Raw Materials Required to Make 100 Candles

The 100-candle list, before a single pack is chosen

A container candle is six raw materials: wax, fragrance oil, a wick, a sticker to hold the wick while you pour, the jar, and a care label. Dyes and boxes are choices; these six are the candle. So the list starts with one candle and multiplies. The standard here is a 200g finished candle at an 8% fragrance load — 184g of wax and 16g of oil. At 10% the same candle is 180g of wax and 20g of oil.

Multiplying is easy. The part people skip is the allowance: wax clings to the jug, a jar gets topped up after a sinkhole, a bottle is never quite empty. We plan 4% extra wax and 3% extra oil — planning allowances, not measured losses; your first batch will give you your real figure. Jars and wicks get spares too, because a failed candle can be re-melted but its wick cannot be reused and a chipped jar cannot be sold.

Notice the wax line: 19.14 kg. There is no 19 kg bag, so you will buy 20 kg — four 5 kg bags or two 10 kg bags. Every line rounds the same way: 1.65 kg of oil becomes four 500g bottles, 100 care labels become a roll of 500. That rounding is the gap between "cost per candle" and "cash at checkout", covered further down. For the wax maths alone — five candle sizes, three loads, every pack combination — see how much wax do I need to make 100 candles.

Budget build: ₹19,653.40 for 100 candles

The budget build uses the lowest-priced candle soy wax CSI lists, four oils from the lower end of the price range, the plainest jar sold in a 100-pack, and the Eco wick that the wax's page recommends. Every product is in stock in the pack shown, at the listed price.

Why four scents of 25 rather than two of 50? The bottle. At 8%, 25 candles need 400g of oil, 412g with the allowance — one 500g bottle per scent with 88g to spare. Two scents of 50 would need 824g each, a 1 kg bottle apiece, and half the choice on the stall table. Four scents also tells you which one earns a kilo next time. And the per-gram gap between 500g and 1 kg bottles on these four oils is only ₹0 to ₹1.89 per candle.

Eco Soy CSI 400's page states a fragrance add temperature of 80–90°C (85°C) with two minutes of stirring, and no maximum load — so burn a cured test jar before pouring the hundred. On the oils, one CSI buyer wrote that British Rose gives "strong fragrance in cold throw and hot throw" and another called Roasted Coffee "quite strong": useful signals, not burn-test results.

Premium build: ₹39,405 at a 10% load

The premium build changes four things: a coconut-soy wax with a published 13% ceiling, a 10% load, oils from the woody, amber and oud end of the range, and a wooden wick in a matte jar. The load alone moves the list — 180g of wax and 20g of oil per candle, so the oil line grows by a quarter.

Look at the oil lines: a 500g bottle plus a 50g bottle per scent, and that is not padding. At 10%, 25 candles need exactly 500g — the whole bottle, with nothing for the film in the jug or a top-up. With the 3% allowance the need is 515g, and 50g is the smallest listed pack that covers it. Because it costs more per gram, the per-candle column uses the 500g rate and the top-ups show up as shelf stock. If your jar holds less than 200g the problem vanishes: at a 180g fill each scent needs 463.5g.

CSI 468's page states up to 13%, a melting point of 50–53°C and a pour temperature of 58–60°C. A 10% build uses most of that headroom without sitting at the edge. The low pour temperature is a real process change from Eco Soy CSI 400, so switch your thermometer habits with the wax. Its listed price also steps down — ₹650 a kilo at 1 kg, ₹637 at 10 kg — hence 10 kg bags.

The premium candle costs ₹185.26 more in materials than the budget one: ₹70.89 of fragrance oil, ₹41.30 of jar, ₹41.21 of wax and ₹31.86 of wick. Scrutinise a premium list in that order — the reverse of the order most people agonise over it.

Cash out versus cost in the candle

Here is the number most 100-candle plans leave out. The budget candles contain ₹16,910.28 of materials, but checkout is ₹19,653.40. The difference — ₹2,743.12 — is not lost. It is stock bought because packs don't come in 100-candle sizes, plus allowances you may or may not use. In the premium build it is ₹3,968.80. It tells you how much cash the first run really needs, and how much of the second is already paid for.

Two cautions. The "left" figures assume none of the allowance was used; lose the full 4% of wax and the budget leftover is 864g, not 1.6 kg. And leftovers are only an asset if the next batch uses them: twenty C2 wicks are worth ₹188.80 in the same jar and nothing if you change jars. That is the best argument for keeping jar, wick and wax the same between runs and changing only the scents.

The four products both builds stand on

Oils change with your range; stickers are identical in both builds. These four are the structural choices — wax and jar decide the candle, the wick decides whether it burns properly in that jar.

Swap one line, see what it does to 100 candles

Most real ranges sit between the two builds. Start from the budget build and change one line at a time; the table shows what each swap does per candle and across 100.

The biggest swaps are the jar and the wax, and they are close: ₹41.30 for matte glass, ₹43.76 for CSI 468. Oil is next; the wick matters least in rupees unless it is wooden. When a reseller pushes back on price, that ranking tells you which lines to protect and which to economise on. The load row deserves a second look: 8% → 10% costs only ₹11.75 a candle, but pushes each scent's 25 candles to exactly 500g of oil. For where the profit is made after all this, see how much profit is in candle making.

200 ml is not 200 g: rescale the list to your jar

The clear Salsa page says 200ml; the matte jars say "fill weight of 200 ml" — "weight", but in a unit of volume. Wax is lighter than water and nobody fills to the rim, so the real wax weight is something you measure. It takes ten minutes and can change your order by a 5 kg bag.

Notice the 160g row. Without the allowance, 14.72 kg fits in three 5 kg bags; with it, 15.31 kg needs a fourth. Skip the allowance to save ₹1,996 and one top-up session can leave the last candles unpoured. Keep it on the first run, measure your real loss, use that on the second. Only wax and oil grams change in the per-candle column; the fills are examples, not what these jars hold.

Ordering the 100-candle list: sequence and timing

Split a 100-candle run into two orders. The test order: 1 kg of the wax (₹399 for Eco Soy CSI 400, ₹650 for CSI 468), 50g of each scent, a small pack of the wick and a 5-pack of the jar. Pour, cure, burn. The run order follows only when a test jar passes — the full list above, minus what the test covered.

Then build the cure into the calendar. Soy container candles are commonly cured 14–21 days before sale, so a run poured today is stock in two to three weeks. With Diwali on 8 November 2026, a festive 100 should be poured by early October to cure fully and still ship — which means the test jar needs to happen now. More on that: why your candle needs a 14-day cure.

When does the list outgrow listed packs? Not at 100. At 500 the wax runs to roughly 100 kg of bags, the oil moves into 1 kg bottles, the wicks into a 500-pack and the jars into five 100-packs — the point where a WhatsApp quote on the consolidated order is worth asking for. The full 500-candle list is in raw materials required to make 500 candles. For a wider view of what a candle business costs to start, beyond the raw materials, see how much it actually costs to start a candle business in India.

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