Fatworks, An HFC Charter Member, Outlines the Trajectory of its Healthy Fats Business

Welcome to Fatworks, the Fattitude Adjusters! What is our mission? Our big fat mission: to educate the mainstream population about the benefits of using REAL cooking oils like tallow, lard and duck fat while crafting these traditional fats the most natural way possible. For years fat has been marginalized, (no to mention margarinized), maligned, slandered, beat up, picked on and falsely accused! But no longer, for Fatworks is the Defenders of Fat!  

                                                                                                                              David Cole, Fatworks founder

BACK IN 2010, David Cole, owner of Fatworks, hopped aboard the paleo train and had a hunch that a new generation of healthy-fats-seeking consumers were out there in search of well-rendered, premium tallow and lard. 

He just couldn’t find any product on store shelves. He and his wife, Mieke, set out to make their own, taking midnight shifts standing over a kettle in Portland, OR melting beef fat in sweltering conditions. At 3 a.m. with 300 pounds of fat and no customers, they looked at each other and asked, “Are we nuts?”

Decidedly not.  It quickly became clear they were on to something. With only vegetable, industrialized seed oils and coconut oils on the market, Cole set out with keto and paleo enthusiasts in mind, recognizing that a whole new generation was being educated about the benefits of healthy fats. Finding only lard or tallow at the farmer’s market, he realized that rendered animal fats were simply an afterthought.  But now, his company, Fatworks, was ready to give these farm fats a starring role.

Fatworks made its first batch, created a Facebook page and reached out to paleo influencers to sample before “influencers” was even a thing.  People went crazy for fat, confirming for the Coles they were both needed and wanted.  The next day, the Fatworks page got 2,000 likes and Cole contacted every small co-op in the country. Fatworks became the OG.  Literally no one else was doing what they were doing at retail. In the markets or grocery stores, lard that was bleached, deodorized and hydrogenated.

“We believed in the science with various studies out there,” Cole says. “There are enough people out there who believe and understand.  People who grew up in rural areas saw their parents eat lard every day, and died at 95.  Even without the paleo world, there are people who simply embrace healthy fats. Meanwhile the paleo people were doing all the education and legwork, fighting fat phobia.  People like Nina Teicholz (The Big Fat Surprise) and Gary Taubes (Nutrition Science Initiative) were doing the education for us.  I bought into it personally and started eating that way.  I ended up losing weight and felt better, never having any issues with cholesterol.  Research is bearing that out.

“It's amazing how much of our consumer base is eating fats strictly for health reasons,” he continues. “It's delicious but people don't care; they just want to make their food more gourmet, traditional.  We get calls every day from people switching from vegetable oil and eating cleaner.  In 10 years, it's so gratifying to see that.  It was fringy when we started. If you said 10 years ago I'm eating paleo, you'd need to give a 20-minute spiehl about what that is.  Now it’s in the mainstream.”

Known for premium quality, Fatworks sources its fat from small, U.S. based, pasture-raised farms, some so small that it would take a year to get a pallet’s worth.  Farmers couldn’t believe he wanted the fat they had routinely been throwin out, some even selling to diesel companies.  Fatworks ships the fat to a small artisanal USDA facility with two kettles in Longmont, outside of Denver. Once there, it’s ground and put into kettles - similar to the way someone might purchase from a butcher, chopping it up and putting it into a stock pot. The large kettles have better filters (unlike cheesecloth), which means no sediment or proteins get through.  Fatworks also adds a small amount of organic rosemary, a great antioxidant, to keep peroxide levels low without affecting the flavor.

Over the years, Fatworks has seen trends that include devotees injecting brisket with Wagyu tallow like a poultice (full-blood, A-5 highest rated Wagyu has more mono unsaturated fat), using Wagyu tallow on bison which is leaner, and people seeking goose fat/grease for the their lungs during the pandemic.  People have also been smoking and grilling pork with leaf lard (fat around kidneys) or lard made from trimmings and back fat.  Influencer Alton Brown even endorsed Fatworks Leaf Lard in People Magazine.

Cole credits some of Fatworks’ success and brand appeal to an irreverent, almost iconoclastic brand personality.  You’ll find that Fatworks is apt to frequently “Praise the Lard” and is encouraging “Fatworkers” to give themselves a well-deserved “Fattitude Adjustment.”  Says Cole: “We take crafting fat seriously and understand that many people who come to Fatworks do so as part of a huge lifestyle change, but at the end of the day, it’s fat, and if you can’t have fun with fat, then lard have mercy on you.”

As for new products on the horizon, Cole says Fatworks just launched a pre-cooked Duck Confit (duck cured in fat).  Among the other product line additions: Wagyu A-5 ultra premium skincare, including body butter and face butter.  And Tallow Tush, a unique product to treat diaper rash.  “All natural fats are ideal not just for eating but can serve as food for your skin,” Cole says.  Branded tallow candles and fat-based snacks, such as add-on-value bars, are also on the horizon.

Duck Leg Confit

Fatworks just launched a pre-cooked Duck Confit (duck cured in fat). 

Chef Ernie on The Healthy Fats Coalition

Q:  How much fat should people have in their diets?

Chef Ernie:  That's going to vary person to person.  The thing with all diets is, human beings are different.  We're going to need different diets as we age.  We're going to need different diets as our lifestyles change overall.  So there's no real firm answer as to how much fat is good.

Low fat diets that became very popular in the '80s and '90s have failed on so many levels. Although we can't talk about exactly how much fat, we certainly should be increasing the amount of fat that we're eating in general.

Q:  Why is that?  Doesn't fat make us fat?

Chef Ernie:  That's actually quite the misnomer.  You know, the words are exactly the same, fat and fat.  But consumption of fat does not automatically lead to obesity.  Our bodies are very different.  A calorie in is not a calorie out.

Depending on the hormones in our body, that will determine, for example, when a calorie comes in whether that calorie's going to be used immediately for energy, whether that calorie's going to go to short-term storage as glucose in the bloodstream, or whether that calorie will be stored as fat in our body, and again, and where in our body -- whether it's subcutaneous fat or visceral fat around our organs, which are actually two very different types of fat, and how they affect our metabolism is substantially different.

So, fat doesn't necessarily make you fat.  In fact, there have been many successful diets where you eat more fat and actually lose weight more efficiently.  In fact, that's one of the main failures of a low-fat diet is that most people actually have a tendency to lose less weight on a low-fat diet than they do on a diet that contains more fat.

Q:  Certain food writers, like Michael Pollan, have said that the problem with food science is that it looks at nutrients, at individual ingredients and individual foods, and that you can't isolate this thing or that and say it's the culprit.  Do you agree with that?

Chef Ernie:  There's a lot to be said for that point of view.  Obviously, there are very important things that we can break up.  You know, the entire realm of micro nutrients such as particular vitamins - we know exactly what happens if you don't get enough vitamin C.  You get the disease scurvy.  And we know how much vitamin C you need to get in order to prevent scurvy.

So we can talk about the elements of nutrition to a certain limited extent.  But, again, feeding ourselves is actually a more holistic thing.  So, we’re talking more about whole foods, natural foods, real foods, how we actually go about eating and how we share meals -- food is never just food.  If food were just these micro nutrients and macro nutrients, then we could all just be drinking meal replacement shakes, and that would be the end of my job.

Q:  There’s been some research around the concept that fat itself has a taste.  Are you familiar with that?

Chef Ernie:  Yes.

Q:  If that’s accurate, how does that affect behavior?  Does anybody know whether it's the taste of fat, as opposed to the specific ways that fat shows up in various foods? 

Chef Ernie:  The science of flavor is an ongoing exploration.  We don't have all the answers yet.  But I talk about the science of flavor as opposed to the science of taste.

Our tastes are what we get through our tongue and the taste receptors in our mouth.  But, the science of flavor has to deal with all of our senses -- sight, sound, hearing, touch, taste.  And then they're all combined by the brain.
It's actually the most complex sensory experience we go through on a regular basis, developing the sense of flavor.  Some studies indicate that, right now, we think that there are basically five tastes -- salty, sweet, sour, bitter and umami, Japanese for deliciousness that is our sense for amino acids.

And there’s some talk that there is a taste bud for fat.  It certainly affects our sense of texture -- things that are unctuous, that are rich, that have a certain mouth feel, as we say.  But there may actually be a taste bud that recognizes the presence of fat.  They’re still trying to figure it out.  They also think there may be taste buds for metallic flavors, for carbonic acid and a few other things, as well.

Animal fats such as lard and beef tallow contain a real sense of umami, which most vegetables do not.  They bring that sense of richness, that sense of flavor you get with ingredients like parmesan cheese or sautéed mushrooms and other rich sources of umami.

Q:  The Healthy Fats Coalition itself is fairly new.  Is the organization signing up new participants, particularly among dieticians, nutritionists and physicians? 

Chef Ernie:  We are getting a great deal of interest in the HFC.  And if you keep track of the website, you'll see that we're getting support from all over the food and nutrition world, people who are realizing that animal fats have been unfairly demonized over the last half century or so.   We're definitely bringing more and more people aboard all the time.

Q:  As the Healthy Fats Coalition grows, how can somebody participate who's not in the food industry?  Is there a role for consumers in the Healthy Fats Coalition?

Chef Ernie:  There is.  The Healthy Fats Coalition is still developing its programming, and working on some events down the road.  We're still recruiting for our Board of Directors.  But consumers can definitely participate.  They can start by demanding that their suppliers, whether grocery stores or restaurants, begin to incorporate more of these healthy fats in their foods.

Q:  What’s the relationship between the Healthy Fats Coalition and Coast Packing?

Chef Ernie:  Coast Packing took the initiative to start this education campaign, but it actually has a number of different organizations as a part of it.  For example, the Weston A. Price Foundation -- which is well known for its non-profit status in providing nutrition education based on some of the earliest studies by the famous dentist/researcher, Dr. Weston A. Price -- helped the industry to figure out what some of the best nutritional practices among indigenous peoples were.  The HFC also includes other organizations that are busy making tallow and lard, duck fat and other animal fats -- providers such as Fatworks, a Colorado-based company who we're big fans of.  We have authors and chefs and restaurants.  We're seeing more and more people joining the organization every day.