Melissa Lynn Torre: Nourishing Inside and Out

MANY PHILADELPHIANS got to know Melissa Lynn Torre, founder of Vellum Street Soap, as a baker. Her first business, Cookie Confidential, became famous for brash flavor combinations like bacon-infused cupcakes and savory cookies that tasted like cheesesteaks. “This was before bacon was everywhere,” recalls Torre. It was the early 2010s.

That company was inspired by late-night conversations among her co-workers at the South Street bar, Tattooed Moms. “We’d just come up with crazy flavor combinations for fun, and I started actually baking our ideas into cookies and bringing them to work,” she says. It snowballed: Soon, her co-workers were placing orders, and her cookies were being sold around the city. She opened a bakery café.

People delighted in her bacon chocolate chip and sriracha mango cookies and grapefruit dulce de leche cupcakes in jars. Other creative treats included sriracha coconut and pink pepper pistachio brittle. Eventually, Torre made appearances as a celebrity chef on TV shows, including “Chopped” and “Cupcake Wars.”

Behind the scenes, though, something wasn’t quite right. “As someone who has dealt with autoimmune and other health issues all my life, I always used the best ingredients,” she says. She’s always known what you eat affects how you feel. Her eggs, butter, and milk were all sourced from local farms and produced to organic or better standards. Even the wheat she used was locally grown and milled. Still, the business of baking was making her sick—she eventually learned she has a gluten intolerance. But even as she wound down her beloved bakery, another project was brewing.

It’s common for people with autoimmune issues to have sensitive skin, dry skin, or eczema. Torre was no exception. As a kid, her grandmother had advised her to treat dry skin by rubbing it with bacon fat, and she found that it always worked. For that reason, long before she became a skincare entrepreneur, Torre used beef tallow—like bacon grease but not smoky—to make her own soaps and lotions to treat and protect her skin. Not only does beef tallow create a superior soap, but buying tallow from local farmers helps make whole-animal butchery more sustainable and profitable. It’s another way to use as much as possible of each animal and prevent any part from going to waste.

She often gave her homemade soap away to friends.

“I went to dinner at a friend’s in 2015, and I brought my homemade soaps as little gifts for everyone at the party. Another woman there, a friend of a friend, was a regional manager for Whole Foods,” says Torre. She told Torre that Whole Foods was looking for local products to feature on their shelves. “‘You should go pitch this,’ she said. ‘They’d love this,’” recalls Torre. She explained to the woman that soaps weren’t for sale; it wasn’t a business, just a hobby she did for herself and her friends.

“I thought that was that, but she called me the next day to tell me she’d set up a pitch meeting for me at Whole Foods later that week,” says Torre. “So I hurried up. I got in touch with a friend of mine who was just learning graphic design and asked her to help with a business card and product labels.” Also, she had to come up with a name. Vellum Street references the movie Fight Club and a type of paper that was historically made from animal products, like Torre’s signature soaps.

“In the old days, if you had poison ivy you’d take a bath in the potato-boiling water because the potato starches are very soothing to the skin, like oatmeal.”

As a chef, Torre adored working with local and sustainable fats. As the maker of artisan soaps, that’s still true. “The thing about tallow is, it’s almost identical to sebum, the skin’s own natural moisturizer.” Its molecules are also small enough to penetrate the upper layer of skin, she explains, unlike fats from plant sources, such as coconut oil, that sit on the skin’s surface. “It’s much more moisturizing,” she says.

Tallow is the main ingredient in all of Vellum Street’s soaps, lotions, balms, and bath salts. She buys it from local sources, including Tussock Sedge Farm and restaurants like Wildwoods BBQ. But it isn’t the only food “waste product” that she upcycles into her high-end skincare. You’ll also find ingredients like potato skins and cornsilk.

“In the old days, if you had poison ivy you’d take a bath in the potato-boiling water because the potato starches are very soothing to the skin, like oatmeal,” says Torres. She adds the potato skins to her soap for that same reason. She gets them from another restaurant partner—Stargazy, the English restaurant on East Passyunk. It’s a win-win-win that keeps food scraps out of the landfill while helping both businesses and giving Vellum Street’s customers soft, healthy skin.

In the coming year, Torre wants to grow the business and streamline things—a little bit. “I don’t want growth for the sake of growth. I want to grow consciously, and not too much.” She always wants to make sure the quality rises to her high standards. She doesn’t have ambitions for her products to be sold at Targets nationwide. “I really like adding value to the normal things that we use in everyday life, like soap, and making the experience of using it have some meaning,” she says.