Should I Include Wax Lost in Pouring Vessels and Rejected Candles When Calculating My Real Raw-Material Cost?

The pitcher heel: weigh it, then decide its fate

Every batch leaves scented wax behind: a film on the walls of the melting pot, a puddle in the pitcher that will not pour cleanly, drips on the spout. Call it the heel. It is real material you bought: at 8% fragrance on the worked candle (Luxury Soy Wax Chunks at the 10 kg price and British Rose at the 1 kg price), scented wax costs 0.7973 a gram. A 30 g heel (a worked example; weigh yours) is ₹23.92: ₹16.56 of wax and ₹7.36 of oil.

How to weigh it: tare the empty, clean pitcher once and write the tare on it. After the last pour of a batch, before anything cools into the bin, weigh the pitcher (and the pot, if you pour from it) again. The difference is the heel. Do it for ten batches and use the average; it will vary with how fast you pour and how warm the room is.

Per-candle allocation at batches of 10, 50 and 200

Because the heel weighs about the same whatever you pour, its cost per candle is heel value ÷ candles in the batch. At 500 candles a month (worked example), the number of batches, and so the number of heels, depends on batch size:

In batches of 10 you scrap 1,500 g of scented wax a month, about 7.5 candles' worth, ₹14,352.26 a year. In batches of 50 the same habit costs ₹2,870.45; moving from 10 to 50 saves ₹11,481.81 a year without changing any material. At 200 per batch the heel is 0.07% of the fill: still a line on the sheet, no longer a decision. If you sell small batches of many scents, this line is bigger than most of the "cheaper material" savings this series discusses, which is why it belongs in the BOM.

Scent changes are where heels get scrapped

Most makers reuse a heel when the next batch is the same scent and bin it when it is not. With one pitcher and four scents, say 8 scent changes a month force a scrapped heel (worked example): ₹191.36 a month. A second Large pitcher, kept for the scent you pour most, pays back in about 3.7 months on that alone; one pitcher per scent (three extra, ₹2,124.00) in about 11.1 months. Label the pitchers by scent and keep them covered.

Keep the big heel unscented

Where the fragrance goes in decides how much of the heel is scented. If you melt wax in a pot or melter and add fragrance there, the whole leftover is scented and tied to one scent. If you keep the melter for plain wax and add fragrance per pitcher (weighing oil for exactly the wax in that pitcher), the larger residue stays as unscented wax, which can go into any scent's next batch. In the worked example, say 22 g of the 30 g stays behind in the melter as plain wax (₹12.14 of wax, reusable for anything) and only an 8 g scented film is left in the pitcher (₹6.38). In batches of 50 that turns a ₹2,870.45 yearly scrap into ₹765.45. It is a process change, not a free lunch: mixing per pitcher needs accurate weighing every time and a thorough stir in a smaller volume, and batch-to-batch consistency is exactly what to check in your next test. The figures are worked examples; weigh your own.

Rejected candles: three routes and what each loses

A candle rejected at QC (before labelling) contains 184 g of wax (₹110.38), 16 g of oil (₹49.09), a wick (₹9.44) and a jar with lid (₹60.00, worked example): ₹228.91 of materials. What you lose depends on the route:

At 2% rejects on 500 candles (10 a month), route B instead of route A is worth ₹23,336.40 a year. Spread over the 490 good candles, scrapped rejects add ₹4.67 to each; remelted ones ₹0.70. The jar is the swing item: if your jar is dear and reusable, cleaning it is the best-paid ten minutes in the workshop; if it is cheap or the reject damaged it, route C is the honest number. Cosmetic rejects (mild frosting, a slightly rough top) are a separate question: sold as seconds or kept, rather than remelted, is the frosting-rejects post.

The remelt caveat: scented wax heated twice

Every remelt of a heel or a reject heats scented wax a second time. Holding fragrance hot is commonly linked to losing some of the lighter top notes, and some oils darken with heat; how much depends on the oil, the temperature and the time, and no CSI page states a figure. So when remelt goes into a new batch, that batch is no longer exactly your approved formula: part of its oil has been heated twice, and you cannot top up "the missing oil" because you do not know how much is missing. Treat it as the formulation change it is:

If the test shows candles with remelt at your cap cannot be told apart from fresh ones, the practice is approved at that cap; record it on your change-control sheet so it stays approved and does not quietly creep to 30%. The method for that kind of comparison is the change-control series (why one variable at a time, which process changes count as a revised formulation); finding the lowest load that still throws, if you suspect the remelt is weaker, is the lowest effective load post.

Putting heels and rejects into the BOM

The clean way is a "per good candle" BOM: everything spent in the month ÷ good candles made. Worked month: 500 poured in batches of 50 (10 heels), 2% rejects (10), 490 good, labels applied after QC. If every heel and reject is scrapped:

Against a simple BOM of ₹233.91 per candle, the scrapped rejects add ₹4.67 and the heels ₹0.49 per good candle. Switch to reused heels and route-B rejects and the same month costs ₹234.87 per good candle: ₹4.20 less, ₹24,706.85 a year. None of it needs a cheaper material; all of it needs a scale and a habit. For the wider true-cost picture (test candles, failed batches, breakage) see the true manufacturing cost post; for losses that grow as batches get bigger (evaporation, over-dosing, top-up pours) see the scale-up losses post.

How to measure it for a month

Then decide where the money is. If heels dominate, pour bigger batches or keep a pitcher per scent. If rejects dominate, reduce them at the source before you get clever with remelting (the causes and first fixes are in the true-cost post). And if both are small, your BOM is honest already: go back to the order of attack and the cost-per-gram worksheet.

Tools and materials

Four CSI items, chosen on page statements, price and stock on 4 October 2026. CSI publishes no remelt or burn data; nothing here is ranked on performance.

Skip for this decision: bigger wax bags "to cover the heel" (flat per kilo; the heel is a process loss), the out-of-stock Small pitcher and weighing scale, and a second pitcher if you already pour one scent per session.

Frequently asked questions