Tales From The Soap Bar Café – Spring 2023

For those of you who don’t know, we have a lovely little cafe at our head office in Clutton, north Somerset. When we relocated our head office in 2020, Sakina (owner and founder of the Somerset Toiletry Company) decided to open the doors to the local community to provide a space to relax, enjoy a bite to eat and meet with friends. We also opened a boutique gift store where locals can come and purchase bath and body care all year round, instead of just during our annual warehouse sale. Our gift shop offers lots of unique and limited-edition toiletries and gifts and cards of all kinds.

As you can imagine opening a cafe during the pandemic had its difficulties. Initially we were constantly opening and closing following government guidelines which didn’t help the situation. As you may know, there are challenges within the hospitality industry currently (post Brexit) to recruit and maintain staff and the pressure of rising costs. However, we now are proud to have a fabulous team in place to welcome our customers. When we first opened the cafe, we kept the menu simple but we’re improving it all the time, listening to customer feedback and we now offer a great variety of light lunches and brunches. Keen to offer feel-good food, you’ll find lots of healthy options on the menu freshly baked each day.

One thing we’ve had success with and hope to do more of includes events at The Soap Bar Cafe. So far these have included wreath making and floral arranging workshops with Blooms at Breach, a talented local florist. We’ve also offered some reflexology treatments to our customers which seemed to be very popular. We are happy to cater for small groups for afternoon teas or cream teas, so baby showers and local group gatherings are very welcome. Anyone who follows us will know how much we love the Billy Chip homeless charity and back last summer they organised an event in conjunction with Jenny’s Rose, another fantastic local cause raising money in the legacy of young local person.

We recently invited Metro Mayor for West of England to our soap factory and soap bar cafe. We spent time discussing UK manufacturing, sustainable sourcing and big plans for the future.  Metro Mayor Dan Norris said: “Barred soap is making a return – and it turns out Bath and NE Somerset is helping lead the way! It was great to visit Somerset Toiletry Company’s new manufacturing home here in Hallatrow – their soap products really are of the highest quality and most importantly, they’re super-sustainable and no animal is harmed at any stage is the production process. That’s really important. It’s so great to see a Bath and NE Somerset-based firm going from strength to strength and representing this area on the global stage. It just goes to show how many brilliant companies we’ve got in our fantastic West of England region.”