Free Web NovelChapter 346: Soap v2
Laura, Rebecca, and Joel were part of the 5 original workers Lucas had recruited back in Redwood Town with the help of the Director Leah. The other two, Gabe and Jake, had unfortunately been swept away in the Spatial Storm that fateful night.
This was certainly a blow to Lucas and his endeavours, especially Gabe who was second only to Laura when it came to leadership skills and knowledge, but the young boy was somewhat comforted thinking that these two were together with his parents.
In an unfamiliar land with uncertainty all around, having even a couple of additional competent people would be a great boon.
Still, with Victoria and Laura busy getting the new sugar industry up and running, the job of establishing a soap production line in Misty City had fallen to Rebecca and Joel.
Rebecca was competent but somewhat soft spoken, while Joel was a bit less capable overall, but made up for with great interpersonal skills. Together, the two actually complimented each other quite well despite their personalities not meshing.
As such, when Head Manager Victoria assigned this task to them, the two youths immediately divided up the workload according to their preferences and strengths.
Rebecca would handle the technical aspects, such as finding an appropriate location and purchasing the necessary equipment, while Joel dealt with recruiting personnel and bargaining with the local merchants for the raw ingredients.
As for things like marketing and sales, the two of them didn’t put any thought into that for now, deciding to leave that to their superiors.
In any case, it would take a while to get a factory set up, then another couple of days to actually produce a raw batch of soap.
Then that soap would need to cure for almost a month before it was finally ready to be used.
Lucas had mentioned that using hot ingredients could produce soap faster, but he hadn’t yet explained that process to them, so for now, Rebecca and Joel made plans based on the old cold method they were familiar with.
Having gotten to work on this project a few days after arriving in Misty City, both Rebecca and Joel figured it would take until the very end of the year at best before they had any soap to sell.
Hopefully Boss Lucas, Head Manager Victoria, or Lady Sasha would be freer by then and could handle the distribution problem for them.
.....
Unlike with the sugar workshop, which was meant to be more of a temporary test lab, Lucas wanted them to build a full-scale soap factory capable of producing many, many more bars than the small operation he had back in Redwood Town.
To that end, the list of requirements he had passed to Victoria were far more ambitious.
Victoria then passed this list along to Rebecca, who felt a bit faint when she first read it.
Like everything with him, the specific details of Lucas’ plan were quite lengthy and technical, but ultimately, they boiled down to a single goal, 1 million bars of soap per month.
Considering their record back in Redwood Town was just over 4,000 bars in a single month, Rebecca and Joel immediately realized that their boss was thinking much, much bigger this time around.
Of course, Lucas wasn’t completely unreasonable and had signaled that the new soap production line should be established in phases, the first of which would aim to produce a ’modest’ 100,000 bars of soap per month.
Suffice-it-to-say, the two young adults responsible for making this happen were worried the knowledge and experience they had gained over the past 9 months making soap for Lucas would even be applicable at such a scale.
Still, after everything he had done for them, Rebecca and Joel were determined not to disappoint Lucas’ trust, so they gathered together everyone who had worked in the soap workshop back in Redwood Town and began brainstorming.
A number of creative ideas actually came up over the next few days, such as different designs for equipment, creative layouts for the factory floor, and efficient divisions of the necessary labour. There were even a few primitive ideas for types of automation and mechanization.
If Lucas had been part of these discussions, he would probably have been surprised and pleased by the ingenuity some of his employees were showing.
However, ideas were one thing, implementing them was quite another. For that, Rebecca had to bring in outside experts.
Fortunately, Lucas had given them a rather large budget and told them to take their time getting this right, so with a sack of Gold Coins in hand, the young woman began patronizing the best blacksmiths, carpenters, builders, and other craftsmen in Misty City.
While Rebecca was busy designing a new factory with custom stoves, pots, and molds, Joel certainly wasn’t slacking off.
Making enough lye wasn’t a concern as all that was needed was water and wood ash.
The amount of firewood burned in Misty City every day was enormous, so there was no problem there, and as for water, the Lorren provided that in near unlimited quantities.
The only challenge here was figuring out how to collect the ashes and how to ensure that they came only from specific hardwoods, but neither of these issues was insurmountable.
Acquiring enough fat, on the other hand, was significantly more challenging.
In order to tackle this problem, Joel started by visiting the local butcher shops, talking to their managers in hopes of securing a stable source of fats.
The permanent population of Misty City was roughly 150,000, with another 10,000 to 20,000 transient residents. Many of these people were quite well-off and thus a great deal of meat was consumed every day in the city.
In order to fulfil this demand for protein, there were literally hundreds of butcher shops all over town, ranging in size from roadside stalls to giant temperature-controlled warehouses.
This meant that Joel was spoiled for choice when it came to purchasing large quantities of beast trimmings and pre-rendered drippings; or at least that’s what he initially thought.
A standard bar of soap weighed about 150 grams, with fat accounting for roughly 90% of its final weight. This meant that in order to produce 100,000 bars of soap, Joel needed to source 13,500 kg of drippings, per month.
Of course, that number assumed that no accidents happened and nothing went to waste, which was naturally impossible.
14,000 kg of fat was probably a safer number to work with.
When Joel spoke to the manager of the one of the largest butcheries in Misty City, asking if he was capable of regularly supplying that much to him, the balding old man practically laughed him out of the shop, thinking he was making a bad joke.
After this happened a couple more times, Joel realized something must be wrong with his assumptions, so he consulted with Farah, the taciturn female butcher from Redwood Town, and learned that he really was being unreasonable.
According to Farah, one could render roughly 20 kg of lard from a single domestic pig, or 100 kg from an adult cow.
In other words, it would take the equivalent of 700 pigs being slaughtered every month to get the amount of fat the soap factory needed.
Some of the biggest butcheries in Misty City did process that much meat per month, but none of them would sell all of their trimmings and drippings to a single client as they had their own pre-existing customers and it was much more profitable to sell small quantities rather than in bulk.
Understanding where he had gone wrong, Joel adjusted his strategy and took a couple of days to visit 50 different butcheries all over town, eventually striking deals with the 22 shops that offered him the best price for raw trimmings and rendered fats.
Something that surprise Joel quite a bit was that even after all his bargaining and price shopping, the final cost per kilogram he eventually secured was much higher than it was back in Redwood Town.
During the forced evacuation, Joel had visited several different cities and knew that prices for everyday items varied quite a bit from place to place, but this stark difference in cost still caught him a bit off-guard.
When he had a chance to consult with Head Manager Victoria about this issue, however, she simply smiled and told him that was normal and not to worry about it.
There were several other ingredients Joel needed to source as well, such as flowers, herbs, and spices to add scents to the soap, but those were only needed in relatively small quantities, so that didn’t take him much time to acquire.
One might think that, having accomplished all his objectives, Joel would be in a good mood, but that was far from the case.
Why? Because the amount of ingredients he had secured was only enough to cover phase 1 of the new soap production plan.
It had been a challenge to get enough raw material to produce 100,000 bars of soap per month, but the end goal was actually 10 times that much, and knowing his boss, Joel was certain 1 million bars wasn’t the true end goal.
Unable to suppress his curiosity, Joel asked Lucas about this late one evening, drawing a smile from the young boy who replied, "Forget 1 million bars per month, I hope one day we can produce 100 million bars!"
"But... but Boss! That’s... that’s impossible! That’s like... 700,000 pigs per month or 1.5 million cows per year! I don’t think there’s that much livestock in the entire kingdom!" Joel exclaimed.
"Hahaha, true, true," Lucas laughed, patting the gobsmacked youth on the shoulder, "That’s why I need you to start running trials with a different kind of oil, one that is easier and faster to produce."
"Oh, don’t worry," Lucas grinned widely, "I’ve already started looking into it, you just need to run the tests, figure out what works best, find a way to purchase or produce enough oil to meet the factory’s demands, then... and then... oh and make sure..."
Hearing Lucas ramble off a never-ending list of new tasks for him, all while a familiar glint flashed across the young boy’s eyes, one that promised an enormous amount of difficult work in future, Joel wasn’t sure whether he should laugh or cry, wondering why he couldn’t just keep his mouth shut.
Eventually, Joel decided on sobbing when Lucas thanked him for reminding him about this and told him to relay the message to Rebecca to get her help, Big Sister Becca’s gonna kill me when she find’s out...
