This topic is kind of our whole shtick here at RollPros, so hear us out. There are some extremely valid (and valuable) reasons why a rolled pre-roll will always be superior to a stuffed cone pre-roll. And it’s more than just that sweet, nostalgic hit of simpler times that rolled pre-rolls provide.
A rolled pre-roll hits harder, burns better, and costs less to produce. Check out our breakdown of the facts below.
Straight up—if you’re using a machine to stuff your pre-rolled cones, you’re robbing your consumers of valuable cannabinoids. First and foremost, machine-stuffed cones require heavily ground and heavily dried flower (usually with a moisture content as low as 6-8%). Over-grinding flower can knock off a lot of those precious trichomes your consumers are paying for, and over-drying flower can degrade the cannabinoids that are left.
After the flower is dried and ground, pre-roll stuffing machines then use either a tamping system or a vibrating system to pack the ground flower down into the cone, and both of these actions also destroy and knock off valuable trichomes.
RollPros’ BlackBird, on the other hand, is a machine that requires sticky bud with at least 10% moisture content in order to automatically roll its pre-rolls. It does so the same way you would roll one by hand, but with fewer touch points than is needed to roll by hand, so there aren’t any fingers (or machine parts) getting sticky from over-handling trichomes. And there’s no tamping arm destroying the very thing your customers are hoping to inhale.
On the topic of ground flower, stuffed pre-roll cones also require a finer grind of drier flower than is necessary for a rolled pre-roll, meaning you have to use more flower to reach weight. This not only costs you more money directly by requiring you to use more flower, but it also costs you more money indirectly by requiring you to put out an inferior product that makes it harder to earn customer loyalty.
And on the backend of things, pre-roll cones come with ridiculous shipping costs and carbon emissions because they must be shipped as cones, so you’re paying for all that airspace to maintain their shape during the shipping process. The BlackBird rolling machine works with paper that comes in uncut bobbin form (basically a large spool/roll of paper), essentially cutting your consumable materials cost by up to 80 percent ($0.03 per unit for a rolled pre-roll versus $0.15 per unit for a stuffed pre-roll cone).
Let us put it to you this way: One pallet of bobbins equates to approximately 24 million joints. It would take over 60 pallets to ship 24 million pre-roll cones.
We’ve all lit a stuffed pre-roll cone and spent the entire session fighting to keep it from canoeing, ultimately losing half of the flower we paid for to an uneven burn. This happens because the tamping mechanism used to stuff those cones leads to an uneven pack—flower is packed tightly near the crutch but loosely near the top.
A rolled pre-roll doesn’t have that issue. The BlackBird consistently rolls evenly packed, evenly burning pre-rolls, and it has a built-in DrawCheck on the machine so you can check each batch to make sure they pull consistently. That’s how you build consumer loyalty and earn repeat business.
We’ve already touched on the ridiculous carbon emissions produced by shipping pre-rolled cones. The amount of space taken up on pallets in order to maintain their shape means pre-roll companies have to order a lot in order to fulfill their quotas. (Only about 250,000-350,000 cones fit on one standard pallet.) But one other aspect of pre-roll cones that’s terrible for people and planet alike is that most cones are made by hand in India, Indonesia, China, and other countries with shady labor laws.
At RollPros, we don’t stand for that. Every component of the BlackBird machine, with only a few specific exceptions, is produced within 10 miles of our headquarters in Vancouver, Washington. We’re very intentional about keeping things local and sustainable.
If you’re still not convinced a rolled pre-roll is the way to go, we wish you all the best. But if you’re ready to take your business and your consumers seriously, get in touch with RollPros today. We’re happy to walk you through a live demo of how the BlackBird works and back up everything we’ve explained here. We promise you’ll notice a difference between our rolled pre-roll and a stuffed pre-roll cone, and so will your consumers.
