FAQ

Yes, that is possible. If you are looking for a store in you region, please contact us and we will advise. If you would like a local store to carry our products, please contact us via email, chat or call 802-289-7590 during business hours, EST

We are able to develop and manufactore all kind of soaps, lotions, creams, salves and many more products. We do also offer a service to contact manufacture your products. Please contact us via email, chat or phone.

Yes. Our all-vegetable and bayberry soaps are made from only vegetable components, as are our liquid soaps. All Vegetable Unscented Formula Bar Soap

We are aware of the concerns surrounding sourcing of palm oil and coconut oil. We purchase vegetable oils from sustainably-managed plantations. For example, our palm oil comes only from producers who are members of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil.

Both the bar/shaving soap packaging and the liquid soap bottles are recyclable any place you can recycle cardboard and milk jugs.

All true soap is by legal definition “lye soap” (an alkali salt of fatty acids). Once we make soap from it, there's no lye present anymore; it's all combined with oils and converted to soap, glycerin, and water. Further, we test every batch for excess caustic in our chemistry lab.

Just barely. Both soaps are made from oils and caustic, but grandma couldn't really control the quality of her ingredients or monitor the process like we can.

Right. Ours is made using high precision processes and tolerances, with more than a few safeguards and tests. Excess lye can cause a burning sensation and serious skin irritation.

Some soaps dry people's skin because all the glycerin has been removed from it for resale to the cosmetics industry. We don't remove the glycerin so our soap is very moisturizing to your skin.

Surprisingly well. It's still soap, so you may see soap curd in very hard water; but unlike some soaps, it lathers well in hard water.

Yes. We don't use wheat or related products to make our soap.

Detergents use petroleum-based oils and do not contain any naturally-occurring glycerin. Detergents don't react with hard water minerals (i.e. they can't make "soap scum") but can be very drying to skin.

Soap has been made for thousands of years, so why are there still so many things about soap that confuse people?  It’s like lots of things – most of the time we just don’t take the time to look into the details. This page on our web site is intended to present a few things about how soap is made and the things that distinguish Green Mountain Soap from most other soaps.  We think that the more you know about soap, the better informed you will be and the better you will be able to decide what is best for you.

Soap is made through a chemical reaction called saponification, literally “soap making” from the Latin word for soap, Sapo.  The result of the reaction is two things:  soap and glycerin.  Glycerin is a natural by-product of the soap making reaction, and glycerin is known for its ability to hold water.  Soap without glycerin in it tends to dry your skin.

Most soap made by large-scale continuous process factories has had the glycerin removed from it.  The glycerin can be sold as a separate commodity to maximize their profits.  All the glycerin produced in Green Mountain Soap stays in the soap.  That is the first major point of distinction between Green Mountain Soap and most of the soap you will see on the grocery store shelves.

Many things are added to most soap.  For a list of additives found in other soap,go HERE 

Though Green Mountain Soap Co. does have a few soaps to which fragrances and essential oils have been added (See Bayberry and the list of shaving soaps), it is true that our original flagship line of soap, both bars and liquid, is free of all additives.  Period.  None.

That is the second major point of distinction between Green Mountain Soap and nearly all other soaps on the market.

Remember the Saponification Reaction, above?  Oils plus Caustic yields Soap plus Glycerin.  So the purity of the oils and caustic will determine the purity of the soap and glycerin.

All of the oils used to make Green Mountain Soap are Food Grade oils.  We use Tallow, Palm Oil, Coconut Oil, and Olive Oil for the oils (the triglycerides).  And the caustic soda is always greater than 99% pure.

Because soap can pick up the scents and odors that surround it, we make all of our unscented products in a separate room that is used exclusively for making unscented products.  The air conditioning system is separate and dedicated only to that room.

Any work with fragrances is done in another part of the facility, again with its own dedicated HVAC system.  All facilities are air conditioned year-round so the soap will never get too hot.  (Cold is no problem for the soap, but we do heat the buildings in the winter for the people working there.)

Several years ago, we discovered that there are small amounts of copper and iron in the city water that comes to our plant.  Those metals were enough to shorten the shelf life of our soap a little, so we started using distilled water exclusively in the entire soap making process.

Our unscented soap is so pure, in fact, that one of our formulations, the Uncented All-Vegetable bar soap, has been certified as “Food Grade” by the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF International), an arm of the US Department of Agriculture.

We do not now, nor have we ever, nor are there any plans for the future to perform any testing of our soap on animals.  There has never been anything used to make our soap that is questionable enough to require testing for allergic reactions.

We do, however, admit to having done major testing over the last 35 years on members of the human race, homo sapiens.  Happy results have always been the outcome.