Making more of it

Scaling this craft is not a melting problem, which is why buying a bigger pot disappoints.

The bottleneck is not melting

Melting ten kilos is no harder than melting one. Pouring ten kilos before it cools is.

The working window is fixed by the formula, so a batch larger than you can pour inside it produces a run where the first and last tubes are different products.

More batches, not bigger ones

Run batches back to back at a size you can pour cleanly, rather than one large one.

Two melting vessels staggered so one is pouring while the other comes up to temperature is a effective change makers often make, and it costs the price of a second pot.

Only a filling method that pours a whole tray at once changes the window itself, and that is the point at which a larger batch starts to make sense.

Where the real time goes

Labeling, capping, banding and boxing. Between them they usually exceed the making.

So the first equipment that pays for itself is a label applicator, not a bigger melter. Measure your own hours before buying anything: the answer is nearly always downstream of the pour.

The step change

There is a real discontinuity somewhere in the low thousands of units per run, where hand filling stops being viable no matter how well organized you are.

At that point the choices are a semi-automatic filling line, or a co-packer. Both are real answers and the second is usually cheaper until volume is reliable.

What does not work is trying to hand-fill through it. That is where quality drops, and it drops in the places customers notice: crooked labels, marked tops, short fills.

References