Marijuana Business Magazine February 2019

Marijuana Business Magazine | February 2019 50 Roll Away COMPANY STM Canna | WHERE Spokane, Washington FOUNDED 2017 | PRODUCT The RocketBox is a commercial- grade machine that can roll 453 pre-rolls in three minutes—far faster than other pre-roll machines on the market TARGET MARKET Cultivators and processors PRICE $12,500 Pre-rolls are popular products at retail but laborious to produce. Most rolling machines are small, low- tech, tabletop models. Jason Dueweke, who plied his engineering skills in Washington state’s aeronautics industry before starting the cannabis-focused tech company STM Canna, set out in 2017 to solve that problem. He came up with the RocketBox, a commercial- scale machine that can roll 453 joints in three minutes— about four times quicker than the next-fastest model on the market, said Jessica Ferranti, STM’s senior vice president of sales. How? The RocketBox, which is 46 inches tall, weighs 350 pounds and has wheels so it can be rolled throughout a facility, comes with a three-piece tray set with 453 slots into which empty pre-roll cones can be dropped. Why 453? A pound is equivalent to 453 grams, making it easy to keep track of how much product is going into your pre-rolls. Here’s how it works: A machine operator drops ground flower into the cones and can set joint weights to 1 gram, 0.7 grams and 0.5 grams. The operator turns on the machine, which is equipped with a multi-setting motor and a pneumatic leveling system that evenly distributes the ground cannabis throughout the cones. The machine then goes into a packing phase, ensuring tightly rolled joints. Dueweke understood that different flower strains could have different characteristics—sticky, dense, light, etc. That, in turn, could affect how a final pre-roll would turn out, so he installed technology that allows operators to customize how a pre-roll should be packed. The machine also comes with 10 custom presets such as Sour Diesel and Kush. Since putting the RocketBox into the market in early 2018, STM Canna has garnered roughly 100 cannabis and hemp customers in the United States and Canada, including Canndescent, Curaleaf, Green Thumb Industries (GTI), Aphria and Organigram, Ferranti said. Dueweke started the company, which also makes a commercial-grade rosin press, with $200,000 provided by friends and family. He has expanded production capacity and grown the business from five to 20 employees entirely through sales revenue. The Rocket Box can produce 453 1-gram joints (that’s 1 pound total) in three minutes. Courtesy Photo