Charles Mayfield

Charles Mayfield put a jar of cooking lard on a sunburn because the drugstores in his small town had closed for the night, and built a skincare company out of what happened next.

Rob Cain of Baja Gold Sea Salt had been on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast a few months earlier, and that introduction is how Mayfield ended up in the chair. He recorded his episode in a half stripped room during a studio renovation, with nothing on the wall behind Brad Banyas but a picture of a woman underwater on a surfboard. The two of them opened by comparing notes on relatives who made moonshine. Mayfield's birthday was the following week. He was turning fifty.

Mayfield spent 25 years in Atlanta and graduated from Georgia Tech in 1997, then moved back to East Tennessee and ran a farm raising meat, with a monthly food drop for customers down in the city. He started handing out jars of homemade cream alongside the meat. The first recipe came off the internet, a water and beeswax emulsion with the coconut oil swapped one for one for lard. It went black and rancid inside a week. Rather than go get a degree in chemistry, he took the water out. The company sells four products under the name Farrow and sources its fat from Joyce Farms in North Carolina. The closest substance on earth to human sebum, he says, is lard. The tagline is that the Lard works in mysterious ways. He does not have to explain any of it to a hunter or a butcher, because anyone who has cleaned a deer already knows how their hands feel afterward.

A woman who had spent decades as a C-suite cosmetics executive asked him exactly one question about the product. What is the shelf life? He said he did not know, that he had jars six months old that still smelled fine. She told him that without a two year shelf life he did not have a cosmetics product. He still tells people six months. Keeping the water out means keeping the preservatives out, and that is also why Farrow is not on a store shelf, because retail is hard at six months. When his own branding team asked whether lard should go in small print somewhere down at the bottom, he said no. It was the one thing they were doing that nobody else was doing.

Mayfield has a ham that has been hanging for four years, Spanish style and Tennessee made, and he brought Brad a piece of it. He argues the country would not be where it is without high quality pork, because salted pork kept before refrigeration existed. Pigs are his favorite farm animal. He calls them jovial and curious, omnivores for whom everything is a potential meal.