Soap Manufacturing: From Aleppo Vats to ABB Robots

Soap manufacturing is one of the oldest chemical trades, and a bar of soap still goes through the steps it did centuries ago. Fats are boiled with alkali, and the soap is set, cut, stamped and wrapped. Over time, machines and then robots have taken over more of those steps. This post follows the bar from the soap vats of Aleppo and Nablus, through the steam kettles, plodders and stamping presses of 19th and 20th century factories, to today's high-volume lines in India and Africa, and then looks at where ABB robots such as the FlexPicker and FlexPacker could fit in the packing hall.

Bars of olive oil soap stacked to dry under the vaults of the Zanabili soap factory in Aleppo, 2025. Photo: Dorfbroicher / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

How soap was boiled, cut and wrapped by hand

People made soap-like materials in ancient Babylon around 2800 BC. By the 13th century soap making was a major cottage industry in West Asia and North Africa, with centres in Nablus, Fes, Damascus and Aleppo. Aleppo soap is still made the old way. Olive oil, water and lye boil for about three days in a large in-ground vat, with laurel oil added at the end. The hot soap is poured over waxed paper on the factory floor and levelled by workers walking on wooden planks. Once hard, it is cut into cubes and stacked in open cylinders to age for six months to a year.

Freshly poured Aleppo soap setting on the factory floor before it is cut, 2010. Photo: Bernard Gagnon / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

In Europe, soap was being made on an industrial scale by the 15th century in Antwerp, Castile, Marseille, Naples and Venice. In 1688 the Edict of Colbert limited the name Savon de Marseille to soaps made with olive oil. Brands came later. Andrew Pears began making transparent soap in London in 1807, Procter & Gamble introduced Ivory in 1879, and in 1886 William and James Lever bought a small soap works in Warrington before building Port Sunlight. Large plants such as Colgate's in Jersey City boiled their soap in riveted steel kettles heated by steam coils.

Floor with soap kettles at the Colgate and Company plant in Jersey City, recorded by the Historic American Engineering Record. Photo: HAER, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Turning kettle soap into neat bars took a chain of machines. Dried soap was milled into chips or ribbons on roller mills and fed to a plodder, a screw extruder that compacts the soap and pushes it out as a continuous rod. The rod is cut into billets, and each billet is pressed between a pair of dies that give the bar its shape and logo. Colgate's Jersey City plant had a Ferguson and Haas automatic wrapping machine installed by 1929. Hand work hung on elsewhere: photos of the Nablus soap works in 1940 show bars being wrapped one at a time by hand.

A Ferguson and Haas automatic wrapping machine on a hotel soap line at Colgate's Jersey City plant, installed by 1929. Photo: HAER, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Soap bar lines and where ABB robots fit today

Bar soap is still a growth business. On 26 August 2026 Godrej Consumer Products opened its fourth manufacturing unit at Malanpur in Madhya Pradesh, India, where it has made soaps, hair colours and insecticides since 1991. The new unit cost over ₹480 crore, and the state's chief minister called Malanpur Asia's largest integrated soap manufacturing facility. In Cameroon, Business in Cameroon reported on 6 October 2026 that two new household soap plants are planned in Douala, one sized for 31 million units a year. The country exported 74,208 tonnes of soap in 2025, up 31.1 percent.

Soap bars stacked in tall open towers to dry at a soap factory in Nablus, 2015. Photo: Hendrik Wieduwilt / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

On lines like these, bars still have to be grouped after stamping and wrapping, then put into cartons or shrink packs and stacked. ABB's IRB 360 FlexPicker is a delta robot designed for pick and place and flow-wrap handling, and it can pick wrapped products straight from a moving belt using conveyor tracking. The IRB 390 FlexPacker handles secondary packaging with a payload of up to 15 kg, and ABB says it can be paired with the FlexPicker for pre-sorting and group packing.

ABB IRB 360 FlexPicker robots packing small items into cases at high speed. Photo: ABB

We could not find a published ABB case study from a soap factory, so treat these robots as plausible fits. Full cartons could go to an IRB 460 or IRB 660 palletizer at the end of the line, a job those robots already do in food and consumer goods plants. Vision-guided picking in FlexPicker cells is set up with ABB's PickMaster software. The whole layout is usually checked first in RobotStudio, so reach and cycle times are known before anything is bolted to the floor.

An ABB IRB 390 FlexPacker doing secondary packaging on a meat line at Torfresma in Brazil. Photo: ABB

Where soap bar automation goes next

In big factories, the next robot jobs sit around the stamping press. Soap makers run many brands, sizes and shapes, and every change means new dies, new wrapper settings and new packing patterns. Die changes are repetitive work, and a cobot such as the GoFa CRB 15000, which works beside people and stops on contact, could plausibly help with them. Cameras that check each stamped logo and reject chipped bars are another likely step. Those faults are easy to spot and tedious to watch for over a whole shift.

Half of a removed plodder, the screw extruder that pushed soap out as a rod, at Colgate's Jersey City plant. Photo: HAER, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Small makers face a different set of choices. Aleppo Ghar soap was added to UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage in December 2024, and part of its value is that it is still made by hand in the old way. Craft soap makers who pour cold-process soap into moulds at home or in small workshops work in batches far too small for a delta robot. Help for them is more likely to come from simple cutters and wrapping machines, or from a single cobot taught by hand, as described in our post on no-code robot programming.

An ABB GoFa cobot loading parts into a machine at a small factory. Photo: ABB

Plenty remains unsolved. Soap lines are wet and dusty and the raw materials are alkaline, so robots need grippers and covers that survive cleaning. Where labour is cheap, a robot cell has to earn its keep through speed and fewer injuries as well as wage savings. Raw material is a separate problem: Business in Cameroon put the country's palm oil shortfall at about 300,000 tonnes, and automation does nothing about it. Plants will also need technicians who can keep the cells running as the product mix changes.

A worker wrapping soap bars by hand at a soap factory in Nablus, 1940. Photo: Matson Collection, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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