With plant oils, everyone today asks about cultivation and quality. With animal raw materials, the question of origin is often skipped. And yet with tallow in particular: the fat stores how the animal lived. Feed, movement, stress, all of it helps decide what ends up in the jar. Which is why good tallow care does not begin in the manufactory, but on the pasture.
Fat is a store
Fatty tissue in cattle, as in humans, is a long-term store. What an animal eats over months is reflected in the composition of its fat. Grass-fed pasture cattle develop a different fatty acid profile from animals in conventional fattening, and the natural companion substances too, such as the fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K, depend directly on feed and sunlight. Cattle grazing outdoors all year round on species-rich land simply bring better conditions with them than animals from a barn.
How our herds live
Our tallow comes from Hereford and Highland cattle in Dutch nature reserves. These robust, original breeds are made for a life outdoors, and that is exactly how they live:
- Outdoors all year round, in the rhythm of the seasons, in sun, wind and rain.
- In a natural herd, the animals live in grown social structures, without confined barn housing.
- Without supplementary feeding, they eat what the reserves provide: grasses, herbs and wild plants.
- Not vaccinated, not dewormed, they live as nature intended.
The land itself is so untouched that it cannot even be certified organic. Nature reserves simply fall outside the system of agricultural certification. No fertiliser, no sprays, just nature left to itself.
Nose to tail: using instead of wasting
Our cattle are not kept for cosmetics. The tallow accrues when animals from the reserves’ nature management are utilised, and instead of disposing of it, we refine it into skincare following the nose-to-tail principle. That is sustainability in practice: a high-quality raw material that exists anyway is given a meaningful use.
What that means for your cream
From this tallow comes our Premium Tallow Creme, with only two further ingredients: organic olive oil and honey. Cleanly processed pasture tallow is odourless, rich in natural vitamins and related in its fatty acid structure to human sebum, the basis for care that feels noticeably rich and still absorbs quickly.
Frequently asked questions
Is “grass fed” the same as pasture farming?
Not necessarily. “Grass fed” describes the feed, but the animals can still spend most of their time in a barn. Our herds live outdoors permanently and eat only what they find there.
Then why is the tallow not certified organic?
Because nature reserves are not agricultural businesses, they cannot (and need not) be certified. In many respects the husbandry goes beyond organic standards.
Can you taste or smell the origin?
No, but you can see it in the quality: cleanly rendered pasture tallow is pale, odourless and creamy. A strong smell of its own points to inferior raw material.
Conclusion
“Not all tallow is the same” is not a slogan for us but the core of the product: free-living herds, untouched land, nose-to-tail use, and, at the end, a cream made of three ingredients. You can read more about tallow as a care ingredient in our big tallow guide.