Soap Noodles Malaysia - Palm-Based Soap Base for Personal Care and Laundry Soap

Soap noodles are semi-finished soap intermediates composed mainly of sodium salts of fatty acids. Palm-based grades can be manufactured from palm-derived fatty materials, including palm oil or palm stearin components together with palm-kernel-derived materials. They are supplied as solid noodles or pellets so downstream manufacturers can formulate and process them into finished soap bars.

Soap noodles are generally produced through saponification of suitable oils or fatty acids with alkali. Mars describes its soap noodles as being produced through distilled-fatty-acid and oil-route saponification processes. The resulting soap base can then be dried and formed into noodles suitable for downstream soap manufacturing.

TFM means Total Fatty Matter, an important commercial specification used to describe the fatty-matter content of soap. Different soap-noodle grades are produced with different TFM values to suit different finished products and price-performance requirements. Mars currently lists grades including 65%, 68%, 72% and 78% minimum TFM across different 80:20 and 90:10 compositions.

Soap noodles are principally used to manufacture toilet soap, beauty soap, personal-care soap bars and laundry soap. Manufacturers select a suitable noodle composition and TFM specification according to desired hardness, lather, cleansing properties, appearance and formulation economics. For example, Mars' 80:20 TFM 78 grade is described as containing approximately 80% palm-derived fatty acids and 20% palm-kernel-derived fatty acids.