I Need to Produce 1,000 × 100 g Scented Candles — How Much Wax and Fragrance Oil Should I Order Before Beginning Production?

The net requirement, line by line

Every quantity calculation in this series uses the same convention: the fragrance load is a share of the finished candle's weight. So a 100 g candle at 8% holds 8 g of oil and 92 g of wax. It is not 100 g of wax with 8 g added on top, which would make a 108 g candle that no longer matches the fill line you tested. Once each candle is split correctly, the batch is plain multiplication.

The last row is the check worth doing on every sheet: wax plus oil must equal the finished weight. If your spreadsheet shows 100 kg of wax and 8 kg of oil, it is describing 108 kg of candle, 80 more 100 g candles than anyone asked for. At the CSI 468 10 kg rate of ₹637.00 a kilo, that stray 8 kg of wax is ₹5,096.00 sitting in a sack. The same mistake at other scales is worked through in the 50 × 200 g calculation and the 500 × 100 g corporate run.

Material cost per finished candle, at the rates used below, is easy to read off the net split: 92 g of CSI 468 at ₹637.00 a kilo is ₹58.60, 8 g of Lavender at the 1 kg rate of ₹5,221.00 a kilo is ₹41.77, one Eco Thin C1 wick is ₹5.90 and one Yankee 130 ml jar with its clear cap is ₹47.20. That is ₹153.47 per candle in raw materials. It excludes labour, labels, boxes, freight and GST, which you add from your own quotes.

If you have not fixed the load yet

The title does not state a fragrance load, and many makers placing a first 1,000-candle order have not fixed one either. That is fine, as long as you know how much the order moves when the load moves. CSI uses 8% as its default working load for maths. Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 does not have a published fragrance ceiling in the data behind this page, so treat 6–10% as a labelled test range, not a specification, and check the wax's product page or ask CSI on WhatsApp for the wax maker's stated maximum before you run above 8%.

Two things fall out of the table. First, the wax barely moves: about 2.1 kg for each two-point step in load. Second, the oil moves a lot in money terms, roughly ₹10,902.00 from 6% to 8% with Lavender. That is why the load belongs in the development order, not in a guess. A 10% candle is not automatically a stronger candle either. A melt pool that never reaches the glass, a wick that is too small, or a two-day cure will hold back scent at any load. Settle wick and cure first, then choose the lowest load that passes your burn test. The 10% version of this calculation shows the same arithmetic at the top of the range, and the 10% fragrance-oil order covers the oil side on its own.

Why the order comes in two stages

Three numbers decide the production order and none of them is known on day one: the true fill weight of your jar, the load you will run, and the wick. Buy the big order before you know them and a single wrong guess can strand kilos of wax or a thousand wrong wicks. So split the purchase. The development order is small, about ₹2,234.80, and buys enough material for 12 test candles: six at 6% and six at 8%, half wicked with Eco Thin C1 and half with Thick C2. CSI does not publish a wick size for any jar diameter, so the wick really does have to be tested in your jar, with your wax and your oil.

Why Lavender at 100 g rather than 15 g? The 15 g is ₹105.02 and holds 15 g, less than the 87 g the test plan needs. The 100 g is the smaller total spend that actually covers the tests, and it costs ₹5.40 a gram against ₹7.00 for the 15 g. Where you are still choosing between scents, 15 g testers of each candidate come first. How much oil to keep for testing sets that up separately.

The jar needs the same care. CSI lists the Yankee Glass Jar as 130 ml, which is its brim volume, not a fill weight. Solid soy wax is lighter than water; using a labelled approximate factor of 0.86–0.90 g per ml, a brim-full jar would hold roughly 111.8–117.0 g of wax. A 100 g fill should therefore sit a little below the brim, but that is an estimate. Pour one jar to your chosen line and weigh it. If the real fill is 95 g or 105 g, every number in this guide moves with it. The 200 ml jar calculation and estimating fill from a water weight go through the method.

Rounding to real CSI packs

The production order covers the 1,000 candles plus 10 QC pulls, one from roughly every hundred, which you keep as retained samples from the run. Add the 3% pour-loss allowance and the finished-equivalent weight is 1,010 × 100 g × 1.03 = 104.03 kg. At 8% that is 95.708 kg of wax and 8.322 kg of oil. The order of operations matters: net candles first, then test and QC candles, then the loss percentage, then rounding. Applying the loss before adding the tests understates the order slightly; rounding before the loss can understate it by a whole pack.

The wax rounds to 9 × 10 kg + 1 × 5 kg + 1 × 1 kg. CSI 468 is priced almost flat from 5 kg upward: ₹3,185.00 for 5 kg and ₹6,370.00 for 10 kg, both ₹637.00 a kilo, while the 1 kg is ₹650.00. So the pack mix barely changes the total; it changes how many bags you carry. The oil rounds to 8 × 1 kg + 4 × 100 g. Lavender costs ₹5.22 a gram at 1 kg and ₹5.40 at 100 g, so topping up with 100 g bottles rather than a 500 g (₹5.24 a gram) is the cheaper way to cover the last few hundred grams here, by ₹460.00. If the wick test chose Thick C2, the wick line becomes 1 × 1,000 + 2 × 20 at ₹9,817.60 instead of ₹6,136.00.

A note on volume pricing. CSI's listed wax bags stop at 10 kg for CSI 468, and oils stop at 1 kg per listing. There is no published discount for ordering ten bags at once, and per-gram price breaks on the listed catalogue are rare: for most oils the 1 kg costs within 1% of the 100 g per gram, and only 24 oils show a 1 kg saving of 5% or more. Lavender's 1 kg saves 3.3% on its 100 g. For quantities this size, the right move is to send the exact quantities on WhatsApp and ask for a quote; do not assume a discount figure, because none is published.

The full priced bill of materials

Divide the total by the 1,000 candles the customer receives and the raw-material cost is ₹161.66 per delivered candle. That is higher than the ₹153.47 per-candle figure worked out from the net split, and the difference is the real cost of testing, QC pulls, pour loss, spare wicks, spare jars and pack rounding. Put the higher number in your quotation. Quoting from the net figure is how a run that looked profitable on paper loses its margin in the workshop; the quoting-before-wastage guide looks at that trap across larger orders.

Five checks before you pay

A calculation is only as good as the three inputs it started from. Before the production order goes through, run these five checks against the development results. Each one has caught a real-sized error on runs like this.

The fill-weight line is the one that surprises people. Five grams feels like nothing on one jar, but across 1,010 jars it is more than 5.2 kg of finished candle. That is why a weighed test pour comes before the order, and why a jar's millilitre rating is never a fill weight. If the client adds units after you have bought, do not rerun the whole order; calculate only the increment, as the 500-to-750 wedding order shows.

If this run is the first of several, keep the working sheet. The next 1,000 × 100 g run uses the same formula with your measured loss instead of the 3% assumption, and after two or three runs you will know your real number. The 1,000 × 200 g run works the same stack at twice the weight with a heavier test plan, the 2,000 × 150 g guide is about catching the finished-weight-as-wax error in a spreadsheet, and 10 kg of soy wax into 100 g candles runs this calculation backwards. For the fragrance side of a 1,000 × 100 g run in more depth, including when 1 kg bottles stop making sense, see I Need 1,000 × 100 g Candles at 8% Fragrance — Should I Buy Fragrance Oil in 1 Kg Packs or Move to a Larger Bulk Quantity?; for how many spare wicks a thousand candles really need, I Need 1,000 Candles and Each Uses One Wick — Should I Order Exactly 1,000 Wicks or Keep Additional Pieces for Testing, Defects and Production Mistakes?.

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