Candle Manufacturing: Dipping Vats to ABB Robots

Candle manufacturing covers two very different worlds. A small shop may pour a few hundred jars a week by hand, while private label suppliers send tea lights and pillars to supermarkets by the pallet. This post follows the work from chandlers dipping wicks in tallow, through Joseph Morgan's 1834 moulding machine and the arrival of paraffin, to lines where robots handle and pack candles. Along the way it looks at where ABB robots such as the IRB 360 FlexPicker, the GoFa cobot and the IRB 660 palletizer fit, and at the jobs that still need people on the line.

Rows of hand dipped taper candles in every colour at a candle factory and shop in Denmark. Photo: Paul Maingot / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

How chandlers dipped and moulded candles by hand

For most of history a candle was made by dipping. The chandler lowered a wick into melted tallow or beeswax, lifted it out to cool and dipped it again, over and over, until the candle was thick enough. The Romans already made candles this way. Other makers rolled soft wax around a wick or poured fat over it by hand. Chandlers often went from house to house turning saved kitchen fat into candles, or sold their own from small shops. Sieur de Brez introduced moulds in the 14th century, yet moulding stayed slow until the 19th.

A costumed worker dips candles at Sovereign Hill, Ballarat, the way chandlers did before machines. Photo: seefit / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The first real machine came from Manchester. In 1834 Joseph Morgan, a pewterer, patented a moulding machine with a cylinder and a movable piston that pushed candles out as they set. It made continuous production possible at about 1,500 candles an hour, and candles became cheap enough for most households. Better materials arrived around the same time. Chevreul and Gay-Lussac separated stearin from animal fat in 1823, and in the mid 1850s James Young distilled paraffin wax from coal and oil shale at Bathgate in Scotland. Paraffin burned cleanly, had no tallow smell and was inexpensive.

A six tube metal candle mould from the Auckland Museum collection. Photo: Auckland War Memorial Museum / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)

By the late nineteenth century Price's Candles of London, founded in 1830, was the largest candle maker in the world. Then kerosene lamps and the electric light bulb of 1879 took over lighting, and candles became decorative and ceremonial products. Change on the factory floor was slow. A 1927 photo from the Saint Louis Candle and Wax Company shows workmen still dipping candles by hand on large racks. The job that machines eventually took over first was moulding, and much of the handling around it stayed manual.

Workmen hand dipping candles on racks at the Saint Louis Candle and Wax Company in 1927. Photo: National Archives via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Candle manufacturing today: hand pour shops and robot lines

Small makers still pour by hand, and a hit scent can swamp them. On 8 October Syracuse.com reported that Witty Wicks, a shop that hand pours soy candles in the village of Camillus, New York, can barely keep up with sales of one of its candles. In a shop like that each jar is filled, wicked and labelled at a bench. Container candle plants run the same steps at industrial scale. A wick on a metal tab is fixed into the jar, wax is dosed and cooled, the wick is trimmed, and then the lid and label go on.

A candle maker hangs a freshly dipped candle to dry in a small shop. Photo: Ben Ostrowsky / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

Bigger plants are automating those steps. Candles Scandinavia, a private label candle maker in Örebro, Sweden, said in June 2025 that during the previous year it had installed a fully automated production line with 13 ABB robots. According to the company, the line, along with new working methods and training, lets it handle higher volumes with far fewer people, and it gave notice to 25 production staff. It put the yearly savings at about 13 million Swedish kronor and said it might need to hire people with specific technical skills to run and develop the automated plant.

An ABB FlexPicker cell set up with PickMaster Lite. Photo: ABB

The release does not name robot models. ABB's catalogue still maps well onto a candle line. An IRB 360 FlexPicker running PickMaster software can pick tea lights or small jars from a moving belt and place them in trays, using conveyor tracking to follow the products. A GoFa CRB 15000 cobot could load jars and lids beside workers in a smaller plant. At the end of the line an IRB 460 or IRB 660 stacks cases on pallets, a step covered in more detail in our post on packaging lines and case packing.

An ABB GoFa CRB 15000 cobot at a work table. Photo: ABB

What comes next for candle factories and home makers

Candle factories are likely to follow food and cosmetics plants. Private label buyers ask for many scents, colours and pack sizes in short runs, so lines have to change products quickly. Programming and testing robot cells offline in RobotStudio helps here, because a new pack pattern can be checked before the line stops. Palletizers and FlexPicker cells are the obvious first robots in a candle plant, and ABB has installed both widely in other industries.

An ABB IRB 660 palletizer stacking cases at the end of a line. Photo: ABB

Home makers and small studios will mostly keep pouring by hand, since a jar candle business can start with a melting pot and a thermometer. A cobot is a possibility for a growing studio that fills the same jar thousands of times a week, as long as it costs less than a part time worker. Machines take over first with tea lights and simple pillars, where the shape never changes and the volumes are large.

Lit tea lights, the kind of high volume candle where machines take over first. Photo: Ftc08 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)

Some problems are specific to wax. Hot wax and fragrance oils are messy, and grippers often have to move filled jars before the wax has fully set. Wicks are thin and flexible, and a wick that sits off centre makes a candle tunnel or smoke, so placing and centring them calls for good vision or fixtures. Candles Scandinavia's own release points to the skills problem as well: fewer operators, but a need for technical staff who can keep an automated line running, and someone has to train them.

A burning candle with three wicks, each of which has to be placed and centred. Photo: Reinhard Müller / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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