How Do I Control Raw-Material Lot Numbers When Several Wax and Fragrance Deliveries Are Open Simultaneously?

Why there is no code to look up

The situation, as it is on your bench. Four 10 kg packs of Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 (Flakes) open or part-used; three fragrance bottles on the go — 1 kg each of Sandalwood, Lavender and Citrus Lemon; two 500-wick packs of Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1). At published pricing that is ₹20,296.00 of wax, ₹13,079.80 of fragrance and ₹5,900.00 of wick: ₹39,275.80 of raw material in simultaneous use. Three months later a stockist rings about a candle that behaves differently from the rest of the order, and asks which batch it came from.

The instinct is to ask the supplier for the lot. That request has nowhere to land. CSI publishes no lot number, no batch code, no manufacture date and no expiry date on any product listing on candlemakingsuppliesindia.store — not on the wax listings, not on the 92 oils in the fragrance collection, not on wicks, dyes or jars. There is no page to revisit, no field to quote in an email, no identifier tying the pack on your shelf to a production run. That is a fact to design around, not a gap to spend January closing.

Two more published facts make this sharper rather than softer. First, shelf life: exactly two waxes in the catalogue publish one. CSI 464 and Premium Coconut Soy CSI 468 both state "Shelf Life 60 months (cool, dry storage)". Every other wax — Luxury Soy Wax Chunks, Natural Soy Pearl Wax, Eco Soy CSI 400 and the rest of the sixteen — publishes none, and no fragrance oil publishes a shelf life, manufacture date or expiry at all. Second, the pack ladder: wax comes in 500 g, 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg, with Natural Soy Pearl Wax's 50 kg the one exception in the catalogue, and fragrance stops at 1 kg. So a 25 kg wax requirement is two 10 kg packs plus one 5 kg pack — three separate parcels that may have come off three different production runs, which is the whole reason this page exists.

The receiving code, in thirty seconds a pack

A receiving code has one job: to be unique, to be written on the physical pack, and to be legible to you in eighteen months. It does not need to be clever. Three fields do everything: material, receipt date, pack sequence.

Note what the prefixes do. W464 is not "soy wax". It is that specific listing, in that specific form — flakes, not pellets, not chunks — because CSI carries several soy waxes that are not interchangeable. If you also run Luxury Soy Wax Chunks, that gets its own prefix (WCHK): its fragrance ceiling is stated differently, its pour temperature is different, and a mix-up between the two is exactly the failure a lot code is meant to catch. Fragrance prefixes are per oil, not per family — Sandalwood and Woody Oud are both woody and have nothing else in common.

The log and the retained sample

The hard rule for the receiving log is one row per pack, not one row per order. Four 10 kg packs of CSI 464 is four rows. This is the most common place a maker's records collapse: the invoice says "CSI 464 × 4", the log copies the invoice, and from that moment the four packs are indistinguishable again. The log earns its keep by being more granular than the paperwork it came from.

Then the retained sample — the part makers skip, and the part that decides whether a complaint is answerable. Draw it from every pack before the pack is used, not from the leftovers at the end, which are the least representative material in the pack. For wax, 100 g into a jar; for fragrance, 10 g capped tight; for wicks, five pieces in a marked envelope. Each carries the pack's receiving code, written on the container rather than on a sticker that will fall off.

Set that against what one untraceable day's pour is worth. Ten kilograms of CSI 464 poured as 200 g candles at 8% of finished weight — 184 g of wax and 16 g of oil each — gives 54 candles (10,000 ÷ 184 = 54.3). The material in those 54 units: 9.936 kg of wax at ₹507.40/kg = ₹5,041.53; 864 g of Sandalwood at ₹5.0268/g = ₹4,343.16; 54 White Matte Glass Jars at ₹70.80 = ₹3,823.20; 54 Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) at ₹5.90 = ₹318.60. ₹13,526.49 of material in one day. If you cannot say which wax pack and which bottle went into it, all 54 candles sit in the same undifferentiated bucket as the rest of the quarter's output, and the samples that would have let you compare suspect material against the rest do not exist. ₹541.44 is the price of not being in that position.

The batch sheet — and the denominator

A batch sheet is where the receiving codes stop being inventory admin and start being evidence. The rule is one line: the sheet records the code, not the product name alone. "CSI 464" on a batch sheet is worth nothing in January — every pack you own is CSI 464. "W464-260928-B" is worth everything, because it points at one pack, one log row and one retained sample.

The denominator field is the one most batch sheets omit. "8% fragrance" is not a formula. A 200 g candle at 8% of finished weight is 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax; the same candle at 8% of wax weight is 14.8 g and 185.2 g. That is 1.2 g per candle, 64.8 g across this 54-unit batch, and kilograms across a year — and the two conventions genuinely collide inside CSI's own catalogue, because Luxury Soy Wax Chunks states its ceiling as "max fragrance load 13% of total wax weight", while CSI 464 states "Fragrance Load Up to 10%" with no denominator given and CSI 468 states "Fragrance Load Up to 13%". If your sheet does not say which convention you used, a future you investigating a complaint cannot tell whether the batch was inside the ceiling or over it. Write the percentage, the denominator and the gram figure, every time.

Weighing deserves one line of honesty, because the sheet is only as good as the numbers on it. The Candle Making Weighing Scale at ₹354.00 publishes no maximum capacity and no graduation, so do not take a precision figure on trust from any supplier, us included — read the graduation off the scale in front of you. On a 200 g candle the 8% dose is 16 g, so a scale graduated to the nearest 10 g is working to ±62% of the dose; on a 10 kg batch the fragrance is 800 g and the same graduation is ±1.25%. A coarse batch scale weighs wax. It does not weigh oil, and it certainly does not weigh liquid dye.

One pack at a time, and what to do when two are already mixed

The default rule: finish one pack before you open the next, for every material, wherever production allows. A 10 kg pack of CSI 464 is about 54 candles at 184 g of wax each — one or two production days, a natural unit to run sequentially. Do that and every batch in the week carries exactly one wax code, and a complaint points at one pack and one retained sample. Nothing else you can do is this cheap.

Fragrance makes this easier still, because the ladder stops at 1 kg and there is no larger bottle in the catalogue. One kilogram of oil at 16 g per candle is 62 candles, so a bottle is itself a natural run boundary: open it, use it, close it out, open the next. Wicks are the one place where mixing barely matters — Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) is flat at ₹5.90 per wick from 10 pieces to 1,000, so a 500-wick pack buys continuity rather than price, and two packs on the bench is normal. Code them anyway; it costs an envelope.

One pack-size fact here runs against the grain of the rest of this series. Natural Soy Pearl Wax has a 50 kg variant at ₹21,240.00 (₹424.80/kg) — the only wax pack above 10 kg in the whole catalogue. For lot control specifically, that is the one place on the store where 50 kg of wax arrives under a single receiving code instead of as five separate packs. If you have already validated that wax for your formula, that is a real operational advantage and not just a price one. If you have not, it is the worst possible thing to buy, because an unvalidated 50 kg single lot is one failure away from being 50 kg of unusable wax. Validate first, consolidate second, and treat a change of scale as something to validate separately.

FIFO on the only date you actually have

Stock rotation is where the absence of published dates bites hardest, and where makers most often invent a rule that sounds professional and means nothing. You cannot rotate by expiry date, because no CSI listing publishes one; nor by manufacture date, because none is published either; nor by shelf life except on two products: CSI 464 and CSI 468, both stating "60 months, cool dry storage" — and even there, 60 months from when is not published, so the figure tells you the material is not short-dated rather than telling you when it stops being usable.

So FIFO runs on the receipt date in your own log — the only date in the chain you personally witnessed and wrote down. For your purposes that is a better date than a factory one, because it is the moment the material entered your storage conditions and started ageing under them. W464-260928-A is used before W464-261112-A, and the codes sort themselves because the date is embedded in them. Arrange the shelf so the oldest code is in front and easiest to reach: that is the whole of FIFO as a physical practice.

Last thing, and it is the point of the whole page: none of this can be retrofitted. A receiving log can be started today and will be useful today. A batch sheet can be introduced tomorrow. But the four packs already open on your bench have no codes and never will, the retained samples you did not draw in September cannot be drawn in January, and the candles you have already shipped are traceable to nothing. So the honest advice is uncomfortable: treat the material currently in use as outside the system, start on the next delivery, and accept a window of production you cannot investigate. The complaint-investigation framework works well on batches with codes and retained samples and can do very little for batches with neither. Thirty seconds and a marker pen per parcel is what separates the two.

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