How to Calculate Soy Wax Cost for 100 Candles

Three different numbers hide behind “the cost of 100 candles”

A costing is only useful if you know which question it answers. There are three, and every serious worksheet produces all three rather than arguing about which is right. The consumed cost is the wax, oil and wick that physically end up inside the 100 candles. The true cost of the run adds the material you bought, paid for and did not sell: the film left in the pitcher, the top-up pours, the dregs of a melt, the two candles that came out crooked. The cash out is what actually leaves your bank on order day, including the half-kilo of wax you will still have on the shelf next month.

They are not academic distinctions. Consumed cost is the right number for comparing two waxes or two loads, because it strips out pack sizes and your own tidiness. True cost is the right number for quoting a job, because it is what the 100 candles really absorbed. Cash out is the right number for planning the order and for telling whether you can afford the run at all — and on a first 100-candle batch it is the one that surprises people, because leftover stock feels like a cost on the day you pay for it and only turns back into value when you pour again.

The nine-line worksheet

Nine lines, in order, each one a number you can point at. The worked column is a single fixed example so you can check your own arithmetic against it: 100 candles, a 200 g fill, Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464, British Rose Fragrance Oil at 8% of wax weight, and Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1). Every rupee in the column is a live pack price or a sum of live pack prices.

Two habits make this worksheet reliable. First, always round up to packs at lines 4 and 6: a costing that assumes you can buy 21.4 kg of wax is a costing of a shop that does not exist. Second, never let line 3 be zero. A 100-candle run with no wastage has never happened; if your own records eventually show 4%, use 4%, but use a measured number rather than an optimistic one.

Lines 1–4: how much wax 100 candles really take

The gap between the wax poured and the wax bought is the whole of line 3, and it is not sloppiness — most of it is unavoidable. Wax clings to the pitcher and the melter wall as a film that re-solidifies before you can pour it. Soy container candles usually want a small second pour to fill the dip that forms as the wax contracts, and that wax has to come from somewhere. The last 100–200 g of a melt is hard to pour cleanly into a jar without dribbles. And on a first production run, two or three candles out of a hundred will be wicked off-centre, poured cloudy, or cracked, and you will not ship them.

The shares below are planning allowances drawn from ordinary small-batch practice, not measurements from any laboratory — treat them as a starting budget and replace them with your own weights once you have poured three runs. What matters is that they add up to something in the 5–8% range for a first run and 3–5% for a practised one, and that the number appears on the sheet instead of being absorbed silently by the last jar.

Line 4 is also where the Indian calendar quietly enters the sheet. If the run is festive, the wax has to be on your table well before the pour, not on a delivery van. Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026; soy container candles are generally given 14–21 days to cure, so a Diwali batch wants to be poured by about mid-October, which means ordering wax in the last week of September or the first week of October. Ordering late does not change the arithmetic on this page — it just adds an air-freight-style panic buy at 500 g pack rates, which does change it.

The pack effect: where your rupee-per-kilo actually moves

This is the part of the worksheet where people expect to save money and usually do not. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 is ₹507.40/kg whether you buy the 1 kg, the 5 kg or the 10 kg pack; only the 500 g pack sits above at ₹520.00/kg. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks is ₹599.00/kg across 1 kg and 5 kg. Eco Soy CSI 400 is ₹399.00 at 1 kg and ₹1,996.00 for 5 kg — effectively the same rate. So on those grades, buy the larger pack for fewer bags to open and one consignment instead of three, not because the rate improves.

Two grades do move. Premium Coconut Soy CSI 468 drops from ₹650.00/kg at 500 g and 1 kg to ₹637.00/kg at 5 kg and 10 kg. Natural Soy Pearl Wax drops from ₹450.00/kg at 1 kg to ₹424.80/kg from 5 kg upward — the largest step in the soy range, though its working temperatures and fragrance ceiling are not published, so it belongs in a costing only after you have burn-tested it. Honest summary: pack size is worth between nothing and ₹25.20 a kilogram here. Fill weight and load percentage are worth far more, and this page would rather you saved money there.

Read the first two rows together, because they contain the one piece of pack arithmetic worth learning. Moving from 21.5 kg to 22 kg costs ₹247.40 more and brings 0.5 kg more wax — a marginal rate of ₹494.80/kg, below the 1 kg rate, because what you are really doing is swapping the dearest pack in the plan for part of a cheaper one. If you will pour again within the month, take the extra half kilo. If this is a one-off order and cash is tight, take the smaller cheque and accept the ₹520.00/kg on that last half kilo. Neither choice is wrong; pretending the difference does not exist is.

Fragrance oil is the opposite story. On British Rose, the rate falls from ₹4.25/g in a 50 gm bottle to ₹3.42/g at 100 gm, ₹3.19/g at 500 gm and ₹3.07/g at 1 kg. Buying your 1.6 kg in the wrong sizes is the most expensive mistake available on this worksheet — far more expensive than anything the wax line can do to you.

Lines 5 and 6: the fragrance and wick lines

CSI product pages state fragrance load as a percentage of wax weight, and this worksheet follows that convention: oil grams = wax grams × load. At a 200 g fill, 8% is 16 g of oil and a poured weight of 216 g. If you have seen the other convention — load as a percentage of the finished candle — the same 216 g candle carrying 16 g of oil is 7.4% on that basis. Neither is wrong, but they produce different shopping lists, so write the convention at the top of your sheet and keep it there.

The load percentage is the most powerful lever on the whole worksheet, because oil is the dearest ingredient per gram. On this run, British Rose costs ₹36.82 a candle at 6%, ₹49.09 at 8% and ₹61.36 at 10%. Moving from 8% to 10% adds ₹1,227.20 to a 100-candle run — almost exactly what the wax wastage and pack rounding cost combined. It may be worth it. It may also be money poured into a candle that a smaller load and a longer cure would have matched, which is why a cheap three-jar comparison before a 100-candle run pays for itself.

Stay inside the ceilings, and take the lower of the two that apply. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 states a maximum of 10% of total wax weight; Luxury Soy Wax Chunks and Premium Coconut Soy CSI 468 state up to 13%, with 8% as a starting point and 10% as the recommended working figure on the Chunks page. Oil pages carry their own ranges — Jasmine Fragrance Oil states up to 10% for soy, Apple Cinnamon states 6–10% — and where a wax ceiling and an oil range disagree, the lower figure governs. Eco Soy CSI 400 does not publish a ceiling at all; ask on WhatsApp rather than assuming one, and cost it at a load you have actually tested.

The wick line is small and worth getting right anyway. Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) is ₹5.90 each in every pack size from 10 to 1,000, and Thick (C2) is ₹9.44; there is no volume break to chase, so buy the pack that matches your run plus roughly 10% spares. Order 110 rather than 100: wicks get trimmed short, stickers fail, and a run that stops for a missing wick costs more than the wick. If your jars are wider than 8 cm you are into Cotton Braided Wicks Ready Made at ₹12.00 each, which roughly doubles the line; if you are testing Performance Wooden Wicks at ₹59.00 each in a 10-pack, the line stops being small at ₹5,900.00 for 100 and needs to be in the sheet before you quote, not after.

Run the worksheet on your own candle

Four steps, about twenty minutes, and you will have a number you can defend to a customer who asks why a 200 g soy candle is not ₹150.00. Do it once properly and the sheet becomes a template you reuse for every order.

A second worked example, so you can see the whole sheet move. Suppose the order is 100 candles at a 150 g fill in Luxury Soy Wax Chunks, run at a 10% load with Jasmine Fragrance Oil, on the same Eco C1 wick. Net wax is 15.00 kg; with the same 7% allowance, 16.05 kg; rounded to packs, 17 kg as three 5 kg and two 1 kg packs, ₹10,183.00. Oil at 10% of 15 kg is 1.5 kg, bought as 1 kg + 500 gm, ₹5,884.00. Wicks are unchanged at ₹649.00. Cash out is ₹16,716.00, or ₹167.16 a candle — a candle a quarter smaller than the first example that costs very nearly the same, because a dearer wax and a heavier load ate the entire saving. That is the whole argument for running the sheet before the batch instead of after it.

What swapping the wax grade actually saves

Because the wax line is the largest single line, it is the first place people look for savings. Here is the honest size of the prize, worked as consumed cost at a 200 g fill so that pack sizes and wastage do not muddy the comparison. The cheapest and dearest container grades in the CSI soy range are ₹47.60 a candle apart — real money on a hundred candles, but less than the gap between an 8% and a 10% fragrance load in an expensive oil.

What this worksheet deliberately leaves out

The sheet stops at wax, oil and wick on purpose: those three are the lines a soy costing gets wrong, and they are the ones a supplier can price precisely. Everything below swings far more than they do, and none of it belongs inside a wax cost.

The container is the biggest variable in the whole candle. In live CSI stock, a Clear Glass Votive Jar 70 gram is ₹31.86 each in a 10-pack, a 200ml Salsa Glass Jar with 63mm Lug Cap is ₹29.50 each at 50 and 100, a Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid is ₹94.40 each, a 135 gram tin works out at ₹96.76, and an Apothecary Glass Candle Jar with Dome Lid is ₹212.40. Across a hundred candles that is a spread of roughly ₹18,000.00 — more than the entire wax, oil and wick basket priced on this page. Pick the jar first; it decides the fill weight, the wick and half the retail price.

Freight is charged separately and is not something this page will pretend to know for your pin code; two CSI reviewers have said plainly that delivery charges felt high, and on a small first order they can be a visible share of the bill. The practical answer is to consolidate: one consignment carrying 22 kg of wax, the oil and the wicks costs less to deliver than three consignments spread over a month. GST invoicing is available on request; CSI prices are stated as inclusive of taxes, so a registered business should record the invoice properly rather than treating the shelf price as a net cost. Labour — your hours, or a helper's — is a real cost too, and at 100 candles it is usually the line that decides whether the order was worth taking.

Finally, the rejects that survive. A candle with a slightly rough top or a small wet spot is still sellable as a second at a discount rather than written off; a candle that will not burn safely is not. Decide that rule before the run and put the discounted seconds into your revenue line, not into your wastage line, or your worksheet will double-count them.

Frequently asked questions