My Business Uses 100 Kg of Soy Wax Every Month — Should I Keep 100 Kg, 150 Kg or 200 Kg Available at Any Time?

100 kg a month in days, not months

The first thing to do with 100 kg a month is to stop thinking in months. A month is a billing period, not a production unit. Your pours happen on days, your supplier's lead time is counted in days, and a stock-out announces itself on a Tuesday afternoon with half a batch poured. So convert once, properly, and keep the daily figure written somewhere you can see it.

One hundred kilograms over a thirty-day month is 3.33 kg a calendar day. If you only pour six days a week — twenty-six working days in a typical month — the figure rises to 3.85 kg per working day. Both numbers matter and they answer different questions. The calendar rate tells you how fast a shelf empties, which is what cover is about. The working rate tells you how much wax a single pour day consumes, which is what you lose when the shelf is empty. Use the calendar rate for cover and the working rate for damage.

Translate that into candles and the number starts to feel real. At the series convention of a 185 g wax fill with fragrance at 8% of wax weight — 185 g of wax plus 14.8 g of oil, a finished candle just under 200 g — 100 kg of wax is about 540 candles a month, or roughly 18 candles a day. Allow a 4% planning allowance for spills, top-ups and the wax left in the pouring jug and the usable figure is nearer 519 candles. That allowance is not a CSI specification; it is a planning habit, and you should replace it with your own measured loss as soon as you have one.

Now the definition that does all the work for the rest of this page. Days of cover = stock on hand ÷ average daily consumption. That is it. One hundred kilos ÷ 3.33 kg = 30 days. One hundred and fifty ÷ 3.33 = 45 days. Two hundred ÷ 3.33 = 60 days. Every argument about holding levels is really an argument about how many of those days you are willing to buy, and at 100 kg a month each day of cover costs you ₹1,689.64 of CSI 464 sitting still.

The three policies, fully costed

Here are the three options with every consequence attached — cover, cash, pack count and what each one actually protects you against. The rupee figures use three waxes to show how much the choice of wax changes the price of the identical policy: Eco Soy CSI 400 as the cheapest listed route, CSI 464 as the mid-range container wax, and Natural Soy Pearl Wax because it is the only wax CSI lists in a 50 kg pack.

Read the third column before the rupees. "Spare pour days after a 30-day cycle" is the number that kills the 100 kg policy. If your reorder cycle is monthly — you order, it arrives, you consume, you order again — then a 100 kg holding level means your stock is designed to hit zero at precisely the moment the next delivery lands. Any slippage at all, from either side, becomes idle time. At 3.85 kg per working day, one idle pour day is 21 candles you have already costed and possibly already sold.

The 150 kg policy converts that knife-edge into a fortnight. You can place the order late, the courier can be slow, a batch can be delayed, and you keep pouring. The 200 kg policy doubles that slack and doubles the cost of it, and for most makers at 100 kg a month the second fortnight is dead weight — ₹25,370 of CSI 464 that will be the same ₹25,370 in six months' time. It earns its place only when you can name the risk it covers.

One honesty note that matters at this volume. Lead time is your figure, not ours. CSI publishes no delivery times and nothing on this page assumes any. Pull the last six orders you placed, write down the gap between the day you paid and the day the wax was on your bench, and use the worst of the six rather than the average. The worst case is what your buffer exists for.

What 100 kg costs at every listed pack

Before you decide how much to hold, decide what a kilogram costs at the quantity you are actually buying. This table takes each of CSI's six candle soy and coconut-soy waxes, shows the largest pack listed, works out the per-kilo rate at that pack, and compares it with the 1 kg rate. Then it multiplies up to the three policies. Nothing here is a quote for 100 kg; these are the listed pack prices multiplied out, which is the ceiling a maker pays before any recurring arrangement is discussed.

Three conclusions, and they are not the ones most makers expect. First, there is no volume reward to chase on four of the six waxes. CSI 464 and Soy Pillar Wax are flat to 10 kg, Eco Soy CSI 400 is flat to 5 kg to within two paise a kilo, and Luxury Soy Wax Chunks are dearer in the 10 kg bag — ₹599.90/kg against ₹599/kg at a single kilo, which across 150 kg is ₹135 you pay for the convenience of fifteen bags instead of a hundred and fifty. That is a trivial amount of money and a completely non-trivial fact about how to think: the big bag is a handling decision, not a price decision.

Second, where the ladder does step, it steps meaningfully. Natural Soy Pearl Wax drops ₹25.20/kg from the 1 kg rate once you are at 5 kg or above, and it is the only CSI wax listed at 50 kg. At a 150 kg policy that is three bags, ₹63,720, and ₹12,390 less than the same policy on CSI 464. CSI 468 drops ₹13/kg at 5 kg and above. If you are choosing a wax now and the candle will take either, the ladder is worth reading before the price tag.

Third, and this is the one that governs the whole page: because the per-kilo price barely moves with quantity, you are not being paid to overstock. On many materials in many trades a deeper buy earns a discount that offsets the cash it ties up. Here, going from 100 kg to 200 kg of CSI 464 costs you exactly double and saves you exactly nothing per kilo. Every rupee of the second hundred kilos is pure working capital, which is why the decision has to be made on risk alone — and why 150 kg, not 200 kg, is the defensible middle.

Which wax to hold 150 kg of

Three waxes cover almost every business pouring 100 kg a month. Each card shows every listed pack with the per-kilo rate and how many 185 g candles each pack yields, plus what a 150 kg policy works out to. Choose on the stated specification and on how the wax behaves in your jar first — then let the ladder break the tie.

Two waxes deliberately left off the cards. Eco Soy CSI 400 is the cheapest 150 kg at ₹59,880 and its page is specific about method — add fragrance at 80–90°C (85°C), stir gently for two minutes, pour directly, with Eco Wicks recommended — but its largest listed pack is 5 kg, so a 150 kg policy is thirty bags to receive, label and store, and its page states no maximum fragrance load. Soy Pillar Wax at a flat ₹600/kg is for pillars and moulds, not containers, and should be held as its own line with its own cover rather than folded into a container-wax policy.

150 kg is not one bag of 150 kg

A holding level is a total, not a shape. Two businesses can both hold 150 kg and have completely different exposure depending on how that 150 kg is arranged. This is where most policies quietly fail, and it has nothing to do with the number.

If all 150 kg is a single wax used across every SKU you make, the policy is doing its job: forty-five days of cover on your binding constraint. If 150 kg is three waxes at 50 kg each because you pour a container line, a pillar line and a premium coconut-soy line, then each line has only fifteen days of cover against its own consumption — and the business is far more fragile than the headline suggests. The total has not changed. The protection has collapsed.

The third and fourth rows are the common failure and they come from the same instinct: buying evenly across materials that sell unevenly. Fifty kilos of a wax you use at 10 kg a month is five months of cover — money that is not just idle but idle for a very long time — while the wax carrying 60% of your output sits at twenty-five days. The correction is not to buy more in total. It is to reallocate the same 150 kg in proportion to consumption: compute each wax's own daily rate, apply the same days-of-cover target to each, and let the kilograms fall where the arithmetic puts them.

There is a storage dimension too, and at this volume it is not trivial. One hundred and fifty kilos arriving as thirty 5 kg bags of Eco Soy CSI 400 is a different proposition from three 50 kg bags of Natural Soy Pearl Wax. More units means more handling, more part-opened bags and more chances for wax to be contaminated or mislabelled; fewer, larger units means a single opened bag is a large exposure if it is stored badly. Keep wax sealed, off the floor, away from sunlight and away from fragrance oils — not because CSI publishes a storage specification, because none of the wax pages state one, but because soy picks up stray scent and because an opened bag in an Indian summer is a bag you want closed again quickly.

Setting your own number in five steps

One hundred and fifty kilograms is the answer for a typical business at this volume. Here is how to derive your own, so that the number survives the first month your sales move. Do this once with a calculator and once a quarter thereafter.

When to move off 150 kg

A holding level is a decision with a shelf life. The four triggers below are the ones that should make you recalculate rather than drift, and the first is the one almost everybody misses.

The growth row deserves emphasis because it is silent. A reorder point is a number of kilograms, but what it really encodes is a number of days. As your daily rate climbs, the same 80 kg buys fewer and fewer days, and nothing warns you — until the month it does not reach. Recalculate on a stated cadence, quarterly is plenty, and recalculate immediately if your monthly consumption moves by more than about 20%.

The festive row has a hard edge the others do not. Diwali 2026 is 8 November. Soy container candles are normally cured 14 to 21 days before they are fit to sell, and that time cannot be bought back with extra wax. Work backwards from the date you need stock on a shelf, through the cure, through the pour days, to the day the wax has to be on your bench — and raise cover before that date, not on it. Fragrance timing for the same build-up is covered in how early candle brands should order fragrance oils for Diwali.

Frequently asked questions