Soy lights

Jill Anderson’s candles are made from clean-burning soybean oil – and they smell good enough to eat.

By E. M. Morrison
Photos by Rolf Hagberg

Redwood Falls, Minn. — Lining a wall in Jill Anderson’s dining room are shelves of Mason jars filled with luscious colors and smells: blueberry, strawberry-kiwi, orange dreamsicle, mango-papaya, Georgia peach,
pear...

Jellies and preserves? No, they’re candles, a mouth-watering line of more than 60 scents and colors. Made of clean-burning soybean oil wax, which is less expensive than paraffin, Anderson’s “Country Candles” show how renewable plant oils are replacing petroleum products.

The candle industry, which uses more than 500 million pounds of paraffin a year, could be an important new market for soy oil, says AURI chemist Jerry Crawford. Anderson alone will pour 12 to 15 tons of soybean oil into her candles this year. “If soybean wax captured just ten percent of the paraffin market, we would use an additional five million bushels of soybeans each year,” Crawford says.

A candle business from scratch

Anderson started Country Candle Company just 18 months ago. With her husband Rob, a Redwood Falls area economic developer, she turned an initial $200 investment into first-year sales of $40,000. This year, Anderson expects to triple revenues.

“The business was my dad’s idea,” says the 30-year-old mother of two. “He obviously thought I had too much time on my hands.” Anderson’s father, a Wal-Mart retail manager, observed that there were lots of little candle-making companies. Noting his daughter’s fondness for candles, he suggested she try making some of her own.

With $100 from her dad and $100 of her own, Anderson bought some supplies and started making candles in her kitchen. Neighbors and friends praised her first offering, a candle service refilling empty containers with fresh wicks and the scented wax of their choice. Encouraged, she and a neighbor invested in 15 dozen glass canning jars and began making container candles to sell at craft fairs.

Manufacturing candles at night, peddling them on weekends, they quickly gained a following. “Every day, people would call and say how much they liked our candles,” Anderson says. Direct mail orders followed, then requests from wholesalers. “We had been planning to take the summer off, but by then we were getting wholesale accounts, so we were too busy to take off.”

At the end of a hectic summer, Anderson’s partner called it quits. But Anderson carried on, juggling the demands of her business with a new baby and a toddler. She moved the operation into her basement. Now, whenever she has a few minutes free, she slips on a pair of wax-spattered clogs and heads down the back stairs to make more candles.

Zero soot’s
the clincher

“Candle making is a true art,” says Anderson, lifting the lid on a 20-pound roaster of melted wax. She produces Country Candles in small batches, mixing specially processed soybean oil, dyes and scents. She pours the fragrant wax into wide-mouth pint and half-pint glass jars.

At first, Anderson made Country Candles from paraffin, which produces soot when burned. Last fall, she began experimenting with soybean oil candles. Working with Jerry Crawford, a chemist at the AURI Fats and Oils Lab in Marshall, she developed a wax that burns clean, yet retains an intense fragrance.

“Zero soot is a big deal to people,” she says. “That will be my marketing advantage.” A local church, for example, recently ordered Anderson’s white vigil candles. They wanted soot-free candles to keep the newly painted church clean.

Scents and sensibility

Sarah Johnson and Kari Clouse are taking time to smell the roses — and the orange blossoms and the lilacs, even the fresh-cut grass. They’re spending their lunch hour in Anderson’s dining room, sampling candles. They unscrew the lids from dozens before making their choices: heather, lemon-vanilla, honeysuckle and cucumber-melon.

As Anderson totals their purchases, Clouse picks up one last candle: macadamia nut. “Mmm,” she says, “smells like something good baking in the oven.” Her friend agrees, “I’ll take one of these, too.”

Anderson’s 60-plus fragrances range from plain vanilla to exotic scents such as China rain, English ivy and country clothesline. “I have a great-smelling vanilla,” she says. “But it’s funny, people don’t want vanilla, they want to try something new. Kind of like ice cream.”

Feedback at craft fairs helps Anderson decide which scents to make. Nearly all customers are women, says Anderson, and “women will tell you everything you need to know — what they will buy, what they like or don’t like, how much they will spend.”

Having spent several years as marketing manager for a Denver start-up software company, Anderson knows how to pursue a variety of ways to build sales. In addition to mail order, craft fairs, Internet sales, fundraisers and home candle parties, she’s brought on a wholesale representative to pitch her products to retailers.

“I have a lot of marketing irons in the fire,” says Anderson, speaking with a sense of urgency. Today, there are only a few soybean oil candles on the market. But Anderson believes vegetable oils will one day replace petroleum-based wax, making paraffin candles as obsolete as “the rotary dial phone. So I can’t get out there fast enough to establish my brand first.”

Still in the cottage

Anderson’s young company is still a classic cottage business; her mom does the books, her dad works craft fairs, her husband helps with production. Even her 90-year-old grandmother lends a hand, setting candlewicks and cutting raffia ribbons for packaging.

But with the drive and energy characteristic of entrepreneurs, Anderson thinks big. Late last fall, she began making scented soy-oil body creme, daily use lotion and lip balm. Her innovative lotion bars — palm-sized squares of solid moisturizer for rubbing in hands like soap — were a huge hit, she says. She sold 3,000 before Christmas. “We couldn’t keep up with demand,” she says.

Later this year, Anderson plans to move her business to a commercial building so she can produce larger quantities. AURI is helping her develop a marketing plan and, in five years, she aims to pass the million dollar sales mark.

“I’m a person who isn’t afraid to take chances,” says Anderson, who earned her pilot’s license in high school and went on to study aviation management at the University of North Dakota. To be a successful entrepreneur, she says, “you have to be willing to put in a lot of hard work and make sacrifices.”

Just as important: “You have to have the persistence to believe that, even though you’ve heard ‘no’ a hundred times, ‘yes’ is still out there.”

For more information about Country Candle products, visit their Web site at www.countrycandlecompany.com or call 507-637-3752.