Becoming Acme-Hardesty

An 80-year legacy of success through innovation

What happens when you take 100 pounds of animal fat and you split (hydrolyze) it? Many people in the chemical business understand what this means - you get roughly 90 pounds of fatty acids and about 10 pounds of glycerine. You are probably wondering why this is even important. Well, back in 1949, companies would sell glycerine to the makers of ammunition for the United States government. Glycerine from tallow went right to the makers of bullets and bombs as the United States was gearing up for the Korean War. This detail is an important piece of the Acme-Hardesty history.

In the 1940s, there was a lot of tallow and very little export of that tallow from the United States. Jacob Stern & Sons had already been in business for just about 92 years. Jacob Stern, who founded Acme-Hardesty in 1942, had relationships with most renderers from the Missouri River to the east coast. There were hundreds of these renderers at that time, while today, there are probably fewer than two dozen in the entire country.

At the time, Jacob Stern mostly sold to soap manufacturers, candle makers, and manufacturers of fatty chemicals. These soapers included Procter & Gamble, Lever Brothers, Fels Naptha, and Colgate. Back then, the soap manufacturers, and others, did not maintain their own purchasing departments, but bought through dealers like Jacob Stern & Sons. This business position provided the opportunity to do more with tallow than just sell it to others.

Bill Hardesty, co-founder of Acme-Hardesty, had believed he figured it out. Phil Bernstein recalled, “[his] proposition to my grandfather was that we take the tallow that Jacob Stern had access to, and split it to get the glycerine, to sell to people who were making ammunition and munitions…” Hardesty was a chemical engineer by training and reckoned that there was a fortune to be made by selling raw material to the government to support the war effort. Glycerine, at the time, was worth close to a dollar a pound. The tallow splitting idea had appeal and, before long, open kettles were added to the Jacob Stern facility at Tioga St. and Aramingo Ave in Philadelphia, PA. Bill Hardesty went on to start another fatty acid business in Dover, Ohio. To this day, that plant still exists, in a greatly transformed state, and is owned by Arizona Chemicals.