Est. in Cody, Wyoming
Our Story
We're AJ and Jessica Richards. We live in Cody, Wyoming, with our three daughters.
We ran a USDA slaughterhouse. That work put us closer to beef than most people ever get: the animals, the families raising them, and every part of the carcass that never makes it to a dinner plate. Leaf fat is one of those parts. It's the cleanest, most prized fat on the animal, and most of the time it gets thrown away or ground into something that ends up far from anyone's skin.
Meanwhile we were reading the backs of bottles in the store. Our girls are growing up in a world that sells them beauty in a plastic tube, and the ingredient list on most of it is a paragraph of things we couldn't pronounce and didn't want to keep rubbing into their skin every morning. We didn't want to hand them that. We also didn't want to lecture anybody about it. We just wanted a better jar on the shelf.
So we made one.
Before Modern is beef tallow skincare, made from a fat our great grandmothers would have recognized on sight. Tallow was in the medicine cabinet and the kitchen long before the word "moisturizer" existed. It's close to what skin already produces, it carries fat soluble vitamins, and it does the job with a short list of ingredients instead of a long one.
Where it comes from
Our tallow comes from cattle raised right here in our part of Wyoming, rendered from the same processing facility we ran. Not a broker. Not a barrel of blended fat with no name on it. We know the plant, we know the process, and we know where the animals came from.
That's rare in this category, and it's the whole reason we felt we had the right to make this at all. We had the access. It felt wrong not to use it.
How it's made
We triple render our tallow for purity, whip it slow, and blend it with a handful of ingredients you can read out loud. Olive oil. Essential oils. That's the list.
No fillers to make it cheaper. No fragrance blends we can't explain. No claims we can't stand behind at our own kitchen table.
Why we do it
AJ was raised in a generational ranching family and now spends his days building From The Farm, a company working to connect families directly to the farms and ranches that feed them. Before Modern comes from the same conviction, just at a smaller and more personal scale: good things come from good animals, raised by real people, and very little should stand between the two.
We're a family business in the plainest sense. We render, we jar, we label, and we ship. Our daughters are usually somewhere in the middle of it.
Thank you for letting us make something for your family.
AJ and Jessica Richards
Cody, Wyoming
What is in the jar
Three ingredients
Beef tallow
Leaf fat from cattle raised in our part of Wyoming, triple rendered for purity and whipped slow.
Olive oil
A small amount, whipped in, to keep the balm soft enough to scoop and light enough to disappear into the skin.
Essential oils
For scent, and nothing more. No fragrance blends we can't explain, no fillers to make it cheaper.
That is the whole list. Skincare the way it was made before modern additives.
Simple Ingredients
Three things, and nothing you can't pronounce.
Small Batches
Rendered slowly, poured and labeled by hand.
Timeless Skincare
The way skin was cared for before modern additives.
Handcrafted With Care
Made in our own kitchen in Cody, Wyoming.