Candle-making is an art and a science for Ohio company

By MARY BETH BRECKENRIDGE

DELICATE BALANCE

A.I. Root has been supplying churches for 140 years.

MEDINA, Ohio — Making fine candles is a delicate balance of science and art. The right wax has to be combined with the proper wick for the best burn. Colors have to match exactly from batch to batch. Even the fragrance and hue of a candle need to be perfectly paired to meet consumers’ expectations.

Those kinds of details are the business of Medina, Ohio’s 140-year-old A.I. Root Co.

Root has been in business since 1869 and early on made its mark as a manufacturer of beekeeping equipment.

But its founder, Amos Ives Root, set the stage for the company’s current focus by rolling sheets of beeswax from his hives around wicks to create altar candles, which are still Root’s flagship product.

Today, Root candles light churches and homes across the United States and beyond.

The company added decorative candles in the 1960s and now produces between 2,000 and 2,200 decorative products in Medina and almost 2,000 liturgical products in Ohio and in San Antonio, said company President Brad Root. It employs 150 people in Medina, 15 in San Antonio and 10 sales representatives across the country who handle liturgical-candle sales. It’s a long way from the company’s beginnings.

Founder A.I. Root originally repaired and made jewelry in a store on the Medina square. As Brad Root, his great-great-grandson, relates the story, honeybees swarmed the store window one day in 1869, and A.I. had a worker capture the colony in a box.

His wife was not pleased. “You paid a day’s wage for a box of bugs,” she supposedly told him. But the acquisition sparked in A.I. a fascination with beekeeping.

He saw a business opportunity in finding a better way to harvest honey, and he went on to standardize beekeeping equipment.

He wrote a book, established a magazine for beekeepers and became known worldwide as “the bee man.”

Although A.I.’s company has since gotten out of beekeeping, it continues to publish the monthly Bee Culture magazine and keeps a few hives for the edification of the magazine’s editor, Kim Flottum. Flottum even advises the keeper of the White House’s hive and helped figure out a way to keep the bees in check so they wouldn’t annoy the participants in this year’s Easter Egg Roll.

Today, the Root Co.’s focus is primarily on candles, but beeswax — most of it from Iowa’s Sioux Honey — remains an important ingredient. It’s always been used in Root’s liturgical candles, and now it’s blended with other natural waxes in a new line of home fragrance products called Legacy by Root.

Beeswax, Brad Root explained, is desirable because it burns slower than other waxes. And in combination with other soy- and vegetable-based waxes, he said, it does a better job of emitting fragrances.

“We’re trying to find a niche in the market that wants top-quality, American-made products” made of renewable materials, he said. At Root Candles’ headquarters complex just west of Medina’s town center, the company uses a variety of methods to produce its products.

Some of the candles are made by pouring melted wax into tempered-glass jars. Some are made by dipping wicks repeatedly into hot wax in a computer-controlled version of the method used by early Americans. Some candles are formed in molds. Still others are made by compressing wax pellets that resemble snow.

The company’s signature Grecian pillar candle, for example, starts as melted wax in a metal mold. A worker stirs the wax briskly to prevent air bubbles from forming and tops off the wax as it cools and shrinks. When it hardens, the candle is unmolded and the wax on the end trimmed to level the base. A drill press bores a hole through the candle to allow a waxed wick to be inserted, and finally the candle is pushed through hot dies to form its distinctive ridged coating.

A more unusual process involves compressing paraffin pellets under pressure. Paraffin is sprayed onto the cold surfaces of giant, spinning drums, and then knives scrape off the hardened wax coating to form pellets that resemble snowflakes. Pistons press the pellets into molds or containers, and in some cases the rough candles are then dipped into liquid wax to form a smooth coating.

Brad Root explained the process makes candles particularly bend-resistant, a plus for tall altar candles that might be in use for weeks or more.

That kind of handwork isn’t unusual in Root’s manufacturing process.

Workers can be seen inserting wicks by hand, trimming and polishing candle tops and even using what look like makeup brushes to dust candles with glitter for a retailer’s special Christmas order.

As the candles are produced, samples from each batch are cut open and studied or burned under controlled conditions to measure such aspects as how long the candle burns, how big a flame it produces, how much wax drips and how much soot is emitted. It’s the scientific part of a business that has beauty as its goal.

And creating that beauty is an art.