The p.b. gast & sons company of today traces its origins back to the P.B. Gast Soap  Company, founded in 1894 by a 20-year-old soapmaker named Peter B. Gast.

    Soap manufacture in the 1890s was more of an art than a science.  Gast and the other soapmakers of his day liquefied beef tallow in large, cast-iron kettles of boiling water laced with caustic soda (lye), a highly alkaline substance.  The mixture had to be just right:  Too little alkali and the soap would turn rancid and spoil; too much alkali and the soap would be too "hot."  Because even such simple chemical indicators as litmus paper were unknown at the time, soapmakers had to rely on their own senses of sight and taste to arrive at a mixture just slightly on the alkaline side.

    The soapmaker's next step was to add salt to precipitate the soap, which was then skimmed from the kettle and poured onto a large metal-top table where it was dried and cut with piano wire into four-foot-long sticks.  Gast marketed his soap sticks, packed in open-top barrels, to some 20 Grand Rapids steam laundries.

    Like other housewives of the time, Emily Gast, Peter's wife, pared the soap sticks into small pieces that could be boiled with the family wash in a large copper tub.  As the mother of seven children, Emily did lots of laundry and one day asked her husband why a machine couldn't chip the soap.  He presented the problem to a machine shop in Syracuse, New York, and in 1908 began marketing P.B. Gast Soap Chips, a soap industry first, according to members of the Gast family.

    By 1922 two of Peter's sons, Waldemar and Raymond, had joined him in the business, and the company name was changed to p.b. gast & sons.  Four years later, faced with rising competition from such soap industry giants as Proctor & Gamble, the firm stopped making soap entirely, devoting itself instead to the distribution of janitorial and sanitary supplies.

    The Laundry Division of p.b. gast & sons was established in 1949 by Frederick C. Gast Sr.  This division distributes commercial laundry equipment throughout Michigan and northern Ohio.  It provides complete laundry planning, engineering, installation, and implementation for all types of laundry processing, including schools, hospitals, nursing homes, and large commercial and industrial plants.  This division is the exclusive representative of many major laundry equipment manufacturers and has installed some of the most energy and labor-efficient laundry facilities in the Midwest.

    A third generation of the Gast family is now active in the firm's management.  Peter B. Gast, based in Detroit, is Corporate President and General Manager of the Laundry Division.  Frederick C Gast, Jr., is Vice-President and Chief Operating Officer.  He heads up the Grand Rapids office with responsibilities for administration and sanitation sales.

    They preside over a firm that has been transformed from their grandfather's small soapmaking operation into a large, diversified corporation dedicated to providing the most modern, innovative, and energy-efficient products and equipment to all its customers.

    Today p.b. gast & sons company is one of the largest distributors of its type in the Midwest.  It provides janitorial supplies and equipment to a wide range of institutional, commercial, and industrial customers.  It also maintains a retail outlet at the Grand Rapids headquarters for walk-in trade.