I Need to Make 100 × 200 g Soy Candles at 10% Fragrance Load — How Many Kilograms of Wax Should I Order Instead of Simply Multiplying 100 × 200 g?

Why 100 × 200 g is the wrong wax number

The multiplication feels natural: 100 candles, 200 g each, 20 kg. But 20 kg is the finished weight of the order — wax and oil together. At a 10% load, each 200 g candle holds 20 g of oil and 180 g of wax. Across 100 candles that is 2,000 g of oil and 18,000 g of wax. Buy 20 kg of wax and then 2 kg of oil for it, and you have bought 22 kg of material to make 20 kg of candles. The surplus is 2,000 g of wax — 11.1% more than the candles can hold.

The higher the load, the bigger the error. At 8% (the hub example) the shortcut over-buys wax by 8.7%; at 10% it is 11.1%. That is why this question matters more for strongly scented candles than for lightly scented ones — and why the answer is always the same formula: wax = candles × weight × (1 − load).

The worked calculation with allowances

The title gives no wastage figure, so the allowances below are labelled working assumptions: two test candles (one to burn, one to keep), and 4% pour loss — the middle of the 3–5% range most makers plan. Tests are added as candles; the loss percentage then multiplies everything melted, tests included.

So the order is 19.09 kg of wax and 2.12 kg of oil. The shortcut, given exactly the same tests and loss, asks for 21,216 g of wax — 2,121.6 g more — because it applies the allowances to a wax figure that was already too large.

Working at CSI 464's 10% ceiling

Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 is rated up to 10% fragrance load by the wax maker. That is a stated formulation maximum — not a regulatory limit, and not the optimum. A 10% formula in this wax has no headroom: a heavy hand on the oil jug, a mis-tared scale or topping up a weak batch all push you over the maker's figure. Two things follow for the order. First, weigh oil per batch, not per candle — 20 g at a time invites rounding up. Second, decide now whether 10% is really the formula, because if a test tells you to go lower, the oil order shrinks and the wax grows.

Dropping from 10% to 8% saves ₹3,426.00 of Dark Vanilla on this order and ₹30.58 of oil in every candle, while the wax goes up by only 424.3 g. If you want to keep a 10% formula with headroom, Luxury Soy Wax Chunks are rated up to 13% — the 300 × 150 g post works a 10% order in Chunks. Either way, whether 10% smells better than 8% in your jar is something only a side-by-side burn test answers; CSI publishes no throw measurements for any oil.

Rounding to CSI 464 bags and Dark Vanilla bottles

CSI 464 is listed at ₹260.00 for 500 g, ₹507.40 for 1 kg, ₹2,537.00 for 5 kg and ₹5,074.00 for 10 kg (CSI live pricing, pulled 24 September 2026). From 1 kg upward the price is flat at ₹507.40 a kilo; the 500 g bag is slightly dearer at ₹520.00 a kilo. So there is no bulk reason to prefer the 10 kg bag — only fewer bags to open.

Dark Vanilla Fragrance Oil is a premium gourmand at ₹7.90 a gram in 100 g and ₹7.65 at 1 kg. At 20 g per candle, the oil alone is ₹152.92 of every candle at the kilo rate — the single biggest material cost in this order. That makes tight rounding worth doing.

The priced order

The jar is CSI's White Matte Glass Jar, the container in CSI's 200 g cost examples. Its fill weight is not published, so weigh one test pour to confirm 200 g at your line. Wick size per jar diameter is not published either, and a 10% load is exactly where the wick choice matters, so this order buys a small test pack of both Eco Candle Wicks Thin C1 and Thick C2, then 110 production wicks of whichever passes (100 + 10, a labelled allowance of eight spares).

If Thick C2 wins the test, production wicks cost ₹1,038.40 (100 + 10 at ₹9.44 each) instead of ₹649.00, and the total rises by ₹389.40. The single-candle material cost at list rates is ₹320.95: ₹91.33 of CSI 464, ₹152.92 of Dark Vanilla, ₹5.90 wick and ₹70.80 jar. The order's ₹346.29 per sellable candle includes the tests, loss, spare wicks, spare jars and leftover stock. Both exclude labour, packaging, freight and GST.

The same mistake at larger orders

The error is a fixed share of the order, so it grows with every candle. At 10% load the shortcut always over-buys wax by 11.1%. The table shows what that becomes at the order sizes covered elsewhere in this series.

At 1,000 candles the shortcut buys 20 kg of wax you did not need — ₹10,148.00 of CSI 464 on the shelf. See 1,000 × 200 g with test batches for the larger order, the 10% fragrance-oil post for the oil side of this same candle, and 10 kg of wax at 10% for the calculation run backwards from stock.

For the neighbouring scenarios in this cluster: 100 × 150 g at 8% covers the load-convention trap, 200 × 180 g with 5% extra covers applying an allowance once, and 250 × 200 g covers choosing bag mixes on a bigger order.

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