The ingredients look typical of many of the commercial, mass marketed 'natural vegetable' soaps you can find out in the retail arena. Venezia Soapworks on Amazon, for example (and others 'natural' veggie soap businesses that I found on the internet), list the exact same ingredients in the exact same order as listed on the Trader Joe's package, only with different scents listed in place of the tea tree oil, which made me think this soap was most likely mass produced from bulk soap noodles derived from a lye-based formula.....and upon further investigation which led me to a
marketing research website of all places, I found I was on the right track, and that a typical blend of these bulk noodles is made from palm oil and palm kernel oil (or coconut oil). It even disclosed the typical ratios of each oil in the different blends on the market, the most common blend being 80% palm oil and 20% palm kernel oil for it's 'proper balance' of cleansing power, lather and hardness.
I also saw that
Candles and Supplies sells such bulk noodles on their website, only instead of the pentasodium petatate, they use testrasodium EDTA as their chelator (as do I in my own soap).
So....if you wanted to try to make your own, you can do so from scratch using 80% palm and 20% PKO and the proper amount of lye, water and tea tree oil, or you could buy the noodles from Candle and Supplies and rebatch them into soap bars with the addition of tea tree oil in the proper/safe amount.
IrishLass