I Need to Make 100 × 200 g Soy Candles at 8% Fragrance Load — Exactly How Many Kilograms of Wax and Fragrance Oil Should I Buy?

The arithmetic, shown in full

Start from what you are selling. Finished weight is the wax plus the fragrance oil in the jar — not the jar, not the wick, not the lid — so the mass you must pour is 100 × 200 g = 20,000 g, or 20 kg. Everything else here is that number divided up.

Those four lines scale to any order: at 6% the same hundred candles need 1.2 kg of oil and 18.8 kg of wax, at 10% it is 2 kg and 18 kg. Keep unit weight and load as two separate variables in your notes.

"8% of what?" — the denominator trap

A fragrance load of 8% is a ratio, and a ratio needs a denominator. There are two in circulation, both used by serious people, and they give different answers:

The working. On finished weight the oil is 8% of 200 g — 16 g, leaving 184 g of wax. On wax weight the two must still sum to 200 g, so wax = 200 ÷ 1.08 = 185.185 g and oil = 14.815 g. On a 5,000-candle order that is 74.07 kg against 80.00 kg.

The conversion runs both ways: Chunks' 13% of wax weight is 23.0 g of oil in 177.0 g of wax, or 11.5% of finished weight, while 10% of wax weight is 9.1% of finished. The gap widens as the load rises. This page uses 8% of finished weight throughout.

Kilograms into packs that actually exist

Wax comes in 500 g, 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg, with one exception: Natural Soy Pearl Wax also has a 50 kg variant at ₹21,240.00. There is no 25 kg carton of anything — if you have been quoted one, that is another supplier's pack.

Three things in that table deserve saying out loud, and two of them cost CSI money.

One reason the leftover matters less than it looks: CSI 464 and Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 are the only two CSI waxes that publish a shelf life, both stated as "60 months (cool, dry storage)". The other fourteen publish none, so do not assume one. On a wax with five stated years in it, the 364 g you carry forward is not waste, it is next month's batch — which is why rounding up to the next pack is a storage decision rather than a loss. Keep it sealed, cool and out of sunlight, which is the only storage instruction CSI publishes.

1.6 kg of fragrance oil, where nothing above 1 kg exists

The fragrance ladder stops at 1 kg. There is no 2 kg, 5 kg or 10 kg fragrance bottle anywhere on the store, so 1.6 kg is always assembled. There are two sensible routes and they are not equivalent.

On Sandalwood the decision is trivial: ₹502.68, ₹2,513.40 and ₹5,026.80 are all ₹5.0268/g, so exactly 1.6 kg costs ₹8,042.88 — 1.6 × ₹5,026.80 to the paisa — and there is no reason to buy 2 kg.

If the hundred candles are not all one scent the 1.6 kg simply splits — four scents at 25 units each need 400 g of each oil, one 500 g pack per scent, and at 500 g most CSI oils sit within a few paise of their kilogram rate (Citrus Lemon, ₹2.84/g against ₹2.83/g). More in how much fragrance oil a candle business needs and buying fragrance oils in bulk.

Buffer, samples and the units nobody counts

Two things sit between the calculation and the purchase order. The first is transfer loss — wax and oil clinging to the melter, the pitcher and the mixing vessel. The second is units that are not part of the order: approval samples, retained samples, and replacements. Neither is optional.

Here is a worked illustration. The percentages below are made up for this example — not CSI figures, not recommendations. Your measurement replaces them.

Notice how coarse the granularity is. A 4% buffer on wax is 736 g against a smallest pack of 500 g, so you carry 364 g of spare flakes — ₹184.69 the next batch will use. Pack granularity, not your buffer percentage, decides the final invoice.

The units that are not in the order

A client orders 100 candles. You do not pour 100. Three categories of unit sit outside the order and all three are real:

Those quantities are a worked example, not a rule; the structure is what holds. Decide the extra units before you calculate. At 111 units of 200 g the poured mass is 22.2 kg, the oil at 8% of finished weight 1.776 kg and the wax 20.424 kg; apply the same illustrative 4% and 6% and you need 21.241 kg of wax and 1.883 kg of oil — what the purchase list below is built on. See also scaling to 1,000 orders a month.

The rest of the bill — and where CSI stops

The whole purchase, built for 111 units with the illustrative buffer applied to wax and oil only. Jars, wicks and stickers are counted rather than buffered, because glass either arrives whole or it does not.

Why three of those lines are not buffered by percentage

Jars break, and they are the expensive line, so spares are bought deliberately. The 200ml Salsa Glass Jar is ₹29.50 each in the 50 and 100 Pcs packs but ₹40.12 in the 5 Pcs pack, so those fifteen spares carry a 36% premium — ₹601.80 against ₹442.50 at the bulk rate. The alternative is 100 Pcs + 50 Pcs = 150 jars for ₹4,425.00, ₹873.20 more but all at ₹29.50: better on a run you intend to repeat, 35 jars in storage on a one-off.

Wicks are so cheap that spares are free in all but name. Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) are ₹5.90 per wick at every pack size from 10 to 1,000 — ₹59.00 for 10, ₹590.00 for 100, ₹5,900.00 for 1,000 — and Thick (C2) is flat at ₹9.44 from the 20-wick pack up. No volume discount to chase, therefore no reason to be mean: 200 wicks for ₹1,180.00 rather than 120 for ₹708.00 buys eighty spares. Buy the spares. One caveat: CSI publishes no wick-diameter chart and no jar-to-wick sizing table, so which of C1 and C2 suits a 63 mm jar is a question your burn test answers, not this page — the wick guide by diameter sets out the method.

Stickers round to the roll, not to the unit. The Candle Care Stickers Roll is 500 at 1 inch for ₹413.00 (₹0.83 each) or 1,000 at 1.5 inch for ₹699.00 (₹0.70 each). The bigger roll is ₹0.13 cheaper per sticker, but you need 111 — so the ₹413.00 roll is the honest purchase and the extra ₹286.00 buys 889 stickers you cannot use. For wick stickers the 40-sticker sheet at ₹100.00 is the in-stock variant; for wider tabs the Large Candle Wick Stickers are ₹249.00 for 40.

Tools sit outside the table deliberately, being bought once rather than per batch: a weighing scale and a pen thermometer at ₹354.00 each and a 600 ml Steel Pouring Pitcher at ₹708.00 as a minimum, while a Mini Electric Wax Melter at ₹2,360.00 or the 20 litre Electric Wax Melter at ₹23,600.00 changes how many pours 21.5 kg takes. What it actually costs to start handles the capital side.

Frequently asked questions