I Need to Produce 1,000 Candles in Three Days — How Do I Calculate Daily Melting, Pouring, Cooling and Packing Capacity Before Accepting the Deadline?

Start with materials you already have

1,000 candles of 200 g is 200 kg of scented wax. At an 8% fragrance load on total candle weight, that is 184 kg of wax and 16 kg of oil. Planned in 10 kg loads that give 48 good candles after a 5% wastage allowance, 1,000 ÷ 48 is 20.8, so 21 loads: 193.2 kg of wax and 16.8 kg of oil, plus 1,000 jars and 1,000 wicks and a reject allowance on both.

On a three-day deadline there is no time to order anything and wait for it. So the first check is not capacity at all: it is whether every material is physically in your unit. Count the wax, weigh the oil for the scent or scents ordered, and count jars, wicks, lids, labels and boxes. If any of them is short, the deadline depends on a delivery you do not control, and you should say so before accepting. Oil is the item most often short on a rush order, because 16.8 kg of a single scent is more than many units keep open at once.

If the order is in a scent you have not made recently, or in a new jar, stop here too. A new jar size needs a wick test, and three days does not leave room for a test, a result and a production run.

Work backwards from day three

It is tempting to divide 1,000 by three and plan 334 candles a day. That plan fails because candles poured on day three cannot be set, finished and packed on day three. Container candles need time on a level shelf before they can be handled without marking the surface or shifting the wick, and your own records should tell you how long that is for your wax and jar.

So turn the plan round. Day three is for finishing and packing. Pouring has to be complete by the end of day two. That means about 11 loads on day one and 10 loads on day two, roughly 528 and 480 good candles, and 1,008 in total against 1,000 needed.

The melting and pouring maths

The Electric Wax Melter (Imported) product page states that it melts 10 kg of soy wax in approximately 30 minutes at 100°C. Your cycle per load is longer: melting, cooling to the fragrance temperature, stirring, pouring and resetting the pot. Use your own measured cycle.

As an example only, take a 90-minute cycle. Eleven loads on one melter is 16.5 hours, which no single shift covers. With two 10 kg melters staggered, it becomes about 8.25 hours each, which is a long but possible day. On a 20 kg melter, day one is six loads of 96 candles, about nine hours at the same cycle, though each pour is twice as long and the last jars meet cooler wax.

Then check pouring separately. Eleven loads is about 528 candles in a day. If one pourer manages, say, 60 candles an hour from a Large 600 ml pitcher, which is an example to replace with your figure, that is close to nine hours of pouring. Two pourers halve it. Either way, the pouring hours must fit inside the same day as the melting hours, so the stages overlap rather than add.

Setting space and packing: the usual limits

By the end of day two, around 1,000 poured candles need a level, draught-free place to set. Measure how many 200 g jars fit on one metre of your shelving, and divide 1,000 by that figure. If the answer is more shelving than you have, the deadline fails here, however fast your melters are.

Day three then carries the whole packing job: wick trimming, lids, labels, boxes and cartons for 1,000 units. If one packer finishes, as an example, 80 units an hour, that is 12.5 hours of packing. Two packers make it about 6.25 hours each. Measure your own rate on the actual packaging, because a gift box with an insert is far slower than a lid and a label.

Adding up the people

Put the stages together and count heads, not just hours. On each pouring day you need someone running the melters and weighing oil, one or two pourers, and someone moving set candles off the line to free space. On day three you need packers, and ideally one person checking every candle before it goes into a box. If the same two people are expected to do all of it, the hours on the capacity sheet will overlap in ways that do not work in practice. Write the names against each stage for each day. A gap in that list is a gap in the deadline.

Keep the batch sheet going even at this pace. Every one of the 21 loads should record its wax and oil lot, weights, fragrance temperature and first and last jar readings. If a customer queries part of the order later, those sheets are the only way to find which candles came from which load.

Accept, negotiate or decline

Once the capacity sheet is filled in, the decision is mechanical. Compare hours needed with hours available for each stage. If every stage fits with a buffer, you can accept. If one stage is short by a few hours, you may be able to add a person or a shift. If a stage is short by a day, the deadline does not fit your unit.

If the numbers do not fit, offer something that does: 600 in three days and 400 two days later, or all 1,000 on a later date. A buyer who hears an honest capacity-based answer on day zero is usually better served than one who hears on day three that the order is short. And a rushed batch with hot-poured oil, burnt hands or a mis-set wick costs far more than the order was worth.

Where this page fits

CSI already has guides that cover parts of this question. This page takes the production-floor angle; these go deeper on the rest:

Three things to buy for this job

Frequently asked questions