I Ordered 100 Kg of the Same Candle Wax and Received Multiple Batch Numbers — Should I Test Each Lot Separately Before Combining Them in Production?

Screen every lot, qualify the outliers

A large wax order is often filled from more than one production run. Seeing several batch numbers on one delivery is normal and says nothing bad about the wax. What it does say is that you have received several lots, and each one could sit at a slightly different point of normal variation. The goods-in question is how much testing each lot needs before release.

There are two levels of effort. A screen is a short, same-day comparison against your retained reference wax: labels, weights, appearance, odour and a melt observation. A qualification is a full controlled test in candles with cure and burn, the kind that takes a week. Running a full qualification on every lot of every delivery quickly becomes the bottleneck of a small business. Running none at all means the first test is your customers.

The middle path is to screen every lot and qualify only the lots that fail to match the reference. This is where the companion questions on keeping lots separate in production end and the goods-in decision begins: what happens in the first hour after the delivery arrives.

Receiving 100 kg: codes, weights and sampling

Start before anything is opened. Group the bags by the batch number printed on them, and count and weigh each group. If a bag carries no batch marking, give it your own receiving code, for example the invoice date plus a letter, and ask the supplier whether the unmarked bags came from one production run. CSI product pages do not publish batch numbers, so if you buy from CSI, ask on WhatsApp +91 7397976926 and write the answer on the receiving sheet.

Then decide which bags to sample. A suggested starting point is up to three bags per lot, chosen from different positions in the delivery rather than the three nearest the door. From each sampled bag, take a small amount from below the surface layer. Combine them only within a lot, never across lots.

The per-lot screen, step by step

Allow about 20 minutes per lot as a starting point to validate, so three lots take roughly an hour. Do them in one session so the lighting, the room and your nose are the same for all three.

When bags within one lot disagree

Occasionally the screen shows a difference inside a lot rather than between lots: two sampled bags of lot A match the reference and the third looks or smells different. Do not average it away. Isolate that bag with its own code, sample the remaining unsampled bags of the lot, and screen them individually. If only one bag differs, it may have been stored or handled differently in transit, for example close to a heat source, and it can be qualified or rejected on its own without holding the rest of the lot.

If several bags differ, treat the batch number as unreliable for this delivery and screen every bag as if it were its own lot. That costs an extra hour and tells you something useful about how the delivery was packed, which is worth mentioning to the supplier.

Worked example: who gets full qualification

Suppose the delivery is CSI 464. CSI lists no 100 kg pack, so larger quantities are quoted on WhatsApp; at the 10 kg list price the delivery would be 10 × ₹5,074.00 = ₹50,740.00, and your quote may differ. The whole delivery makes 100,000 ÷ 184 = 543 candles of 200 g at 8% load.

In the screen, lots A and C match the reference on all four checks. Lot B looks slightly deeper in colour in daylight and sets with a duller surface. Lots A and C go to conditional release: approved for production, with one confirmation candle poured in the first production run and burned before those candles ship. Lot B goes to full qualification: a paired burn against retained old wax. Priced with a lemon test candle in 200 ml matte jars at 8% load, four candles (two per lot) cost the following.

Qualifying only lot B saves ₹1,744.50 in materials and, more importantly, releases 325 candles' worth of wax (217 + 108) straight into production instead of holding it for a week. If lot B passes, it joins the others. If it fails, it stays in quarantine and the supplier conversation starts, with your screen notes and paired results attached.

There is one exception. If this is the first delivery of a wax you have never used before, screening against a reference is impossible, because there is no reference. In that case at least one lot needs a full qualification, and the other lots are screened against that one.

Keeping lot identity after release

Once lots are released, use them one at a time, oldest first, and write the lot code on every batch sheet. If you later decide to blend two released lots for consistency, treat that as its own decision with its own record. Until then, separate lots are your cheapest insurance: a complaint in three months can be traced to one lot and 217 candles, not to a delivery and 543.

Where this page fits

CSI already has guides that cover parts of this question. This page covers the goods-in check for the question above; these go deeper on the rest:

Three things to buy for this job

Frequently asked questions