So you have seen a recipe, and it's listed in percentages, and you don't know how much you need of each raw material to make the product that you want?
Sound familiar? You're not on your own, it's a very common question we get, and so here we have tried to break it down so that you can see how to work with it to your advantage.
If we listed a recipe in grams/ml and specified it makes 100 grams/ml then it would make it very simple for people just starting out to use it and we get that but then as you want to make more than 100 grams/ml then what do you do?
That is why by listing the formula in percent you get to specify exactly how much you want to make so say you want to make 200 grams/ml instead of 100 then you would simply take each ingredient and work out how much of each one you need.
For this FAQ article, we will work with the recipe listed here Cream for Dry Skin
For making 100 grams/ml of the recipe you simply convert the % to grams to weigh out on the scale, (we recommend doing this for testing out any recipe to ensure you like the final result before scaling it up to larger quantities).
Now if you wish to make say 250 grams of the recipe you would need to work out for example what 8% is off 250 for the Apricot Oil. We know that 8% of 100 is equal to 8, so we need to times it by 2.5 to get the right figure which is 20. Now we need to do the same for all the other figures to find what the right amount we need is.
What if you wanted to make 20 Litres of this product? Then you would need to work out how many grams are in 20 Litres of each indivdual product.
Now it becomes slightly more interesting as on a small scale we can get away with saying that 1ml of something is equal to 1 gram of something but as you scale up then the discrepancies in that statement start to show.
For example, Apricot Oil has a density of between 0.910 to 0.920 typically. If we average that out we get 0.915 as the weight of 1ml now if we need 8% of 20,000 (for 20 Litres of product) then we divide 20,000 by 100 and we get 200. Then we multiply that by 8 to get the amount of apricot oil we need (8% of 20 Litres) which is 1600 ml now if we want to weigh that on a scale then we have to convert that with the density of 0.915. We do that by taking 1600 and multiplying that with 0.915, and we get 1464 grams needed. If you need to find the density of a product it's listed on the Product Specs, if you require any product specs then please click on the following link to request them Request Technical Documents Request Form
This is what is called wight for weight and is expressed as %w/w.
When measuring ingredients out also be aware of the amount that will get wasted in production, therefore we recommend that you add on 10% extra of everything to make sure you end up with the required amount and not less.