I Currently Make 100 Candles a Month and Want to Reach 500 — Which Parts of My Raw-Material Purchasing and Production Process Need to Change First?

What 500 candles a month actually consumes

Take a 200 g finished candle at a fragrance load of 8% of finished weight: 16 g of fragrance oil and 184 g of wax. State the denominator every time, because it is the most expensive thing to get wrong at this volume — if you mean 8% of the wax instead, the same candle is 14.8 g of oil and 185.2 g of wax, and across 500 candles the difference is 600 g of oil. Luxury Soy Chunks' listing states its 13% ceiling as a percentage of total wax weight, so the two conventions collide inside CSI's own catalogue. Pick one, write it on the batch sheet, never let it drift.

At 100 candles a month you consume 18.4 kg of wax and 1.6 kg of fragrance — exactly 20.0 kg of finished material. At 500 a month you consume 92.0 kg of wax and 8.0 kg of fragrance before any process loss, plus 500 wicks and 500 containers. That is the whole brief.

One more piece of arithmetic worth having in your head: 1 kg of fragrance oil at 16 g per candle is 62 candles (62 × 16 g = 992 g, with 8 g left in the bottle). Eight bottles is 8,000 g on paper and 500 candles exactly — but floor each bottle at 62 because the last 8 g clings to the neck, and eight bottles gives you 496. That four-candle gap is what bottle residue looks like at this volume, and a plan built on round numbers absorbs it silently until the last batch comes up short. The same flooring problem on the wax side is here.

The packs that exist, and the discount that does not

CSI's published wax ladder is 500 g / 1 kg / 5 kg / 10 kg — no 25 kg pack and no 100 kg pack of any wax. The single exception in the catalogue is Natural Soy Pearl Wax, which also ships as a 50 kg variant at ₹21,240.00 (₹424.80/kg). The fragrance ladder is at most 15 g / 50 g / 100 g / 500 g / 1 kg, with nothing above 1 kg anywhere. So "92 kg of wax" is nine 10 kg packs and two 1 kg packs, and "8 kg of fragrance" is eight 1 kg bottles. Writing the order out in those units is the first useful thing you can do.

Now the part against our own commercial interest, and the most useful line on this page. On CSI's published ladder the volume discount you are scaling up to collect mostly does not exist.

CSI publishes no MOQ, no quantity slab, no rate card, no manufacturer-level price list, no annual volume agreement, no credit term and no lead time. That is a limitation, but it also means the only comparison to run is published price × quantity — arithmetic you can do in a spreadsheet before you message anybody. There is no slab to negotiate against, and nobody should tell you otherwise. What is worth a WhatsApp message is what the website cannot tell you: whether your standardised variant is in stock in the quantity you need, and the current lead time. Confirm both before building a schedule around them. Related: the fragrance procurement calculator and when wax stops being a shopping list and becomes inventory.

Change one: batch size and how many cycles a month

This is the first thing that genuinely has to change, and it is a production decision, not a purchasing one. The largest melter CSI publishes is 20 kg / 20 litres. There is no 25 kg, 40 kg or 50 kg melter, no jacketed holding tank, no automated filler and no pump filler in the catalogue. So 92 kg of wax in a month is not one load — it is five cycles through a 20 kg melter, or fewer across two melters in parallel, and the design question becomes cycle time and holding temperature, not machine size.

Here is the neat part. A batch of 100 × 200 g candles is 18.4 kg of wax plus 1.6 kg of fragrance = exactly 20.0 kg of finished material — so your entire current month becomes one batch, and 500 a month becomes five of them. That is a different business, and not because of the kilograms: one mistake now costs a hundred candles instead of twenty, five pours is five chances to drift, and the uniformity of a 20 kg melt is not something you can assume from a 2 kg one. Leave headroom in the vessel too — the fragrance goes in after the wax has melted, so a charge calculated to the brim on wax alone has nowhere to go. How to balance batch size against the risk of losing the whole batch is worked through here.

Change two: how you weigh, once the doses get bigger and smaller at the same time

At 100 candles a month you weigh 1.6 kg of fragrance in 16 g steps and can get away with a lot. At 500 a month in batches of 100, the fragrance dose per batch is 1,600 g — while the dye dose, the sample dose and any single-candle rework is still measured in single grams. One scale rarely does both well, and the arithmetic of graduation is what tells you whether yours does.

Fragrance load is a weight percentage, so millilitres will not reproduce it — oils differ in density, and a volumetric habit invisible at 16 g a candle becomes measurable drift at 1,600 g a batch. Write the denominator beside every percentage you record: "8% fragrance" is not a formula, "8% of finished weight (16 g in a 200 g candle)" is. The three waxes that publish a fragrance ceiling state them differently — Luxury Soy Chunks at up to 13% "of total wax weight", CSI 464 at up to 10% and Premium Coconut Soy CSI 468 at up to 13% — and the other thirteen waxes publish none at all. These are wax-manufacturer formulation limits, not regulatory limits. Why multiplying the recipe is not the same as scaling it.

Change three: the batch record, or a bad batch stays a mystery

At 100 candles a month a problem is recoverable by memory. At 500 a month across five batches, a complaint arriving six weeks later is unanswerable unless something was written at the bench. CSI sells no SOP template, no batch sheet, no numbering system and no traceability software — the record is a page you design, and it only has to answer one question: which batch was this, and what exactly went into it?

One note on those temperatures. They are processing instructions published on the listings, not material properties, and most of the range publishes nothing of the kind: there is no softening point, no heat-resistance figure and no storage-temperature limit published for any wax, and Luxury Soy Chunks' listing gives two pour ranges whose overlap is 75–80°C. Cure is the same: none is published, so pick a period, write it down, hold it identical across all five batches — a cure that varies is a variable you introduced yourself. Turning this into a full SOP is covered here, and the mixing-and-curing protocol is here.

Change four: buy continuity of supply, not a lower price

This is the purchasing change, and it is not the one people expect. Because the unit prices are flat, "should I buy the bigger pack?" stops being a price question and becomes a risk question. You are choosing between 500 wicks from one run in your cupboard and five reorders across a month, each of which can arrive late, arrive from a different lot, or arrive as the variant you did not standardise on because the one you wanted was out of stock.

So the right framing is: lock the exact product and variant of every material, and hold enough of each to cover the lead time you have actually confirmed. Not more, and not because holding stock is "safe" — nobody can tell you it is. Inventory converts cash into material that may not match the formula you settle on next quarter. CSI publishes a shelf life on exactly two products — CSI 464 and CSI 468, both 60 months in cool, dry storage — and none at all for the other fourteen waxes or for any fragrance oil. The ageing risk on most of what you would stockpile is yours to size, from your own storage and turnover.

On lots: if two packs of the same wax arrive from different production lots and you tip both into one melt, you have made a batch you cannot diagnose. Qualify a new lot against your approved reference candle before it goes into saleable production, and note the lot on the batch record either way. Whether to mix two lots in one batch is argued through here. And on the lines CSI does not supply at all — no standalone lids, no retail or gift boxes, no shipping cartons, no printed labels, no inserts, no cushioning and no packing tape — those are real bill-of-materials lines at 500 units a month, to be costed with your own printer and packaging supplier. The only published consumable of that sort is the Candle Care Stickers Roll at ₹413.00 per 500 or ₹699.00 per 1,000. A plan that silently omits packaging is not a plan.

Put the five changes in order and the sequence is almost the reverse of what the question assumes. First, lock every variant — a reorder that is merely similar is the commonest way a scaled process loses the result it had at 100 a month. Second, fix the batch size and cycle count: five batches of 100 through a 20 kg melter, with headroom for the fragrance. Third, fix how you weigh, and accept that you may need two scales. Fourth, write the batch record and keep retained samples. Fifth and last, revisit purchasing — where you will find the only lines the ladder rewards are the container and the dye, and that wax and wicks cost exactly what they did at a hundred a month. For the broader view, see the bulk raw-material package for commercial production and commercial candle-making equipment in India.

Frequently asked questions