It’s easy to say that the cannabis industry is quickly getting very competitive, leading companies to search for new ways to innovate and automate their supply chain. The faster they can move cannabis products from seed to sale, the better.
When it comes to moving cannabis down the supply chain, there are many steps required, depending on the type of cannabis product your company is making and distributing. While marketing is increasingly competitive, the barriers to entry into the cannabis industry are also being reduced. There are dozens of newcomers to the cannabis industry, and new licenses are issued daily. We believe that the key to staying competitive and relevant in the highly competitive cannabis industry is automation. In this article, we will go over the best cannabis automation equipment for your business.
Companies choosing to offer products requiring precise filling measurements are in luck. ATG Pharma offers both semi-automatic and automatic filling equipment with our RoboCAP machine. Unlike many other automated filling machines, the RoboCAP is a benchtop filling machine that can fill pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, vape cartridges, bottles, lotions, balms, capsules, and confectionary items.
One of the issues with product filling systems would be scaling to your business. In the cannabis industry, tinctures, cartridges, and other products made from cannabis extract are growing quickly in popularity. By automating the filling procedures for these products, your company can output more products per hour and enjoy heightened production efficiency.
As consumer buying habits shift from purchasing dried cannabis flower to concentrates, oils, and edibles, automating the production of these products would give you a much-needed head start in the highly competitive cannabis industry. As demand is rapidly increasing, automated filling machines allow you to meet that demand.
Solution:
Before distributing your cannabis products to your wholesalers or your customers, you need to package your final product. The packaging process can include a wide variety of tasks like bottle capping processes, or filling and capping vape cartridges of different sizes. It can take a lot of work to manually be counting out capsules or hand-labelling your product. These steps can soak up a lot of time and money if they aren’t automated and scaleable to your business.
Solution:
When it comes to edibles, gummies are king.
Gummies accounted for nearly $1 billion in retail sales last year, capturing more than 70% of the category’s share across six recreational cannabis markets. Led by gummies, edibles keep pace with growth of overall US cannabis market.
Gummies are delicious and fun, but they're not easy to make. Fortunately, Sainty co. has developed a gummy depositor that makes it fast, easy, and affordable to create your own gummies for mass production. A gummy depositor is a machine that deposits the ingredients that make gummy candies. These can come in various sizes from a tabletop gummy depositors to large sizes of gummy depositors for much larger production needs.
The process of making gummies is a three-step process: depositing the ingredients in molds, cooking the gummies, and packaging them.
Depositing Gummies
There are different types of depositors, such as automating pouring, automated, and dosed depositing – ranging from 8K per hour upwards to over 30K per hour.
A fully automated depositor will pour the mixture without the need for human action to move the nozzle. Semi-automated depositors will either need human hands to move their nozzle or have another mechanical part operated by a human.
Cooking Gummies & Cooling Gummies
Ingredients are cooked in a preheated kettle until reaching a desired temperature, which has a direct impact on the final product’s properties. These ingredients in a heated mixture is called a slurry. After the slurry reaches the desired temperature, it is removed from the kettle and placed in a storage mixing tank to end the cooking process. Here, the final custom ingredients are added, which can include color, flavor, actives, and citric acid.
Packaging
Filling bottles and pouches with gummies can be a challenge. There are special handling requirements that need to be met to successfully fill bottles or pouches with this oddly shaped and sometimes oily candy. One of the biggest challenges of bottling gummies is getting the bottles or pouches filled correctly. Multi-bottle filling systems can eliminate the challenges of bottle filling gummies. Automatically counting and filling bottles to the correct measurement and amount every time.
Solution
In order to create more efficiencies in your process, it is necessary to automate certain steps above. If you're a producer who's looking for ways to increase efficiency, automation is the way to go. But how do you know if you need a system that can be integrated with all of your processes?
You might not, if you're a smaller producer. But if you're looking to scale up and get more volume, investing in automation can help you do just that—and it can save time and money in the long run!
When you’re in the manufacturing business, you need to make an investment that will yield a return. That means choosing the right equipment to match your facility’s size and scope of work, and projected growth.
The worst thing you can do is buy too much or too little equipment for current and future operations—you don’t want to be stuck with a unit that doesn’t match your needs. In most cases, it’s better to purchase one with the potential to scale your production to meet all levels of customer demand.
Companies like One Supply focus on depositing automation and packaging of gummies and have been leaders in the space for years. Their line of Sainty Co. Gummy filling and manufacturing products can provide you some peace of mind in building your gummy production business.
The first step before selling cannabis products is to have high-quality cannabis flowers. No matter your company's product, it starts from a cultivated cannabis plant. When cultivating cannabis, it is essential to know that cannabis is a dioecious type of plant, meaning cannabis plants can be either male or female. Female cannabis plants create significantly more cannabinoids and, when pollinated, will create the seeds for future plants. However, male plants are mainly used to create pollen, allowing female plants to produce seeds.
Depending on the type of cannabis plant, the growing process can take anywhere from ten weeks to twelve months. There are many complexities to the growing process, growers want to have complete control over the lighting, humidity, watering, and air conditions that the plants will be subject to during the growing and maturing period. Once the plant is ready to harvest, it needs to be cut down, weighed, and dried. There is significant time and energy that goes into the labour of processing cannabis. Drying can take two to seven days, depending on air conditions and the plant's moisture.
Solution:
One of the oldest cannabis products on the market are pre-rolls. However, rolling by hand takes a huge amount of time compared to automated preroll solutions. It’s not practical to have any pre-rolls done by hand, as the human hand would cramp up after a certain number of rolls.
You would ideally want 1000 pre-rolls an hour, and a human could maybe roll a fraction of that. You want a machine that can scale to your facilities, and that can roll a variety of cones or straight tubes like a human could.
Solution: