Business Profile: Bubble Farm Soap Co.

Owners: Jean Chen and Chris Bauer

Patch spoke with Jean Chen about Bubble Farm Soap Co.

How did the two of you create Bubble Farm Soap Co.? My husband and I got our first beehive when we were still living in San Francisco. I had read an article about urban beekeeping. A few months after that, we went to the Marin County Fair. The Beekeepers Association was there with their demonstration beehive. We asked if we could keep bees in San Francisco and they connected us with the San Francisco Bee Club.  hen we moved with our beehives to Alameda in 2008.

At first it was all about the honey. But then we noticed we had all the extra wax. So my husband, Chris, started making lip balm with it. Lip balm is really easy to make. You melt the wax with olive oil and add whatever flavoring you want.

Then Chris started making soap. For about a year, he experimented with all different formulas until he found the combination of oils and wax that he really liked. I was the guinea pig!

Sometimes the soap would be too mushy, or too hard. One time he tried a ginger soap, which just smelled weird. Sometimes the soap wouldn’t be terrible but it wouldn’t be something I’d want to spend money on. For instance, the soap wouldn’t lather up enough.

Chris started casually shopping the soap around to a few different stores. Then this past April, we decided to take it to the next level. We have a great product. So I re-designed the label and started taking it to different grocery stores and gift stores.

What was the secret formula to getting the soap just right? Our ingredients are listed on the back. The important thing is to get the proportions right. We have coconut and palm oil, canola and olive oil, castor and almond. You need the right proportions to get a good lather.

 What the beeswax does is hold the soap together. You know how you buy a great moisturizing bar and it gets all mushy in the shower? And you think, “Oh great, I just spent $12 and the soap just melted away after a few uses.” The beeswax makes the bar a little more solid, so we can use more oils but it will hold its shape.

A lot of people say honey is good for your skin, so we do have a few honey soaps. It also gives it a nice smell.

Where do you manufacture your products? In our kitchen! It’s actually legal since it’s not food.

How many hives do you have and where do you keep them? We have five now. We keep some of them at the Alameda Point Collaborative’s gardens. They’ve been super supportive. We have a couple in UC Berkeley’s gardens in Kensington.

We lost a couple to the zombie wasp disease. There’s a parasitic wasp that lays its eggs in the bodies and brains of the bees. When the eggs hatch, the bees act all funky — they’re very disoriented. It was horrible.

How much honey and wax does one hive produce in a year?  Each hive can produce 35 to 100 pounds of honey. It depends on the season and the size of the hive. We’ve always had plenty of honey and sell the extra. We’ve never had a problem until this year with the amount of wax until the business started taking off. We are sourcing local wax from other local beekeepers.

Do you need a permit to keep bees? No. We do have a business permit but you don’t need one to keep bees.

So if you’re interested in keeping bees, we do a workshop about once every six months at Redux.

Where can people get beehives? There are a few ways to get beehives.

We got our first two hives from people in the Bee Club. What happens is that hives will swarm, which is how bees reproduce naturally. When a hive gets really big, half of them will split off and go form a new hive.  If this happens around someone’s house, they can call a local beekeeper who will come and collect the swarm. Then that beekeeper can either keep the swarm or give or sell it to someone else.

Lately, my husband has been catching his own swarms. He’s on the Bee Call list.

The third way to get hives is by mail order. There are on-line companies that you can order from, usually in April, which is the season that bees swarm.

How do you get bees delivered? Actually, the bees come like any other package in the mail. They’re shipped in a mesh box so they can breathe. The queen is in her own little cage with two attendants who take care of her.

What products are currently available from Bubble Farm Soap Co.? We have seven different soaps. Our number one best-seller is the lavender. People love the lavender! We have three honey-based soaps: Milk and Honey, Rosemary Honey, and Oatmeal Honey. Then there’s Mint, Coffee Scrub and Unscented.

We just started making bath salts, which is very exciting. Our bath salts are a mix of small-grain Epsom salt, large Pacific rock salt, lavender essential oil and honey. It’s really nice! Unlike bubble baths, it doesn’t dry out your skin. We’re experimenting with some other mixes, so we’ll keep you posted.

We’re working on a hand salve for gardeners.

Will there be any special products for the holidays? We’re going to have gift boxes, which you can find on our website or at Redux and Poppy Red. I want to give a shout out to the local stores that carry our products. They’ve been great in supporting us.

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