What Tests Should I Run Before Ordering 5 Kg of a Candle Fragrance Oil?

What 5 kg adds to the 1 kg gate

The checklist for a first kilogram is in What Should I Test Before Buying 1 Kg of a New Candle Fragrance Oil?: burn at a cured age, wick in your jar, discolouration, sweating, stability after two weeks, cost per candle and stock at 1 kg. Treat it as the entry ticket. Nothing below replaces it, and if you have not done it, stop here and do that first; a 5 kg order on an oil that has not passed it is a bet, not a purchase.

What changes at 5 kg is exposure. A kilogram at 8% in a 150 g jar makes 83 candles; five make 416. At 40 candles a month that is 10.4 months of one scent. The risks that matter are no longer "does it throw" but "does batch 9 smell like batch 1", "is pack #4 the same oil as pack #1" and "is the oil in the opened bottle in month six still the oil I approved". None of these shows up in a six-candle test, because a six-candle test uses one bottle, one day and one fresh nose.

Compatibility and stability specifically, including a warm-storage check on finished candles, have their own protocol in How to Test Fragrance Oil Compatibility Before Buying 1 Kg or 5 Kg; discolouration under light, in How to Test Fragrance Oil for Discoloration Before Bulk Production. This page does not repeat them. It adds the three questions that only exist once you are buying more than one pack.

Is it actually the oil? What a 5 kg failure usually is

Makers who buy in bulk and then see a difference tend to message us with "the new oil is weaker". Sometimes it is. More often, in our judgement, something else moved between the test and the production run: the batch got bigger and was held hot for longer, the wax came from a new bag, the wick came from a different pack, the candles were sold before they had cured, or the season changed and the shop got warmer. Each of these can change a candle without any change in the oil.

This is why the gate uses a sealed retain. Without a reference from the day you approved the oil, a weaker batch can only be argued about. With one, two blind strip comparisons separate "the new pack is different" from "my storage changed it" from "the oil is fine and my process moved". Scale-up in depth, from batch temperature to cooling rate, is covered in My Fragrance Oil Worked in a Small Test but Performs Differently in Bulk Production — Why?; the gate below is the evidence you gather before buying, not the repair after.

How 5 kg is bought at CSI, and what it really commits

CSI lists fragrance oils up to 1 kg. Of 102 oil listings, 101 include a 1 kg size (Mogra is listed only as 100 g, and is out of stock), and 82 had the 1 kg in stock on 25 September 2026. There is no 5 kg or 25 kg listing. A 5 kg order is therefore five 1 kg packs at the listed price, or a bulk quote requested on WhatsApp. We will not quote a bulk discount in a blog post; ask, and get it in writing with the GST invoice terms.

The store shows whether a size is in stock, not how many units are on the shelf. If your gate passes and you need three more packs of the same oil on the same day, confirm the count on WhatsApp before you promise a customer a delivery date. Ask at the same time whether the packs will come from one production batch; the product pages do not publish batch information, so this is a question to ask, not a fact we can state here.

Why would anyone buy ten 500 g packs? Storage. A 1 kg bottle opened in week one and emptied in month three spends months with growing air space above the oil; a 500 g pack is opened later and emptied sooner. For Citrus Lemon the smaller packs cost ₹40.00 more across 5 kg, which is cheap if lane C shows your storage matters. For British Rose it is ₹590.00, which is worth avoiding unless it does. On several other CSI oils a 1 kg costs ₹1.00 more than two 500 g packs, so the choice is almost free there; on Saffron Cedarwood and Sage and Cedarwood the 1 kg is dearer per gram than the 500 g. Read the price table for your oil rather than assuming.

The oil is the smaller part of the bill

Worked example: 416 candles of 150 g at 8% from five packs of Citrus Lemon. Wax is 57,408 g of CSI 464, jars are the 150 g Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid, wicks are Eco C1.

Excluding labour, freight, packaging and GST. The point of the table is not the total; it is that a fault found after pouring wastes the jars and wax too. A fault found in the gate wastes eight candles.

Deciding which of several oils deserve bulk at all is a range question, covered in the guide to choosing which oils deserve 1 kg inventory; this page assumes you have already chosen the oil.

Test A: the repeat production batch

Pour two batches from pack #1 at the size you will actually produce, on different days. If you produce 20 candles at a time, that is 240 g of oil and 2,760 g of wax per batch, weighed on a scale, with add and pour temperatures logged on a thermometer against your wax page (CSI 464 states a pour temperature of 80°C–90°C). Change nothing else from the recipe that passed the 1 kg gate: same wax, wick, jar, load, stirring time.

What to pull, and when to judge

From each batch pull three candles: the first poured, one from the middle, and the last. The last candle from a big jug has sat hot the longest, and if anything is going to differ, it is often that one. Label the base with batch, position and date. Keep the rest of the batch for sale only if the pulled candles pass; until then it is stock on hold.

Burn the six pulled candles at day 14, one per session, in the same closed room you used for the 1 kg gate, blind, scored at the doorway at 30 minutes, 1 hour and 2 hours on a 1 to 5 scale. Log the hour-3 melt pool too. How to run a fair hot-throw session is set out in How to Test Fragrance Oil Hot Throw Before Buying It in Bulk.

Test B: does the next pack match the one you approved?

On the day you open pack #1, fill two 12 ml attar bottles to the neck, cap them, label them "retain · oil · pack #1 · date", and put them in a dark cupboard. They cost ₹36.00 each. Do not open them until the comparison.

Order pack #2 about three weeks into the gate. On the day it arrives, and before it goes near a production jug, run a triangle test on smell strips: three strips, two dipped in one sample and one in the other, coded so the smeller does not know which is which. The smeller's job is to pick the odd one out. If your panel of two or three people cannot pick it more often than chance (one in three) across a few rounds, the packs are, for your purposes, the same oil. Then pour one candle from pack #2 beside one from pack #1, same melt, same everything, and burn both at day 14.

Colour matters here too: pour a little of R and N side by side into two clean clear glass bottles against white paper. Oils can vary in colour between lots without any change in scent, and colour in the oil does not always show in the wax, but a visible difference is a reason to pour the candle pair before deciding, and to ask.

Ask on WhatsApp about batch before ordering pack #2 if lot consistency matters to your range.

Test C: storage over the months 5 kg will last

CSI's product pages do not state a shelf life for fragrance oils, and this page will not invent one. What you can test is whether your storage, in your workshop, over the months you will take to use 5 kg, changes the oil enough to matter. Start by working out how long that is.

If you sell 40 candles a month in one scent, you will use about 2.88 kg in six months. In our judgement, if 5 kg would take you much longer than six months to pour, buy it in two orders. At listed prices the per-gram cost at 1 kg does not change with the number of packs, so buying it all at once mainly saves a delivery.

Running lane C

Store pack #1 the way you will store all five: cap tight after every use, out of direct sun, away from the melter and the window. Indian summers (roughly April to June) and the monsoon months (roughly June to September) are when workshop conditions swing most; note the room if you can. On the comparison day, strip the sealed retain (R) against the opened pack (O), blind, as in Test B, and pour a candle from O beside one from N. If O and R cannot be told apart and the candle pair scores alike at day 14, your storage is fine for the period tested. It tells you nothing about longer periods; repeat the strip check every two months while the order lasts.

The dated plan and what the gate costs

A worked schedule starting from 25 September 2026, assuming the 1 kg gate has already passed and delivery within a few days (confirm dispatch on WhatsApp; it varies by location). Worked example uses Citrus Lemon, CSI 464, the 150 g clear jar and Eco C1 wicks.

The oil in the gate is not extra spend: it is the first 96 g of the 5 kg you meant to buy. The unpulled candles from batches 1 and 2 (34 of the 40) are saleable once they pass. Excluding labour, freight, packaging and GST.

Diwali, 8 November 2026

Diwali falls on 8 November 2026, 44 days after these prices were checked, and five days before this schedule's decision date. If your oil has passed the 1 kg gate, Diwali stock does not need the 5 kg order at all: batches 1 and 2 are Diwali candles once their pulled samples pass, and packs #1 and #2 cover 166 candles at 8%. If you need more before Diwali, buy a third single pack and treat it as part of lane B. What we would not do is order five packs now to "save time"; the time the gate takes is the point.

What to buy for a 5 kg programme

Two staple oils that suit a 5 kg programme on price and stock, then the two non-oil purchases the gate needs. Oils are chosen on stated candle load, price per gram at 1 kg, and every size in stock on 25 September 2026, not on throw, which CSI has not measured. Candle counts assume 150 g at 8%.

Frequently asked questions