How Do I Account for Supplier MOQ When My Calculated Requirement Is Smaller than the Minimum Pack Size Available?

Buy the smallest pack — then decide what the leftover is for

First, what "MOQ" means at CSI. The store states no minimum order quantity. For each product, the smallest listed in-stock size is effectively the minimum you can buy: 15 g for 51 fragrance oils, 50 g or 100 g for most of the others, 500 g for the container soy waxes, 1 kg for Natural Soy Pearl, 20 wicks for Eco Thin C1 while its 10-pack is out of stock, 12 Golden Aluminium Tins, 5 White Matte jars, 40 wick stickers. So the practical form of this question is: my calculated need is below the smallest pack — what do I buy, and how do I account for the difference?

The answer has three parts. Buy the cheapest in-stock combination that covers the need — which is not always the smallest pack (Love Spell's 100 g is cheaper per gram than its 50 g). Price the leftover — the rupees you are paying for material the current batch will not use. And give the leftover a job before you buy: carry it into the next batch, scale this batch to use the pack, swap to a material with a smaller pack, or wait. For most items in a small pilot the leftover is a few per cent and the first option is obvious. For a few — here, Sandalwood, whose 15 g, 50 g and 100 g are out of stock on the 4 October re-check — the leftover is most of the pack, and the decision deserves five minutes of arithmetic.

CSI's effective minimums, item by item

The table below is the minimum-pack map for a candle BOM at CSI, taken from the listed, in-stock sizes. It is the first thing to check when a requirement looks small. The last column converts each minimum into what it makes, so you can see at a glance whether a small batch is going to strand material.

Two lines repay attention. Dye is the material where the minimum most often dwarfs the need — CSI does not publish dye doses per kilo of wax, so follow the dye's own page, but for a pilot of a few dozen candles a 15 g bottle at ₹236.00 is almost always mostly leftover. And Sandalwood is a reminder that the effective minimum moves with stock: on the 24 September pull its 15 g was ₹93.22; on the 4 October re-check only the 500 g and 1 kg are buyable. That is a stock-out, not a discontinuation — ask on WhatsApp before you plan around it either way.

The worked pilot: four scents in 85 g tins

The example is a small launch: four scents, one 12-tin pack each. The Golden Aluminium Tin is chosen because it is one of only two CSI containers with a published fill — 85 g — so the BOM needs no guesswork. At 8% a tin takes 6.8 g of oil and 78.2 g of wax. Of the twelve tins per scent, eleven are for sale and one is kept as a retained sample and burn-test tin (a labelled working practice). With a 3% pour-loss allowance on wax and oil, each scent needs 84.0 g of oil and the whole pilot needs 3.87 kg of Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468. The wick is the reader's own tested choice for this tin — CSI publishes no wick-size-per-diameter chart.

Read the four rows as four cases. Peach Melon Berry has a 15 g size, but covering 84.0 g with 50 g + three 15 g packs costs ₹467.28, more than one 100 g pack at ₹417.72 — so the right buy is the 100 g, with 16.0 g spare. Love Spell starts at 50 g, but its 100 g is cheaper per gram, so 100 g again. Midnight Bakhoor Royale starts at 100 g; the need fits inside it. All three leave about 16 g each — a couple of tins' worth, which any second batch absorbs. Sandalwood is different in kind: the only buyable size is 500 g, the pilot uses 17% of it, and 416 g worth ₹2,090.91 stays in the bottle.

Five ways to handle a minimum pack that is too big

How to account for the leftover in your BOM

Once a leftover exists, it has to go somewhere in your numbers, or your per-candle cost will be wrong in one direction or the other. There are two honest treatments. If the leftover has a confirmed job (option A, B or E), record it as opening stock for the next batch at its purchase rate, and cost this batch at the per-gram price. If it has no confirmed job, cost this batch at the effective rate — pack price divided by grams actually used — and treat any later use as a bonus. The worst treatment is the common one: cost the batch per gram and forget the leftover exists, which flatters the pilot and hides a write-off.

For three of the four oils the gap is modest and disappears with the next batch. For Sandalwood it is ₹194.31 a tin — the difference between a tin that looks profitable and one that may not be. That is the whole case for deciding the leftover's job before buying. Choosing pack sizes for minimum leftover goes further on matching packs to requirements, and the smallest spend to validate a candle idea covers the pilot budget as a whole.

The pilot's priced CSI order

Everything rounded to real in-stock CSI packs, with the allowance stack in the series' order: one retained/test tin per scent counted as a whole candle, no reject allowance (it is a pilot — rejects are what you are looking for), 3% pour loss on wax and oil only, no breakage on tins, then rounding. CSI 468 is bought as 4 × 1 kg — exactly the same ₹650.00 a kilo as two 500 g bags, and 134 g spare. Eco Thin C1 wicks come as 1 × 50-pack, because the 10-pack is out of stock and a 50 is cheaper than three 20s.

That is ₹8,714.12, or ₹198.05 per saleable tin before labour, packaging, freight and GST — with ₹2,356.62 of it sitting in four oil bottles as leftover. If you take option D for Sandalwood and launch three scents, the order drops by ₹2,513.40 for the oil, plus one pack of tins and its share of wax and wicks.

When the minimum-pack problem goes away

Minimum packs are a small-batch problem. As soon as a scent sells, its monthly need passes the 100 g mark and the leftover becomes a rounding detail. In this example, a scent selling 30 tins a month needs 210 g of oil a month; a 500 g pack lasts 2.4 months. At that point the question changes from "how do I avoid leftover" to "how much safety stock and how often do I reorder" — the territory of safety stock by material role and per-material reorder points. The 13 kg versus 10 kg wax post is the same rounding problem at production scale.

This page belongs to the procurement cluster: the 30-day purchase order sets the requirement, this page handles the case where it falls below a pack, frequent versus bulk buying and shared materials decide what to hold, and the capstone procurement system places MOQ and pack selection between buffer and purchase order.

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