OC business offsetting inflation costs by turning bacon grease into soap

OCEAN CITY, Md. – Bacon grease is being turned into soap!

“It’s an old-time recipe but it’s saving one Ocean City business big bucks by cutting inflation. “When you see your bacon prices and your eggs increase, I mean at one point eggs were up 500% percent. I was like I have to do something,” said Sam Delauter.

Every summer Sam Delauter turns 1000 pounds of bacon grease into soap. It’s the grease from his business Sunrise Diner in Ocean City where he sells French toast, smoothies, and of course bacon. Following his great-grandmother’s recipe with a few tweaks, Delauter says when it came time to cut costs he had the perfect idea. “My great-grandmother would make this out of bacon grease and this light bulb went off. I just have so much bacon grease in the back,” Delauter said.

Before you lather up with it the food waste has to go through a process to be a nice bar of soap. “Start with water and I just put it right on the grill you got to heat it up really well so then all the oil floats on top and all the stuff you don’t want gets caught in the water so all the crud all the odor, anything else, and little bits of bacon, and your just left with this very pure odorless lard on top. It’s actually some of the best soap you can use on your skin,” Delauter said.

Delauter sells 5 scents currently all natural with just 5 simple ingredients. Not only is the soap inexpensive but the recycled food waste offsets his business costs. “Good actually helps me a little bit. I’m technically paying cheaper for bacon now because if people are buying that byproduct as well as us selling the bacon it offsets 80% of that cost,” he said.

Selling 2000 bars of soap a summer since 2022, Delauter says his bacon grease helps keep more than Sunrise Diner afloat on the boardwalk. “It’s really good for business it offsets a lot of costs. It’s allowed us to be more competitive our menu prices are able to be cheaper because of that and I’m able to pay my employees more because of it and people notice it and you can walk up and down the boardwalk especially the prices everywhere are very very high but we’ve been able to maintain very stable prices,” Delauter said.

You can check out Sunrise Diner in Ocean City and to look at their soaps, click here.