I Buy Wax in 10 Kg Packs but Fragrance in 500 g Bottles — How Do I Convert Both Prices Into a Consistent Cost-Per-Gram Calculation for My Candle?

One unit, or no comparison at all

The problem in your question is not arithmetic, it is bookkeeping. A 10 kg wax pack and a 500 g oil bottle arrive priced per pack, and a pack price tells you what left your bank account, not what a candle costs. Until both are expressed in the same unit they cannot be added, cannot be compared, and cannot be multiplied by a recipe. The conversion is one division: pack price ÷ grams in the pack = cost per gram. Everything else on this page is about doing that division so it stays true six months later.

Work it on illustrative figures first, so the method is clear before any live prices appear. Say the 10 kg wax pack was invoiced at ₹5,800.00 and the 500 g oil bottle at ₹2,400.00. Those two numbers are illustrative stand-ins for your own and are not CSI prices. Ten kilograms is 10,000 g, so the wax is ₹5,800.00 ÷ 10,000 = 58.00 paise a gram, or ₹580.00 a kilogram. The bottle is 500 g, so the oil is ₹2,400.00 ÷ 500 = ₹4.80 a gram, or ₹4,800.00 a kilogram. Now they compare, and the comparison is not what the pack prices suggested: the oil costs about 8.3 times what the wax costs, gram for gram, even though the wax invoice was more than twice the size.

That inversion is the whole reason this page exists. Makers shop hardest for the line with the largest invoice, and on a candle bench the largest invoice is almost always the wax, because wax is bought in tens of kilograms and fragrance in hundreds of grams. Per gram, the ranking reverses. A rate card fixes the ranking in place so that every later decision — which line to negotiate, which line to measure more carefully, which line a 10% price move actually hurts — is made on the right number.

How far to carry the decimals, and why it matters more for wax

Every rupee figure in this series is written to the paisa, because that is how money is written. A rate is a different animal. When a rate is small, two decimal places is a blunt instrument, and wax is the smallest rate on a candle bench. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 at the 10 kg pack is ₹507.40 a kilogram. Per gram that is 50.74 paise. Write it as a rupee figure rounded to two places and it becomes fifty-one paise, which is 0.26 paise a gram too high — ₹2.60 a kilogram, ₹0.52 on a 200 g pour and ₹26.00 across the 10 kg pack you just bought.

There are two clean ways out and one dirty one. The clean ways are to hold wax as a rate per kilogram, or to hold it in paise per gram. Both keep the precision where it lives, and both read naturally in Indian bookkeeping. The dirty way is to keep four rupee decimals in a spreadsheet column and hope nobody formats it. That works until somebody does. Pick a unit per material, write it in the column heading, and stop thinking about it.

The same problem runs the other way on fragrance, where two decimals are enough for the candle but not enough for the pack comparison. Jasmine Fragrance Oil reads ₹3.92 a gram at the 500 gm bottle and ₹3.92 a gram at the 1 kg pack — a difference that vanishes at two decimal places and reappears at the kilogram, where the two rungs are ₹3,922.00 and ₹3,923.00, ₹1.00 apart. Neither figure is wrong; they answer different questions. Use the per-gram rate to cost a candle and the per-kilogram rate to compare pack sizes, and label which is which.

The rate card, across every pack CSI publishes

Here is the conversion done for both materials at every pack size on the store in September 2026. Read it as a template rather than a shopping list: the value is the columns, not the rows. Your own card wants the same shape — pack, price, grams, rate — with your materials in it and the month written at the top.

Two things in that table are worth saying out loud because they cut against the usual advice. The wax rate is identical at 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg — ₹507.40 a kilogram at all three — so the 10 kg pack in your question buys you convenience and one delivery, not a better rate on the wax itself. And the oil's steepest step is at the bottom of its ladder, between 15 gm and 50 gm, not at the top: ₹6.87 a gram falls to ₹4.60, while the move from 500 gm to 1 kg is ₹1.00 a kilogram in the other direction. Neither of those is a criticism of the store; both are facts your rate card should carry, because a costing built on the assumption that bigger is always cheaper per gram will be wrong here.

Building your own rate card in four steps

Where delivery belongs, if you want it in the rate

A rate card can be held two ways: at the price as invoiced, or landed — the price plus what it cost to get the pack to you. Both are defensible. What is not defensible is a card where some rows are landed and some are not, which is the same disease as mixing units and just as hard to spot later. Decide once, write it at the top of the card, and apply it to every row.

If you choose landed, the conversion is the same division with a second numerator. CSI's delivery is a published flat rate by weight band, and it is billed on the packed weight, so a 10 kg pack of Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 at a stored packed weight of 11.0 kg falls in the band published at ₹1,200.00 on Standard Shipping in September 2026. Spread across the 10,000 g inside, that is 12.00 paise a gram, which takes the landed wax rate to 62.74 paise a gram. The 500 gm Jasmine Fragrance Oil bottle stores 0.8 kg and falls in the band published at ₹110.00 on Standard Shipping, which across 500 g is 22.00 paise a gram and takes the landed oil rate to ₹4.14 a gram. Rates are the published bands as at September 2026 and can change.

Look at what that does to the ranking, because it is the useful part. In rate terms the delivery burden on the wax is 12.00 paise a gram against 22.00 paise on the oil — the small bottle carries almost twice the delivery per gram that the big pack does, even though the wax parcel costs far more to send. That is the real argument for the 10 kg pack, and it is an argument about parcels, not about the wax. A landed card also drifts: order two bottles together and the two 0.8 kg parcels at ₹220.00 between them become one 1.6 kg parcel at ₹180.00, a difference of ₹40.00, and every landed rate on the card moves. If you cannot face maintaining that, hold the card as invoiced and keep delivery as its own line in the cost sheet. That is what most makers should do.

What a rate card is not

A rate card costs grams. It does not cost a candle, and the step between the two is where the series convention has to be stated. Fragrance load on these pages is a percentage of wax weight, as CSI product pages state it, so 200 g of wax at 8% carries 16 g of oil and 216 g goes into the vessel. Read the same "200 g" as the finished weight instead and the split is different. Neither reading changes your rate card — the rate is a property of the material, not of the recipe — but it changes how many grams you multiply, which is why the convention belongs in writing at the top of the cost sheet rather than in your head. How to calculate fragrance load covers the grams; this page covers the rate.

Nor is a rate card a buying decision. It tells you what each rung costs, not which rung to stand on, and those are different questions with different inputs — how fast you turn stock over, how much cash you want tied up, how many scents you are still testing. A maker who reads ₹3.92 a gram at 1 kg and commits a kilogram to an untested scent has used the card to make exactly the wrong decision. Get the rate right first; decide what to buy separately.

One last honesty note about the rate card itself. It is only as current as the day you built it, and the store's prices are the authority, not your spreadsheet. Two published facts are worth carrying in the header alongside the month: CSI store prices are inclusive of applicable taxes, and GST invoicing is available on request. If your other suppliers quote before tax, your card has a consistency problem that a unit conversion will not solve — that is a different question and it belongs on a different sheet. Ask CSI for the invoice, keep the invoices together, and rebuild the card from them rather than from memory.

Frequently asked questions