How to Make Incense in Bulk

Buying incense in bulk can save money and is easy enough to do at home. It is also a great way to make sure you have plenty of incense to gift all year round or to sell at your local craft fairs. Unlike store bought incense sticks, which can be loaded with glues and chemicals that may cause health issues when burned, homemade incense is all natural. Making your own incense in bulk can be fun and very rewarding.

Making incense from scratch requires a lot of time and effort, but the results are well worth it. Making your own incense can be as simple or complex as you want, and there are many types of incense to choose from. The most popular form of incense is sticks made from bamboo or wood and soaked in essential oils.

To make incense sticks you need to first prepare the ingredients. This involves chopping and grinding the ingredients into fine powders, which will ensure that your finished incense sticks burn reliably. Grinding is usually done with a mortar and pestle although there are commercial-grade grinders available. Some soft gum resins like labdanum and elemi can stick to the granite so freezing them before grinding helps to prevent this. Once your ingredients are ground to a fine powder you can mix them with the essential oil blend and prepare to hand roll your incense.

If you are making incense cones, pellets or sticks you will need to add a binder to your recipe. This can be either a wood binder or a gum binder. Wood binders such as makko powder (sometimes called jiggit or tabu no ki) are inexpensive and easy to work with. However, the amount of makko powder you need to add to your recipe can vary based on the type of incense you are making. Wood binders also have no scent of their own, so they don’t interfere with the aroma of the final product.

Gum binders such as xanthan gum are much more powerful than wood binders and need to be used sparingly. The amount of gum binder required to make your incense will depend on the recipe you are using, and too much may bind the incense together so that it won’t burn. Gum binders also have no scent of their on their own, so they don’t interfere or compete with the aroma of the final product.

Once you have your ingredient mixture prepared it is a good idea to make a small batch of incense to test the recipe and to get an idea of how much fragrance oil and DPG you need to use for larger batches. Once you have tested the recipe, you can then scale it up to make hundreds of incense sticks at a time by multiplying the ingredients. The more incense you make, the longer it will take to dry so plan accordingly if you are making incense for gifts. A nice touch is to include a incense stick tray with the incense sticks so that they can be displayed and stored safely.