We all love a pre-roll, but there are few things worse than a pre-roll that’s dried out. They lose flavor, pack less of a punch, and burn hot and fast.
Worse than that, dried, flash-paper-like pre-rolls may prevent customers from coming back to a brand, instead choosing one of the many other pre-roll options peeking out from behind the dispensary register.
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Dried-out hemp wraps can be brittle and difficult to pack, leading to costly slowdowns in production as well.
Which is why many pre-roll experts are convinced that freshness is the key to keeping your pre-roll line growing and thriving, and why they recommend that every manufacturer have a humidor to help keep things as fresh as possible.
Humidors are a staple of the cigar industry to ensure that premium products stay fresh and maintain their flavor while waiting for shipping or sale. Premium pre-roll products deserve the same treatment to deliver the highest potency and best-tasting experience for consumers.
What is a Humidor?
Put simply, a humidor is a humidity-controlled box or room designed to maintain a certain moisture level to prevent what’s inside from drying out.
Ranging from small, desktop boxes to larger, refrigerator-sized cabinets and even to full, walk-in rooms at cigar lounges (and even a couple of baseball stadiums to mitigate the effects of altitude or weather on the ball), humidors keep a constant humidity level to prevent their cargo from drying out, becoming brittle, and losing flavor.
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When it comes to pre-rolls, the humidor is key to three different phases of the process:
- Keeping pre-rolled hemp wrap blunt cones and tubes fresh during production;
- Storing finished pre-rolls; and
- Storing the ground flower used for making your pre-rolls.
Keeping Blunt Cones Fresh
If you have not yet started or scaled up a pre-rolled blunt line, it’s time. It’s a relatively uncluttered segment of the pre-roll category and form factor that is third-favorite among smokers, according to a recent study.
But hemp wrap blunt cones have a tendency to dry out and get brittle. This is because they are made with a process that uses the water molecules as the primary bonds that keep them together. When the wraps start to dry out, those bonds can get brittle and break.
This is especially important if you are using an automated pre-roll filling machine, which can be hard on dry cones and requires consistency to work properly.
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Thankfully, you can not only avoid that entirely. Keeping hemp wrap products in a consistent, humidity-controlled environment maintains the water bonds practically indefinitely, allowing you to plan ahead and buy your blunt cones in bulk.
You can also use a humidor to re-hydrate older hemp wrap cones and tubes. While nothing will put back together a crumbled cone, placing your hemp wraps in a humidor for a day or so before use is usually enough to give them back their pliability so they can be filled without cracking.
(Or you could buy hybrid hemp wrap blunt cones, made with a special combination of hemp fibers and other plant materials so they don’t rely on water bonds for strength, but that’s another topic…)
Storing Finished Pre-Rolls
If you’re producing thousands of pre-rolls, but not sending them to retailers immediately, that means that before being filled, they are drying out. And here that doesn’t just mean the hemp wraps, but the flower itself, which is why this is important even with traditional paper pre-rolled cones.
Dried flower can cause your pre-rolls to burn fast and hot, which is less than ideal to smoke. It also means losing flavor and potency because the molecules that give your cannabis its distinct taste and its potency – the terpenes and cannabinoids – can dry out or evaporate.
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Once again, the simple solution is to store your completed pre-rolls in a humidor before sending them to retail.
In fact, simply reconditioning your pre-rolls in a humidor before packaging for retail can help re-invigorate them, even if you are not storing them full-time in your humidor. Especially pre-rolled blunts.
Storing Ground Flower
Finally, humidors are a great way to store ground flower. It not only maintains freshness but helps ensure consistency from one production run to the next, particularly if you are using volumetric metering trays to speed production.
It’s recommended that you don’t grind your flower immediately before use because the process breaks open the trichomes and leaves your flower too sticky to work properly in pre-roll filling machines, especially those that use metering trays. Instead, let your cannabis sit for a while to reabsorb the oils.
But again, exposure to dry air can cause those oils to evaporate, affecting your potency and flavor. However, in a humidor, with a constant humidity level, your ground flower won’t dry out.
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Additionally, the same strain of cannabis, ground to the same particle size, can weigh out differently if the moisture content changes over time. For example, if you grind 50 pounds of flower to make pre-rolls but it takes you a week to complete the full run, the flower could easily dry out over the week and weigh less, affecting your metering.
Storing that flower in a humidor not only keeps it fresh but helps maintain the same consistency through its entire production run.
Final Thoughts on Pre-Roll Humidors
The pre-roll market is the fastest-growing segment in the industry. Competition is tight, and innovation is what sets apart the winners from the losers. Freshness will help make your pre-rolls a fan favorite and keep customers coming back for more.
By storing your flower and your completed pre-rolls in a humidor, you can maintain consistency, potency, and flavor so your customers truly get a taste of the best you have to offer.
Additionally, humidors are a must-have piece of equipment if you use hemp wrap blunt cones to make pre-rolled blunts.
*This article was submitted by an unpaid guest contributor. The opinions or statements within do not necessarily reflect those of GreenState or HNP. The author is solely responsible for the content.