Keep it Fresh: Why Humidors are Key to the Future of Pre-roll Production

The Future of Pre-Rolls is Freshness. In the modern cannabis industry, consumers simply won’t stand for a flavorless, dried out product that burns too fast and hot.

So whether it’s the flower you pack into your pre-rolled cones or the pre-rolled hemp wrap blunt cones and tubes you pack that flower into, maintaining an appropriate level of moisture and freshness will separate the high-quality pre-rolls that customers reach for from the budget buds they leave on the shelf.

So how do you keep your blunt cones fresh before and after production? Like the makers and sellers of fine cigars have known for decades, you just need a humidor.

Humidor Functionality

A humidor is a humidity-controlled box or room that maintains a certain moisture level in order to prevent what’s inside from drying out.

Humidors are critical to the cigar industry in order to maintain the freshness of cigars, particularly high-end cigars. They are also used in a handful of baseball stadiums, like Denver or Arizona, in order to help mitigate the effects of altitude or weather on the balls used during the game.

Humidors can range from small, desktop boxes to larger, refrigerator-sized cabinets and even to full, walk-in rooms, all maintaining a certain humidity level to keep their cargo from becoming brittle and losing flavor.

So it only makes sense that cannabis producers – especially those who make pre-rolled blunts, the cigar of the cannabis world – should also use humidors to keep their cannabis and hemp wraps from drying too fast and losing flavor or potency.

The humidor is key to three different phases of the pre-roll process:

• Keeping blunt cones fresh during production
• Storing finished pre-rolls
• Storing the ground flower used for making your pre-rolls

Let’s dive a little deeper to see how a humidor helps at each of these stages.

Keeping Blunt Cones Fresh

If you've diversified your pre-roll brand with the addition of pre-rolled blunts – and you should – a humidor easily is your best way of ensuring your hemp wrap cones stay fresh before and during manufacturing.

Because they are made with natural hemp fibers, hemp wrap cones gain and lose moisture quite easily, and when they dry out, they can become brittle and crack during either the filling or closing phases of production. This is because hemp wraps rely on the bonds in the water molecules to maintain their rigidity. When those evaporate out of the wraps, they lose their pliability.

One way to go is to consider using our hybrid hemp wraps, made with a larger percentage of hemp fibers and other plant material to prevent the wraps from drying out as quickly as traditional hemp wraps.

The other way is to simply use a humidor to store your blunt cones or tubes prior to use.

Because hemp wraps are so sensitive to moisture, they can be perfectly remoisturized by spending some time in a humidor, making them easier to work with and less likely to crack. You don’t need to store your pre-rolled hemp wrap cones in your humidor permanently, just for a few hours prior to use to help bring them back to life, depending on the climate in your state and in your facility, of course.

To check, simply pull your cones out of the humidor and give them a quick check to see how pliable they are. Fresh hemp wraps are more giving and can be folded easier than dry ones. Plus, they should not crack or break if you roll them between your fingers.

This is especially important if you are using an automated pre-roll filling machine because if your pre rolled hemp wrap blunt cones crack in your fingers, they will probably crack in your machine, rendering it much less effective. It’s a problem we’ve heard before from customers.

However, with the use of a humidor prior to filling, our customers are able to run hemp wrap blunt cones and tubes in their machines without problems, increasing their ease and speed of production.

Storing Finished Pre-Rolls

Premium cigars are always stored in and sold out of a humidor; so why wouldn’t you do the same for your premium pre-rolls?

If you’re producing thousands of pre-rolls, but not sending them to retailers immediately, that means, just like cigars, they are drying out. And that doesn’t just mean the hemp wraps, it means the flower itself, so this is an important tip even if you are just packing traditional paper pre rolled cones.

Flower that has dried out can cause your pre-rolls to burn faster and hotter, creating a less user-friendly experience. It also means losing flavor and potency. When exposed to oxygen, the molecules that give your cannabis its distinct taste and its potency – the terpenes and cannabinoids – can dry out or evaporate. In fact, oxygen can change the entire structure of the molecules. When oxidized, THC converts to CBN, affecting the high created by your pre-rolls.

But again, the simple solution is to store your completed pre-rolls in a humidor before sending them to retail. In fact, simply re-conditioning 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 to ensure consistency from one production run to the next, particularly if you are using volumetric metering trays to speed production and ensure consistent weights.

First, we always recommend you don’t grind your flower immediately before use because it 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, we recommend you let your cannabis sit for a while to re-absorb the oils.

But as mentioned, 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.

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 now with less moisture, the flower will weigh less, affecting your metering.

In fact, depending on how much space you have in your facility and the size of your humidor, you can even gently re-moisturize buds in a humidor as well.

Final Thoughts and Pre-Roll Expert Pro Tip

The humidor is the next must-have piece of equipment to keep your pre-roll line ahead of the competition, particularly if you are making pre-rolled blunts. It will keep your blunt cones fresh during production, keep your finished pre-rolls fresh after production and prevent your ground flower from drying out before you have a chance to use it.

One important Pre-Roll Expert Tip though: make sure to adjust your humidor’s levels for use on cannabis, as opposed to tobacco products like cigars, in order to maintain freshness without providing too much moisture, which can encourage mold.

For example, cigars are typically kept at about 70% humidity. Cannabis and cannabis pre-rolls, on the other hand, should be stored at about 62%. And, as noted above, pre-rolled hemp wrap blunt cones and pre rolled blunt tubes stay freshest at about 69%. So make sure to adjust your humidor accordingly.

Don’t get left behind, contact the Pre-Roll Experts and order your climate-controlled humidor today and deliver your customers the freshest pre-rolls on the market!

Brian Beckley spent 20 years as an award-winning newspaper journalist and editor, covering cities on both coasts before becoming Managing Editor of Marijuana Venture magazine, where he covered all aspects of the cannabis industry for five years. In his role with the magazine, he spoke at numerous cannabis conferences and hosted several media panels. Brian joined DaySavers as lead copywriter in 2023.