I Need 500 × 200 g Soy Candles at 8% Fragrance — How Many Kilograms of Wax and Fragrance Should I Order After Allowing for Production Loss?

The base arithmetic, and which 8% you meant

Start with the part that has one correct answer. 500 × 200 g = 100,000 g of finished candle. 8% of that is 8,000 g of fragrance oil, and the wax is the remainder: 100,000 − 8,000 = 92,000 g. Per unit, 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax, and the two multiply back cleanly — 500 × 16 = 8,000 and 500 × 184 = 92,000. Everything later in this guide is an adjustment to those four numbers.

Now the trap: 8% of what? The figures above treat load as a share of the finished candle. Many makers and many listings treat it as a share of the wax — Luxury Soy Wax Chunks states its own maximum as "13% of total wax weight", so the of-the-wax convention sits inside CSI's own catalogue. There you solve for the wax: 100,000 ÷ 1.08 = 92,592.59 g of wax, leaving 7,407.41 g of oil — 185.19 g and 14.81 g per candle.

Five hundred and ninety-three grams sounds like a rounding error until you price it. On Sandalwood Fragrance Oil at ₹5,026.80/kg — ₹5.0268 a gram — the gap is ₹2,979; on Vanilla Bean at ₹7,646/kg, ₹4,531; on Citrus Lemon at ₹2,832/kg, ₹1,678. It scales linearly, so at 5,000 units you are out by nearly six kilograms of oil.

Measuring your own production loss, because nobody can give you the number

CSI publishes no wastage figure, no production-loss percentage and no yield allowance, and this page will not invent one. Transfer loss is a property of your equipment and your habits — the film that sets inside the melter, the residue in the pitcher spout, oil left in the bottle, and whether the pourer aims for 200 g or for "near enough the line". A maker running thirty-jar batches through a 1 litre melter and one pouring two hundred at a time do not have the same loss rate, and no supplier can tell either of them what theirs is. It takes an afternoon to establish and stays true as long as your process does. You need a scale that reads the vessels, not just the jars — the Candle Making Weighing Scale at ₹354 is the cheapest way to own one.

Resist averaging the two lines into one tidy figure, because wax and oil are not lost in the same proportion or by the same mechanisms. Wax loss is mechanical — a film on metal that solidifies and stays there — and it scales with equipment surface area, so a 20 kg batch leaves much the same film as a 5 kg one and the percentage falls as batches grow. Oil has a second mechanism on top: it clings harder, it stays in the bottle neck and the measuring cup, and volatile top notes genuinely leave the building while an open pitcher sits at pour temperature. That evaporation never shows on a scale afterwards, because the material is gone.

One loss is not transfer loss at all and is often the largest: overfill. Every jar leaving at 203 g rather than 200 g gives away 3 g — across 521 units, 1,563 g of finished mix. A gram of mix costs (16 × ₹5.0268 + 184 × ₹0.4248) ÷ 200 = ₹0.793, so that is about ₹1,239: roughly a 3% wax buffer, caused by a habit and fixed with a scale on the bench.

What the buffer costs at 500 units

Two points of method. A buffer is a division, not a multiplication — to survive a 3% loss you divide by 0.97 rather than adding 3%, giving 94.85 kg rather than 94.76 kg. And every percentage below is an illustration of the method, not a CSI specification. Substitute your own measured figure; the arithmetic is unchanged.

Read the last column as the price of being wrong one way, then weigh it against being wrong the other, because the two errors are not symmetrical. Buying too little stops a run — you find out at candle 470 with the jars filled, place a second order and wait. CSI publishes no dispatch or delivery time, so nobody, this page included, can tell you how long that wait is; confirm current lead time on WhatsApp before you build a schedule. On a client deadline that pause is the expensive part, not the ₹2,453. Buying too much leaves inventory, and inventory is only waste if it never gets used — which is why the two lines deserve different generosity. Wax keeps its usefulness across everything you make; leftover soy pours into votives, wax melts or the next colourway. A niche fragrance does not: 900 g bought for one client's bespoke blend is 900 g nobody else has ordered. Be generous on wax, deliberate on oil, generous again on any oil that is a core seller.

Kilograms into packs that exist

Take the illustration forward. Five hundred saleable candles plus the twenty-one sample and replacement units costed in the next section is 521 units — 95.86 kg of wax and 8.336 kg of oil. Grossed up for an illustrative 3% wax and 5% oil loss: 98.83 kg of wax and 8.775 kg of oil. The wax line is the interesting one, because exactly one wax in the catalogue has a pack above 10 kg: Natural Soy Pearl Wax ships 50 kg at ₹21,240, or ₹424.80/kg — the lowest per-kilogram rate of any pack above 10 kg here. Everything else tops out at 10 kg, and there is no 25 kg pack of anything.

Side by side at 100 kg the gap is real money: ₹42,480 on Natural Soy Pearl against ₹50,740 on CSI 464 — ₹8,260, or ₹16.52 on every candle you sell. The case against it: Natural Soy Pearl publishes no fragrance ceiling and no shelf life while CSI 464 publishes both, so ₹8,260 buys a cheaper kilogram and costs two pieces of published specification. If you have already tested your formula in one of them, the test result outranks the price.

The fragrance line has no such choices, because the CSI ladder for fragrance oil stops at 1 kg — no 2 kg bottle, no 5 kg jerrican, no 10 kg drum among the 92 oils. The base 8 kg is eight 1 kg bottles and nothing cleverer. On Sandalwood the rate is flat at ₹5.0268/g from 100 g up, so the buffered 8.775 kg can be bought precisely at no penalty: eight 1 kg plus one 500 g plus three 100 g is 8.8 kg for ₹44,235.84, against ₹45,241.20 for nine full kilograms — ₹1,005.36 saved and the leftover down from 225 g to 25 g.

Not every oil is flat: on Citrus Lemon the 1 kg rate is ₹2.832/g but the 100 g pack is ₹3.00. The same 8.8 kg on Citrus Lemon is ₹24,976 against ₹44,235.84 on Sandalwood — ₹19,259.84 on one line of the purchase order, with British Rose at ₹3,068/kg in between. It is the largest single lever on the total, so choose deliberately. CSI publishes no discount, slab or MOQ at any of these volumes; ask on WhatsApp for a quote on a specific quantity, and nothing here promises an answer other than the published price. See also the bulk fragrance buying guide.

The units nobody counts, and the rest of the bill

Three categories sit outside the order quantity, and each consumes wax, oil, a jar and a wick. Approval samples go to the client first, so "not quite the scent we discussed" happens at unit six rather than unit five hundred. Retained samples are mandatory if you ever intend to investigate a complaint: a fault reported four months later can only be answered against a sealed, labelled candle from the same pour. Replacement stock covers your own QC rejects and breakages in transit.

Twenty-one extra units is 4.2% more of everything, and the line that catches people out is the jars. Per-material buffers have to differ because the failure modes differ. Glass breaks — in the courier's van, on your bench, and again in transit to the client. Wax does not; the worst that happens to a sealed bag of flakes is bad storage. Wicks do not either, and they are the cheapest line on the bill by an order of magnitude.

Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) is ₹5.90 per wick at every pack size from 10 to 1,000 — ten cost ₹59, a thousand ₹5,900. No volume break to chase, and no reason to be tight on spares: seventy-nine spares cost ₹466.10, less than four jars. Thick (C2) is flat too, at ₹9.44. CSI publishes no jar-diameter or burn-diameter recommendation for any wick, so which one you need is a burn-test result from your own jar. Test before you buy 600 of the wrong size.

Jars at 521 units plus a 3% breakage allowance is 537, and the pack arithmetic rewards attention. The Salsa jar ships in packs of 5, 50 and 100 at ₹40.12, ₹29.50 and ₹29.50 each. Five 100-packs plus one 50-pack is 550 jars for ₹16,225, 13 above the buffered figure; six 100-packs is 600 for ₹17,700 — ₹1,475 more for jars you did not need. Do not top up with the 5-pack: at ₹40.12 it is ₹10.62 dearer per jar. This jar ships with its golden lid, so there is no separate lid to buy.

Across the 521 units you make, that bill is ₹208.60 of CSI materials per candle; across the 500 you invoice, ₹217.36 — and the second figure belongs in your costing, because samples and retained units are a cost of this order. Compare the naive calculation: 184 g of wax at ₹0.4248 is ₹78.16, 16 g of Sandalwood at ₹5.0268 is ₹80.43, jar ₹29.50, wick ₹5.90, wick sticker ₹2.50, care sticker ₹0.70 — ₹197.19 a candle, ₹98,596 for five hundred. The gap is ₹10,083.84, about 10%, and it is not waste: samples you needed, spares you were right to hold, and packs that come in the sizes they come in.

On scheduling: CSI publishes no dispatch time, no delivery estimate and no lead time, and this page will not supply one. Message +91 7397976926, confirm stock and current lead time before you commit to a client date, and add your cure time on top. How early to order for a festive run does the backwards calculation; the wholesale sourcing guide covers ordering at this scale.

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