Nice one! Thanks
@donnie_arko
We don't know the sizes in which the soap ingredients are mixed. I'm thinking back to my days of volume food production, especially how the pastry mix would hit issues in hot weather when the lard blocks would be too warm around the edges and too cold in the middle (blocks were 18Kg) ... and that would affect the mix which was blended in what was essentially a cement truck sized mixer. Most, like 99% of the mix would be fine. Remember, we'd be packing down 4 tonnes into kilo bags, so that 1% with issues translated to a good number of end product bags ... often sequential.
Right! Translate that to soap ... with a bit of imagination.
Poorly mixed product or product which had issues in terms of ingredient stability prior to inclusion in the mix could well constrain a problem to just part of a batch. Given that is likely to come out as several (scores?) of soap pucks in sequence, those duds would presumably end up with the same retailer.
I think I got onto the idea when I saw mixed reviews of one such batch, hence we tried to pull together not only batch number but retailer. The picture is only as good as the data and given the "few and far between" nature and just how quickly batches sold (or rather batch numbers that we were buying incremented), any problem was only really seen as a fleeting glance.
What I hoped to do was pull some actual data into what was otherwise initially a confused mess between whether there really was a problem or whether it was just folks who couldn't lather it. That, and some threads on larger forums just swamped with every man and his dog repeating their historic experiences which bore no assistance to the issue in hand.
Actual data was what we needed.
... all moot now, although still useful for folks picking up old stock.