A New Supplier Is ₹60 per Kg Cheaper than My Current Soy Wax Supplier — What Should I Retest Before Switching My Production?

Retest everything the flame and the shelf decide — and price the saving first

Start with your own figure, used exactly as you gave it: the new supplier is ₹60 per kg cheaper. A 200 g candle at 8% fragrance contains 184 g of wax, so the saving is ₹11.04 per candle. That is real money — ₹11,040.00 on a thousand candles — and it is a perfectly good reason to look at a new supplier. But it is also a small slice of a candle whose materials cost about ₹249.68 in our worked example, and that ratio decides how careful you need to be.

Here is why. If the cheaper wax causes even a few more rejects — a rough top that needs a heat gun, a candle that tunnels, a jar that pulls away from the glass — each one throws away the full ₹249.68, not the ₹11.04. An extra reject rate of about 4.4% cancels the entire ₹60. So the honest answer to "what should I retest?" is: everything that could create a reject or a complaint, against a control candle in your current wax, before a single production batch moves over.

That means the full burn — wick, melt pool, flame, soot, jar heat, through the whole life of the candle — plus hot and cold throw, tops and glass contact, a shelf and heat check, fill weight, and your fragrance load against the new wax's stated ceiling. It does not mean redeveloping your products from scratch: jar data, the oil's documents and label artwork stay as they are. The rest of this page sorts every line into keep, confirm, repeat or new, prices the test, and shows exactly how many candles the ₹60 needs before it has paid for its own proof.

The ₹60 in candles, loads and rejects

The saving per candle depends on how much wax each candle holds, and that moves slightly with load, because a higher load means less wax in the same 200 g. The reject line depends on what the whole candle costs. Both are plain arithmetic on your figure.

Now put rejects in. Suppose your current wax runs at a 2% reject rate in your workshop — an example figure; use your own. The table compares cost per saleable candle on the current wax at 2% with the cheaper wax at 2%, 4% and 6%. Cost per saleable candle is material cost ÷ (1 − reject rate); rework labour is left out here and would only widen the gap.

At equal rejects the cheaper wax wins by ₹11.27 per saleable candle. At 4% it still wins, narrowly. At 6% it costs more than the wax you were trying to replace. That is the whole case for retesting, in three rows: the price is fixed the moment you see the quote, but the reject rate is only known after the test. The 5% defect post and including rework in the true wax cost take that calculation further.

What to retest before switching: keep, confirm, repeat, new

Every result you hold about your current candles falls into one of four buckets once the wax supplier changes. KEEP means the result still stands. CONFIRM means a short check you expect to pass. REPEAT means the full test again against a control. NEW means a record or test you never needed before. The example is a 200 g White Matte Glass Jar candle with Jasmine Fragrance Oil at 8% and an Eco Candle Wicks Thin C1 wick, moving from Luxury Soy Wax Chunks to the cheaper Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464.

Two things are missing from the matrix on purpose. There is no row where burn data is kept because the new wax "is also soy" or "looks the same" — the look-alike wax post explains why appearance is not evidence. And there is no row for "the supplier says it is a direct replacement": that claim is something to verify, not a test result — what to verify before believing a direct-replacement claim.

The retest, candle by candle

Read the last row with care. Four candles cannot measure a reject rate precisely; one reject in four is a flag, not a percentage. That is why the pilot batch and the first weeks of production carry on counting. CSI publishes no numeric flame-height or jar-temperature limit; the safety rule is no worse than your approved control, within your jar supplier's guidance and the candle fire-safety standard you work to — ASTM F2417 is a commonly cited US standard.

The priced retest kit and its payback

Each 200 g candle takes 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax. Four candles in the new wax need 736 g, or 772.8 g with a 5% pour-loss allowance (a working assumption). The eight candles share one oil lot: 128 g, or 134.4 g with the allowance.

Stage B, if the wick needs bracketing, adds 3 candles in the new wax with an example alternative wick (Eco Thick C2, 10-pack ₹94.40). The 227.2 g of CSI 464 left from Stage A covers it, the leftover oil needs 1 × 50 g more, and the spare jars need another pack, so Stage B costs ₹938.40. Thick C2 is only an example of a different construction to bracket against; CSI publishes no wick-size chart and no CSI wick is a size step from another.

At 100 candles a month the retest pays back in about 3.7 months; at 1,000 a month, in under a week. Either way the test is cheap next to a single bad batch: 100 candles of materials at ₹249.68 is ₹24,968.40. The ₹40/kg bulk saving post runs the same payback logic for a pack-size decision rather than a supplier change.

Re-running the question with CSI's own price gaps

Your ₹60 may come from two outside suppliers, or one of them may be CSI. For readers comparing within CSI's own list, these are the real per-kilo gaps at the 5 kg rate, and what each means per candle. None of them is a reason to skip the retest; each is simply a different size of prize.

Notice the second row: moving from CSI 468 to Chunks saves less than your ₹60, so it would need an even cleaner reject record to be worth it. And notice that a bigger gap — Chunks to Natural Soy Pearl at ₹174.20 per kg — buys a lot more tolerance, but Natural Soy Pearl publishes no fragrance ceiling, melt point or pour temperature, so the CONFIRM row for load becomes a question for CSI on WhatsApp rather than a quick check. Per-kilo price breaks are rare in CSI's list: Natural Soy Pearl's 5.6% step at 5 kg is the only genuine one among the soy waxes.

The decision rule: switch, adjust or stay

If the result is SWITCH and the cheaper wax is CSI 464, the purchase sequence is: the ₹1,934.40 kit now, one 5 kg bag (₹2,537.00) for the pilot, then production in 10 kg bags at ₹5,074.00 — ₹507.40 a kilo, no cheaper per kilo than the 1 kg or 5 kg bag, so buy the 10 kg size for convenience only. Move your best-selling SKU last, not first: qualifying a second supplier without changing your best-sellers explains why.

Recording the switch so the saving is real

Once the switch passes, write it down in a form someone else could follow. The record ties the saving to the evidence, names the deliveries, and tells you when to look again. It also lets you measure the saving you actually got: after the first month, compare candles poured per kilo and rejects per hundred on the new wax with the same figures on the old one. If the realised saving per saleable candle is well below ₹11.04, the switch has not delivered and you know why.

Then keep the two habits that make a cheaper supplier safe over time: incoming checks on every delivery, and a retained sample from each. Incoming QC for a delivery that behaves differently and the supplier-selection hub cover both.

Frequently asked questions