I Need to Produce 1,000 × 200 g Candles at 8% Fragrance Load — How Many Kilograms of Wax Should I Purchase Including Test Batches and Wastage?

Net wax: 184 kg, and the 16 kg trap

CSI's convention, used across this whole series, is that the fragrance load is a share of the finished candle. So a 200 g candle at 8% holds 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax, and 1,000 of them hold 16 kg of oil and 184 kg of wax. The finished weight is the only number a customer can check, which is why the calculation starts there and not from the wax.

The shortcut over-buys 16 kg of wax, which at the Chunks 10 kg rate is ₹9,598.40, and quietly dilutes the formula you tested. The last row is the subtler error: the wax figure is right, but weighing oil as 8% of the wax gives a true load of 7.41%, not 8%. If your recipe is written that way, the fix is oil = wax × 0.08 ÷ 0.92, which for 184 g of wax is 16 g. The 100 × 200 g at 10% calculation shows how the same trap scales with a higher load, and the 2,000 × 150 g guide is about catching it in a spreadsheet before it reaches a purchase order.

How big the test batches should be

The title asks for test batches, and most calculators treat them as a vague extra percentage. It is better to count them in candles, because a test batch is a set of real candles in real jars, each with a wick and a label. Counting them makes the jar and wick orders right as well as the wax. The plan below is a working assumption for a single-fragrance, single-jar run; your own plan may be larger if you are still choosing an oil or a jar.

Round A compares three of the wick types CSI lists: Eco Candle Wicks Thin C1 and Thick C2 and Cotton Braided Wicks. One 10-pack of each costs ₹273.40. CSI does not publish a wick size for any jar diameter, and no page in this series will pretend to; the trial is the only honest way to choose. Round C matters more than it looks. A pilot batch poured exactly the way production will be poured is the only place your real wastage figure comes from, and once you have it, it replaces the 4% assumption in every later order.

In money, the whole test plan costs roughly ₹9,679.69 in wax, oil, jars and wicks at the rates used on this page. Against a raw-material order of ₹2,53,422.00, that is about 3.8%. It is the cheapest insurance in the whole job. The 300 × 150 g test-candle guide sizes a smaller plan, and the development and QC sample guide looks at the fragrance side of test candles in more depth.

The allowance stack, in order

Why this order? Test candles are poured with the same jugs and the same melter as production, so they suffer the same pour loss. Applying the loss percentage before adding the tests leaves the tests' own loss out; on this run that is about 300 g of wax, small, but it is the kind of small that turns a full last pour into a half one. Rounding comes last because a pack is a purchasing fact, not a production one: round too early and you either buy a whole extra bag or, worse, round down and run short on the final day.

3%, 4% or 5% — what wastage really costs

Wastage here means everything melted that does not end up inside a finished, sellable candle: wax left in the jug and the melter, top-up pours, spills, a candle poured at the wrong temperature and remelted, and the odd jar that cracks. "Plan 3–5% extra for pour loss and test burns" is the working assumption CSI uses across these guides; it is not a measured rate. The table shows what each point costs on this run, with and without the test plan.

The spread between 3% and 5% with tests is 3.82 kg of wax and 332 g of oil, about ₹3,313.60 in raw materials at listed prices. That is real money, but it is not the biggest lever. Leaving out the test plan entirely moves the wax by more than 7 kg. Getting the load convention wrong moves it by 16 kg. Fix the big numbers first, then refine wastage with your own pilot-batch measurement.

Rounding to bags and bottles

Luxury Soy Wax Chunks are listed at 500 g (₹299.00), 1 kg (₹599.00), 5 kg (₹2,995.00) and 10 kg (₹5,999.00). The need of 198.823 kg rounds to 19 × 10 kg + 1 × 5 kg + 4 × 1 kg, 199 kg for ₹1,19,372.00. Per kilo the bags are flat: ₹599.00 at 1 kg and 5 kg, ₹599.90 at 10 kg. British Rose is one of the oils where the kilo genuinely is cheaper: ₹3.07 a gram at 1 kg against ₹3.42 at 100 g, a 10.3% saving, so the order uses 1 kg bottles for the bulk and small bottles only for the last few hundred grams: 17 × 1 kg + 3 × 100 g, ₹53,182.60.

Per-gram price breaks are rare across CSI's catalogue in general. Of 91 oils that list both 100 g and 1 kg, 52 are priced within 1% per gram, and only 24 show a 1 kg saving of 5% or more. British Rose is one of the 24, which is one reason it is the example here. For an oil without a real break, buy whatever mix of 1 kg and 100 g covers the need with the least left over, as the 1 kg versus bulk fragrance guide explains.

The priced order

If the wick trial picks Thick C2, the production wick line becomes 1 × 1,000 + 3 × 20 at ₹10,006.40; if it picks Cotton Braided, 1 × 1,000 + 1 × 50 + 1 × 10 at ₹12,720.00. Spread over the 1,000 candles delivered, the order is ₹253.42 per candle in raw materials, against ₹236.17 from the net per-candle split (184 g wax, 16 g oil, one wick, one jar). The gap is the cost of testing, wastage and rounding, and it belongs in your quotation. Material cost excludes labour, labels, lids, boxes, freight and GST.

When the run is done, compare what you bought with what is left. If about 0.18 kg of wax remains, your 4% was right. If 4 kg remains, your real wastage was about 2%, and the next order should say so. The 1,000 × 100 g guide shows how to split the same stack into a development order and a production order, the 5,000-candle guide adds a deliberate safety stock on top, and 10 kg of wax at 10% into 200 g candles runs the calculation backwards. For rejects on a corporate version of this run, I Have a Corporate Order for 1,000 × 200 g Candles — How Much Wax, Fragrance Oil and How Many Wicks Should I Order if Production Rejects Are Expected? picks up where this page stops.

Frequently asked questions