate the molecules making it to easily bind with the Alkali, this will speed up saponification and trace.

After you achieve trace, addictives can be added and the soap further cooked in a double boiler or low heat.

We will look at the ingredients in-depth while making the practical video in part 2. Thank you.