Tallow, Trust, and Testing: Inside My Neighbor's Rapid Growth

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1:16For me, as a consumer, I actually don't care if something's organic. I really care if it's regenerative. And I think that sometimes people use that word regenerative, but don't necessarily know what it is. and there's now going to be more like regenerative seals and certifications. So I think it's really doing the due diligence and making sure that people on their websites, you're really talking about ingredient sourcing and where things are harvested from. We love to be able to kind of like name that farm or name at least the region that it's coming from. We are a company that's built on trust and transparency.

1:48And like if I don't feel like it's safe enough to put it on my own kids, I'm not going to put it into a jar and sell it. Hey, everybody. This is Caitlin Berker, Managing Editor at Startup CPG. We are back with another founder feature. Today, I'm sitting down with Harry Magaldi, founder of My Neighbors, a regenerative tallow skincare brand manufactured in the Hudson Valley. Harry left nine years on Wall Street to make beef tallow products after her daughter developed eczema. She launched at Hudson Farmer's Market in May 2024, made$4 ,000 in her first day, and is now in over 500 retailers headed toward 1 ,500 doors by March, 2027.

2:27We're diving into grass-fed versus grass-finished, why she invested$30 ,000 in microbial and heavy metal testing unprompted, her full circle farm partnerships, and meeting a major buyer while pumping at Expo West. We hear from founders on this podcast every week. If you're a brand and want to get new opportunities right in your inbox, text CPG to 833-605-7002. That's 833-605-7002 and we'll get you hooked up. As always, enjoy. Hey everybody, welcome back to the Startup CPG podcast. This is Caitlin and today I'm here with Harry Magaldi, founder of My Neighbors. Harry, welcome to the show. Thank you.

3:12Very excited to have you here. I have balm on my hands right now. I've been using the balm on my face. But there might be people right now who are not familiar with My Neighbors and they're like, what are you talking about? So before we get any further, can you tell us all what My Neighbors is? Yes. So My Neighbors is a regenerative skincare brand that has both tallow-based formulas and vegan formulas. And we actually manufacture everything ourselves here in the Hudson Valley. Beautiful. They really are beautiful products. I was stunned by the packaging. I mean, come on. Pretty cute. Like, seriously.

3:50And then his all lit. It's so good. Like, you know that feeling that you get when you leave the house and you're like, oh, I left my lip balm at home. Like, what am I going to do? For me, it's like a security blanket. That is something you would not just accidentally forget. I love it. Thank you so much. It's a thing of beauty. So just going to give you your flowers for that because the packaging is absolutely gorgeous. The formulas are amazing. You're not using any artificial fragrances. They smell good. They look good. They feel good. So what brought you to creating My Neighbors? Well, thank you for the packaging part because honestly, I really wanted to make something that was great formulas, but beautiful.

4:29So it kind of sells itself. So when it's in someone's home, you don't have to hide it. You can actually just tell your friends about it. But what is the origin story for us? So it is kind of a wild transition. So I actually used to be on Wall Street before. So I used to do derivatives trading and then I was in sales because I'm the gift of the gap, people say, a little chatty. So I worked on Wall Street for nine years and then I got pregnant with my first little girl, Wilhelmina. And we were in a lucky position where me and my husband had these like two really great jobs. So we had a home in Hudson Valley for the weekends and we'd Airbnb it out to make a little extra income.

5:03And then we had a house in Darien, Connecticut. And so when I gave birth to my first baby, I had all intention of going back to work. I was actually like the breadwinner. Husband did well, but I actually was Miss Moneybags over here. It's good for you. And so I always had the plan of like having a nanny and had already booked someone, etc. And then when I had my little girl, I looked at her and I was like, wait, I'm never going to get to see you. And I spoke to my husband over the first three weeks of maternity leave and was like, I want to stay home. What can we do? And he was like, well, we can't have two homes.

5:35We're going to have to sell our primary house and move upstate if we want to have you be a stay-at-home mom. We just can't do it on my salary. And I was like, OK, like, let's do it. We sold our house. We moved upstate full time, which was like definitely a big change. But we had done it during the pandemic, too, and it was amazing. So we kind of knew a little bit like this is where we want to be. and I was at home with her and my little girl around seven months in started getting really bad eczema and basically I started making beef tallow products for her and the way that I found out about beef tallow because this was in early 2023 was actually on kind of these like homesteading trad wife forums that I kind of like always like idolize the people that were able to kind of grow things and make things more holistically at home and grow food and raise animals for their families but I wasn't like doing that.

6:26I wasn't a homesteader. I had chickens, but I wasn't a full on homesteader. And so I was in those forums. I was like, Hey, does anyone have any like homeopathic recipes for eczema? And they were saying lard and tallow. And I was really lucky. I still have this lovely friend, Lizzie, who had a farm called Woven Star Farms. And I actually got some suet from her and I made beef tallow in my kitchen in a crock pot. And it was actually the only thing that worked on my daughter's skin. And I was giving it to the bougie mom friends that I have in Darien, Connecticut and Greenwich as gifts. And then I was also giving it to mom friends up here at the library.

7:01And people were like, stop giving this away for free. It's amazing. Why don't you try and sell it? So my daughter had eczema, but she was a very good napper. And I was home with her while starting this business for 16 months. But we started formulating in-house in my kitchen in probably October of 2023. And then I launched the business in May of 2024 at the Hudson Farmers Market. And we sold about$4 ,000 the first day. Whoa. That's how it started. And we had kind of like a crazy moment happen to us at month four of being in business where we were picked up by anthropology and terrain at a farmer's market.

7:39And that really catapulted us into the world of wholesale and we're now in upwards of 500 retailers two and a half years in. I am just I'm beside myself right now. Four thousand dollars in your first farmer's market. Yes. And I did have my baby with me. I was actually the cancellation person for like a good six months. So whenever the farmer's market had a cancellation day of they would call me and I'd be like I'm coming. And like I'd come with my baby Wilhelmina and like show before and after photos. And I'm charming, but also the product like people really liked, but no one really knew about Talo yet.

8:12So there was still a lot of education. And then I got really lucky with Talo becoming so popular on TikTok that people started coming up to me being like, Talo, yes, this is exactly what I'm looking for. But that was a really big shift, like just kind of from that May till about August. That's when people started knowing about Talo in 2024. people. Unreal. I mean, I would say that this is lucky for you, but it sounds like you really worked your butt off to get here and made a lot of sacrifices. Oh, yeah. I'm like literally insane. Wow. Sometimes four markets a weekend. I had another baby. So I was writing purchase orders, like putting in things into Shopify from labor with my second baby.

8:52I brought my second baby into the lab since day eight. So she's now with my nanny who they come to visit me every day, which is amazing. But yes, there even is a little baby rocker right here, which needs to go home with me. So good. But yes, mother owned and babies often here. Wow. All right. Can you name drop the farmer's market that you had so much success? Yeah. So the Hudson farmer's market, honestly, it's the best. And the really cute thing about where we are today. So we've had a few different locations of where we manufacture everything ourselves because we've outgrown spaces. But But our newest space as of November of last year was actually the building that we're in now.

9:31And it sits on Columbia and Seventh, right where the Hudson Farmers Market is on the weekends on Saturday. And you can actually see it through our flagship store window. So our manufacturing is on one side of the building and then shipping is behind the store. We do also have five storage units, so we're kind of crazy. But we can see the Farmers Market where it all began from the window of the shop, which just like means something to me. But we also allow vendors to kind of park out front of our shop every weekend so that they can really get involved in that farmer's market traffic, which really helped us.

10:05And it was really hard to get a spot sometimes. So always down for CPG founders if they want to come to Hudson, they're more than welcome to park out front of our shop because it brings people into our shop, but it also gives them visibility for the weekend traffic. What a kind offer. and it is pretty nuts that you were launching this product putting these products into the world when tallow was really trending now i feel like when something's trending you have two camps of people you have one camp who's like oh this product's trending this ingredient is so hot let me get my hands on it and then you have another camp of people who's like uh it's trending like now i'm turned off and they might not even read into what tallow is for anybody who's listening right now who isn't familiar with what tallow is.

10:52Can you give us a little background about what it actually is? Yeah, for sure. And there is a little bit of like greenwashing, grass washing kind of going on in the kind of arena as well. So with tallow, so tallow is going to be beef suet. So it's going to be fat that's around the kidney of a cow. When we were first manufacturing, I was actually receiving a lot of my suet still with the kidney on. So I still have a lot of those really lovely photos of me like a butcher but that really made me be able to understand like the difference in beef trimmings and then suet so suet fat is going to be more nutrient dense there's only about 18 to 25 pounds on the average cow in the united states we are in this like really lucky area of the hudson valley where regenerative farming grass fed grass finished is so prevalent but it's a byproduct so we render this fat and we actually render it in-house too we don't get it from a bigger facility that renders it in massive amounts because when you do get tallow in that way, one, you're not helping your local economy and the farmers that need to get rid of a byproduct.

11:54But two, they're going to be excessively heating it. And often they don't know where they're sourcing it from. And they also don't know where on the animal that fat came from. And then the reason why suet is so good for your skin is because it has so many similar properties to human skin. The fatty acid profile is almost identical to ours. So it really soaks in. And then people like to talk about the vitamin content of tallow having vitamin A, D, E, and K. But that actually isn't the main secret sauce of why tallow is so good for the skin. It's such a small amount of those vitamins in suet. And people would really love to do it as a marketing claim, but it's actually the fatty acid profile.

12:32So the fact that it's so similar to our skin, tallow in Latin actually directly translate to sebum, which means skin. And people were using it for centuries. They were using it, the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans. I mean, it kind of only went out of vogue in the 1920s when more petroleum-based products could be made and mass-produced. That never went bad. You know, it's interesting too, because when I think of fat, my mind immediately goes to like the fat that you'd see after cooking food, like using bacon. Yeah, people think that still today. And it's going to clog up your drains. It's going to do all this.

13:06Yeah. These products feel so good. And it really does feel like my skin is just so moisturized, not greasy at all, which is what I would expect with a fatty based product. It's not like that whatsoever, which is really impressive to me. And I will say that I was hesitant about tallow products in the past. I had never used them. I didn't want to break my skin out. I have had any issues. Yeah. If anything, my skin feels and looks better. Well, you look great. I think that having children actually helped my skin get a little bit better, but also having my tallow line has definitely helped. I used to kind of always get like hormonal pimples kind of around my hairline, but I've never been someone that suffered from acne.

13:48So I haven't had that story. The thing that really matters with tallow is the sourcing. So it's like making sure that it is suet. It's grass-fed and grass-finished. It's not going to have corn or soy to be what finishes off the animal or grain-fed. It really makes a difference in how the fat smells, but also how it performs on the skin. And then also your carrier oil. So you might order a tallow for face off of Amazon and it has 10 ,000 sales a month, but the way that it's being sourced, they probably can't name a farm. It's probably not grass-finished and it's probably has things like beeswax or olive oil or coconut oil that can clog your pores and actually make your skin worse.

14:28So just being really careful about what the additional ingredients are that are associated with the tallow product that you're getting. Look, I love when people are making local tallow in their community and they do a really great job. More people making tallow is a good thing. It's not something that I'm concerned about. I'd rather it not go to waste, but making sure that it's not mixed with things that are just going to irritate you. Like you don't need vanilla and tallow because vanilla isn't good for your skin. And I love vanilla. So that's so sad. I love it too. It smells so good, but like you don't really need a vanilla tallow because vanilla isn't something that really is beneficial to the skin.

15:01So any of our essential oils that we add to our products are actually things that benefit the skin. So our blue tansy, for example, which is one of our best sellers, is a Moroccan chamomile and it like really helps with antibacterial properties, also with anti-inflammatory. So people that have more acne prone skin absolutely love it. It's also kind of like gender androgynous in terms of the scent. It makes my mouth water. I love it so much to have a blue tansy girl. It is so nostalgic for me. That scent, the blue tansy reminds me of blue Jolly Ranchers. Every single time I smell it, that's what it brings me back to.

15:37And it's my childhood. I love it. It's that color too. I'm like, it's kind of fun, but also people are like, wait this is natural and it's literally from a yellow flower that makes that blue amazing essential oil and then our rose and sea buckthorn is like probably our second best seller we launched that last august insane it's so good smells like most incredible rose ever but sea buckthorn is so good for pore size minimization so they're kind of like competing now we're off to the races kind of with that other hero so we'll see who wins by the end of year sea buckthorn saved my skin i was also in the camp of people who used to get hormonal acne, but I would get it around my chin.

16:15And I started oil cleansing with sea buckthorn. Oh, I love it. Changed my skin. Yeah, we have vegan serum too. So blue tansy and sea buckthorn are in that. And honestly, I use my serum as an oil cleanser and a serum, which is kind of fun. I like a simple routine. I'm like a merit makeup girl and then tallow skincare. So like five things and I'm done. Perfect face for the product too, because your skin looks totally flawless to me. Oh, thanks. I actually put concealer on for this. I don't normally wear makeup. So I always think I'm going to be on a podcast. I have to look more presentable. My baby is not sleeping.

16:50Please, you look great. Okay, I have a question because I do not know the answer to this. You've said grass-fed and grass-finished. I know what grass-fed means. I can kind of take a guess at what grass-finished means. Can you tell us what that means? For sure. So there isn't regulation really around like how you can speak about this. And that's something that is going to be becoming like FDA more regulated. So it is something that should be on people's mind. Okay. So RAS finished is when an animal is never given corn or soy at the end of their life to fatten them up. So some delicious meat is sometimes given some corn or some soy at the end to kind of give it a little bit more marbleizing and to give it a little bit more like a fatty profile.

17:36While that might taste great, it's not what those animals were intended to eat. A lot of those corns and those soy products are one, not native to here, but also have GMOs in them. So we have to be really careful about what we're consuming. So when you're in the grocery store, you're definitely going to be looking for like your pasture-raised eggs, cage-free eggs, pasture-raised. And then with meat, you're going to be looking for your grass-fed and your grass-finished. It's definitely going to trade at a premium. But it's better for you. I mean, I'm someone that eats red meat four times a week.

18:08We buy a cow every year for us to eat as a family. We do not suffer from high cholesterol because we're getting it from a very healthy source. And then the same with your skincare. If you're going to be using a tallow, you want to be having one, something that was raised in a really humane way. So they live longer when their grass finished as well. They're also eating what they were intended to eat. But also the fat is going to be of a higher grade and also isn't going to smell like a cheeseburger. So if you smell some tallows out there, they're not going to smell great. Some are also being bleached and deodorized, too.

18:40So that's just also something to note. We're building in public. We let people know our procedure, how we do it. And I think that's also why the brand has resonated with so many people. Yeah, I mean, it makes total sense to me. And how did you go about finding your source for tallow? So we do work with about 12 different farms in the Hudson Valley. And as we grow, we want to make sure that the Hudson Valley is where we always get it from first. But we will probably extend to more of just New York as things continue to grow. But we basically, one, we go to the farm for a farm visit. We want to also make sure that obviously it's all USDA butchered.

19:17So when the animal get processed, normally about three years of age when it comes to grass fed and grass finished. These are animals that a lot of these farms sometimes are selling, we call animal to individuals too. So that's a really cool thing, too, where you're eating that whole nose to tail and then people don't often want this through it. And that's what we buy from them. We also wanted to work with farms that also have a little bit of a retail presence as well. So we buy a byproduct from them, but then we also sell them the finished product to sell in their farm stores. So that's something that makes me feel really good about myself and the business is the fact that these farms can make money twice.

19:49One from us buying the byproduct and then second from them selling our product at retail. And we also interview them. And we have some really badass farmers that we have one. Frankie is a girl that works at Liberty Farm. She's more of a shepherd, like loves the sheep, but she also helps out with the cow program as well. And she actually makes like baby outfits for the lambs that get rejected from their moms. And they're hot pink. And she wears a hot pink car heart jumpsuit. And she's just such a badass. So I love how many female farmers there are up here too. But we also have some like really cool cowboys too.

20:21We've got dirty dog farms. We love working with them too. And they're just like hilarious with their content. Wow. I really like that full circle moment of you sourcing from them and then you giving back to them and then getting back into the hands and faces of people in your community too. For sure. And I think that also now that we've grown as a business, like we actually have to be documented in way different ways. Like we don't have a small business exemption anymore. So even though we are a small business, basically in cosmetics, like once you hit a certain amount of income for three consecutive years, your exemption is gone and you have to actually be registered as an FDA facility.

20:56So we are. And then we actually have to give our sourcing to our SDSs so that we can actually make sure that our safety data sheets and all of our batches are coded to a batch of suet that we've rendered from a specific farm and a specific butcher. So there's some really good regulations going in place so that people can get more transparent skincare and make sure that it's being sourced in an ethical way. Is this something that's unique to tallow-based products because you're dealing with animal products and byproducts versus a typical cosmetic brand that might not be using? So any cosmetic brand in the U.S., like if you're making kind of like under a million dollars, like you have a small business exemption.

21:40So kind of once you get over that one million threshold for three consecutive years, you then are governed by the FDA. But then there's new regulatory things that have come in through the FDA that basically talk about making sure that it says suet fat on the pieces that you're buying of the animal that you're rendering and that it's rendered to a cosmetic grade. So there's procedures in place for that. And there wasn't really any of that regulatory procedures before. So it's something that we're kind of like charting anew as we grow. We're trying to make sure that we stay compliant and we kind of lead the way, but also educate people too.

22:17Like I have other friends that make tallow maybe on a smaller standpoint, but now I think we spent about$30 ,000 just on getting like microbial testing and stability testing and heavy metals testing and everything like that for all of our products to actually have them be deemed as safe. So a lot of products on the market today might just say the safety of this product has not been determined. Whereas we've actually now invested money into making sure that we can say the safety of this product is determined and it is safe fruit consumption or being used on the face or on the body or by a certain age group, for example.

22:50And that's not required. You've chosen to do that. Yes, that's something that we've decided to do. And that's also something that's going to help us stand apart from other brands too. So it's like a great thing that one, we can also be more transparent to our customers, but then also it's going to help us differentiate ourselves when we're trying to get on shelf in these larger retailers. So the reason we had originally done it was we're going to be working with QVC, which is very exciting. But QVC is so diligent on all of their testing and actually maybe respect them so much more as a company because I was like, wow, they care more than like any partner I've ever worked with.

23:27Interesting. And I don't think people know that. So they helped us figure out what lab to work with. And now we have all that documentation, which has been so great. And it's now something that we have to practice with any new SKU creation. So we can't just be like, let's make a new product. We say, can we budget for$5 ,000 to make sure that this product is safe? Wow. So QVC helped school you. QVC, what's up? Yeah. So we love QVC. That's pretty cool. What you're saying to me right now about doing this extra testing for your products to make sure the customer is getting a safe, effective product is reminding me a lot about the hemp boom.

24:06I was in Massachusetts when this was happening about 10 years ago. and I remember there were just so many hemp products on the market at that point, obviously unregulated and it was so saturated and the only way to tell if you were really getting a product that meant what they were saying, that they were making these claims, I'm sure that they shouldn't have been. But you always knew the key players by the ones that had those COIs, the certificates of analysis that were doing the microbial testing, that were testing for heavy metals. So what you're saying about your products is reminding me very much of that hemp boom.

24:43And I think it's definitely something for consumers and retailers to keep an eye out for, for sure, especially during these ingredient booms too. It's tough because there's obviously a barrier to entry. So like for me, yes, I had to make enough money to be able to have those procedures take place. And I don't want to deter other companies from like, you'll get there. Obviously, you need to save a little bit to be able to do that, but it's worth the investment for your consumer and for these bigger placements. It's tough because it's similar to like the organic certification, right, where it's like some farms just can't afford it.