Hash holes. Donuts. Doinks. Blunts. Infused Cannagars.
The robust pre-roll market continues to evolve as consumer tastes develop and mature, and production capabilities rush to keep pace.
Once a market segment primed for production leftovers and the much-maligned destination for “floor scraps,” the commercial pre-roll category is now the hottest and fastest-growing category in Cannabis.
Thanks to the rise of convenience-purchasing at retail, as well as new commercial trends around the newer ultra-premium pre-roll category dominated by the hash hole, pre-rolls accounted for $4.1 billion in annual sales (394 million units), according to a recent data survey conducted by the analysts at Headset in collaboration with Custom Cones USA. Infused joints make up more than 43% of those sales, and that figure is growing.
What does that mean? Well, first, it means that consumers are willing to pay more for a premium pre-roll product. Second, it means the pre-roll segment will need to find a way to scale.
The demand for premium hand-rolled products is on the rise, as is the field of amazingly talented hash hole artists such as CGO, Proper Doinks, Sturts Doinks, Bruno Rolls, and other craft connoisseurs, many of whom companies commission to roll batches of branded hand-rolls.
But that craft segment can’t scale to serve the mass-market consumer. That’s where machinists and robotics manufacturers come in.
These are companies that undergo rigorous research and development in order to bring efficiency and scale to the rolling and infusion process. If we’re ever going to see packs of infused hash holes offered at an affordable scale, these companies will likely be the ones behind it.
Co-founded by former NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineer Nohtal Partansky, Sorting Robotics has been working for years to increase margins and efficiency in pre-roll automation.
Starting with the company’s Aura One machine, which the company says can roll up to 18 joints per minute and also roll blunts, the company has added multiple machines to its lineup that handle different types of infusions. The Jiko injects concentrates down the center of the joint, aiming for the hash hole sector, and the Jiko+ can inject any meltable concentrate, including live fresh-press rosin. According to their data sheets, one operator can inject 115,200 infusions per month.
Sorting Robotics also introduced the Stardust, which coats the joints in kief and concentrates, and also can automate the creation of moon rocks at scale using dry sift, bubble hash, crushed THCa diamonds, or powdered Cannabis.
For the past couple of years, we’ve been impressed with what we’ve seen from the PICC Platform. Created by a production machinery firm out of Spokane, Washington, the PICC Platform’s end-to-end rolling and infusing capability automates the entire process with one system. Their machine mills the flower, layer-packs the cones, and then injects them with concentrates precisely down the center, creating perfect infused cones that the company claims never canoe and always burn all of the material evenly. (The Leaf team has tried a few, and from what we can see, those claims are correct.)
To those of us who remember when infusing a joint meant rolling up a ball of finger hash, lighting it on fire, crumbling it and sprinkling it over your hand-separated flower, the Cannabis industry has become an amazing technological wonderland. And while there will surely always be a market and a desire for a freshly rolled hash hole filled with a custom flower and hash combo by an expert in the craft, we can’t help but be wowed by a future that promises infused, kief-rolled hitters manufactured for the masses. Being able to scale and automate such an intricate process showcases the ingenuity and invention of the minds in the Cannabis industry, and we can’t wait to see what’s next.
sortingrobotics.com | @sortingroboticsinc | madpackerindustries.com | @piccplatform
