Our ingredients and their sources

We hand-render tallow from grass-fed, organically and sustainably-raised suet sourced from farms local to us in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Farms we source from include Green Things Farm Collective in Ann Arbor, Baseline Farm in Dexter, Whitney Farmstead in Ann Arbor, and Steinhauser Farms in Ann Arbor.

We source our sunflower seed oil from Century Sun Oil, a sunflower oil cooperative that works with sunflower growers in the midwest to produce high-quality, high-oleic sunflower oil.

We hand-render tallow from grass-fed, organically and sustainably-raised suet sourced from farms local to us in Washtenaw County, Michigan. Farms we source from include Detroit Flight Path Farm in Romulus and Steinhauser Farms in Ann Arbor.

The honey in our soaps, balms, and salves come from our very own hives in our small apiary.

When we don't have enough of our own beeswax for our products, we source it from apiaries local to us.

At Bee Line Gardens, we grow our our skin-nourishing herbs such as chamomile, calendula, rosemary, and lavender for our products. We also grow our own plant pigments such as indigo and parsley that is used to provide natural color to our soap. Other plant pigments that we use such as black walnut powder, safflower powder, and madder root powder, are organic and locally sourced.

We mostly use essential oils that are grown and distilled on Michigan farms, such as peppermint and spearmint oil from Livingston Farms in Saint Johns, Michigan, lavender oil from Lavender Lane in Milan Michigan, and wild-foraged cedar oil collected and distilled in Petosky, MI. Other essential oils that we use in our products include organic US-grown orange and chamomile oil, and in our cedar soaps we include organic cinnamon oil, our only essential oil we use that is not produced in the United States. 

Our loofahs are a prized crop at Bee Line Gardens. Our loofah plants provide prolific flowers that serve as a food source to our bees as well as native bees all summer and fall, and give us a natural and compostable alternative to plastic bath loofahs and dish sponges. We are big fans and encourage everyone to try growing these at home too, just a couple plants can easily provide you with your year's worth of sponges. 

We do use a small number of other natural ingredients (meadowfoam seed oil, jojoba oil, hemp seed oil, sunflower lecithin, and a few others...) that aren't necessarily locally grown, but are grown in the United States. In our few water-based products (lotion and serum), we do also use an ecocert-certified preservative in order to allow them to be shelf stable, which are also USA-made products. The *only* single ingredient we use that is not grown in the U.S. is the organic cinnamon essential oil that is blended with local cedar oil in our cedar-scented products.