Even though liquid soap is very popular in Nigeria, bar soap has more uses and is therefore more practical. You can learn how to make bar soap for personal use, but bar soap production can also become your new successful business. Find out how to make bar soap in Nigeria!
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1. What you’ll need to start
Learning how to make homemade soap bars for beginners is impossible without the first step – getting the required ingredients and tools. The ingredients needed for soap production largely depend on the type of the soap you want to produce – laundry bar soap ingredients will be from regular soap.
Here are the most common types of soap you can make:
- Beauty soap
- Toilet soap
- Laundry soap
- Medicated soap
- Herbal soap
- Hand washing soap
- Plate washing soap
- Car washing soap
In this guide we will focus on laundry soap, and here are the laundry bar soap ingredients you’ll need:
- Palm kernel oil – 8kg
- Caustic soda – 6kg
- Soda ash – 800g
- Silicate – 200g
- Sodium sulphate – 150g
- Kaolin – 125g
- Water
- Perfume
- Colourant
Additionally, for this bar soap recipe you will need the following equipment and tools:
- Mixer
- Heater
- Fermenting tanks (or plastic containers with covers)
- Hydrometer
- Rhod
- Moulds
- Cutting machine
- Stamping machine
- Packaging
2. How to make laundry bar soap for business
Now that you know which bar soap making ingredients you will need to make your first batch of laundry soap, let’s find out how to produce bar soap for sale.
- Take 4L of water, caustic soda, and kaolin, and pour them into one of the fermenting tanks. Stir well using a rod, cover the tank and leave for 48 hours.
- Take another fermenting tank and fill it with 2.5L of water, soda ash, and sodium sulphate. Stir well with a rod and leave the covered tank for 24 hours.
- Once the fermentation process is complete in both tanks, heat up the palm kernel oil until it melts and add the colourant. Remove the oil from the heat and allow to cool down.
- Pour the melted oil into the mixing tank, add the caustic soda solution, and mix well to combine the ingredients.
- Next add the soda ash solution and stir well again. Add the silicate and give the mixture another long stir.
- Finally, add the perfume and stir the soap mixture well. Pour the mixture into the moulds and leave for 2-3 hours to solidify.
- Before the soap is completely solid, cut it into equal-sized bars. Stamp each bar. Once the soap is ready, package it. Your soap is ready to be sold!
3. Bar soap business in Nigeria
If you’re wondering not only how to make bar soap at home in Nigeria, but how to make your business work, first you’ll need a starting capital.Of course, the cost of launching a soap making business depends on scale of your enterprise.
A small-scale business of laundry soap production can be started for just ₦50,000, as long as you source the ingredients locally, pay a local freelancer to design your packaging and logo, and mainly sell your product over the internet – for example, on Jiji, where thousands of entrepreneurs have already gotten their successful start.
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