I Need to Produce 1,000 Candles for Diwali — How Much Additional Wax Should I Order Above the Calculated Requirement to Avoid Running Short?

The calculated requirement

Most jars don't publish a fill weight. The Golden Aluminium Tin does: 85 g. That makes it a good Diwali workhorse — light to ship, easy to gift in sets, and one less assumption in the maths. At an 8% fragrance load (a share of the total finished weight), each tin is 6.8 g of oil and 78.2 g of wax. A thousand tins contain 78.2 kg of wax. That is the calculated requirement, and it is the number most makers order.

It is also the number that runs out. It assumes every gram you melt ends up in a tin, that every tin you pour is sellable, that nothing is spilled and nobody tests anything. None of those holds in real production. The question in the title is how much to add, and the honest answer is: enough to cover each thing that actually happens, and no more.

Natural Soy Pearl Wax is the one wax in CSI's listed range with a real bulk break: ₹450.00 for 1 kg, then ₹424.80 a kilo at 5 kg, 10 kg and 50 kg — 5.6% cheaper. That makes the 50 kg bag the natural base of a Diwali order this size. Its fragrance-load ceiling is not quoted in our data, so check the product page or ask CSI on WhatsApp for the wax maker's stated maximum; the 8% here is a working load for the maths, not a specification.

What the extra kilos are for

At the 5% level, the order carries 4.73 kg more wax than the 1,000 tins contain. Here is where it goes. Every percentage is a labelled working assumption — the usual guide is to plan 3–5% extra for pour loss and test burns — and you should replace them with your own measured losses once you have them.

Notice what is not on the list. Most rejected soy candles can be re-melted and re-poured into the same scent, so a sunk top or an off-centre wick costs you time and a tin, not the wax. The 1% for rejects is for the ones you can't re-melt into this batch — a tin poured with the wrong oil, a candle contaminated with debris. And top-up pours for sinkholes are already inside the 85 g fill: the finished weight includes them.

3%, 5% or 8% — pricing the overage

Going from the tests-only order to the 5% order costs ₹1,674.00 in Natural Soy Pearl, ₹2,029.60 in CSI 464 and ₹2,405.00 in Luxury Soy Wax Chunks. Going on to 8% adds another ₹1,224.00 in Pearl. Across the three waxes the pattern is the same: each step of overage costs about as much as the wax in a few dozen tins.

Which wax to use is a separate decision from how much. CSI 464 is rated up to 10% fragrance load and Luxury Soy Wax Chunks up to 13% (the wax makers' stated formulation maximums, not regulatory limits); Natural Soy Pearl's ceiling isn't in our data. If your Diwali range is already poured in one of them, stay with it — switching wax six weeks before the busiest week of the year is how finish and throw surprises happen. If you are choosing fresh, run a burn test in the tin first.

The cost of running short

Suppose you order only for the calculated tins and tests — 79 kg after rounding — and your real losses come to 4%. Production actually needs 82.14 kg. You are 3.14 kg short: enough wax for about 39 tins. You find this out on the last pour day, because shortfalls always show up at the end.

At that point you need a top-up order for a few kilos, in the most crowded shipping week of the year. CSI doesn't publish delivery times, and nobody can promise a date in Diwali week that depends on courier capacity. If the top-up comes late, those 39 tins either ship late or don't ship. Compare that with the ₹1,674.00 the 5% order costs over the tight one. That's the entire case for ordering the overage up front.

The Diwali calendar

Diwali falls on Sunday 8 November 2026 — 43 days from 26 September. Work backwards from your customer's delivery date, not forwards from today. The steps below are the ones that decide whether the wax overage matters; the durations are yours to fill in, because melter throughput, cure times and courier times are not published figures and vary by workshop.

If the walkthrough leaves you short of days, the answer is not to trim the overage — it is to order sooner. The wax is the heaviest thing on the list, and the thing every tin needs. When Diwali doubles your sales covers building stock for the season as a whole.

The full 1,000-tin list

That's ₹100.25 of CSI materials per sellable tin, with every test and allowance spread across the 1,000 your client pays for. Lids for the tins, labels, sleeves and gift boxes are not CSI items; add them from your own suppliers' quotes. The oil line uses a 4% allowance; I Have a 500-Candle Wedding Order with a Custom Fragrance — How Much Extra Fragrance Oil Should I Buy for Testing and Production Wastage? goes into how much extra oil to hold when the scent is still being developed, and A Corporate Customer Wants 2,000 Candles in One Fragrance — How Do I Calculate How Many Kilograms of Fragrance Oil I Need Before Placing the Raw-Material Order? into ordering oil by the kilo.

The rest of the order follows the same logic. Costing a first larger order builds the one-candle bill of materials, the 500-candle post stages the purchase around a sample approval, the 5,000-candle post sets a separate wastage rate for every material, and which materials to secure first sorts the list by how long each takes to arrive.

Frequently asked questions