The $250K Lesson

Today we're kicking off The Automation Trap, a 10-part series about the questions pre-roll producers should be asking before making a major equipment investment.

We're easing into it today. Before we get deep into output, labor, downtime, ROI and all the production math, it probably makes sense to explain how we got here.

If you're new to FlexPak, we're an Oklahoma based company and we build high-output semi-automated pre-roll machines for cones, straights and blunts. But we didn't start out trying to become a machine company. We were pre-roll producers trying to fix our own production problems. That's really where this whole story starts.

The pre-roll market is having a pretty incredible run right now.

In 2025, consumers bought 383.2 million pre-rolls worth roughly $3.6 billion. Unit sales jumped 18.6%, and for the first time, pre-rolls outsold every other cannabis category by units.

That kind of growth makes a company feel like it needs to automate everything, right now, no questions asked.

We get the temptation. We fell for it ourselves.

We spent more than $250,000 chasing equipment that promised more output, less labor, and an easier workday. It didn't work out that way.

A machine would run beautifully when the flower was prepped exactly right. Then the moisture changed, or the grind was off, or the flower got sticky, and the whole day fell apart with it. The equipment was sold as a labor-saving solution, but people still had to prep material, feed the machine, watch for jams, and handle the finished product by hand. And the hourly number in the brochure never told us how many good, finished pre-rolls we'd actually walk away with at the end of a shift.

At some point we quit asking how automated a machine was. The real question was simpler: What will it actually take to finish the order? Who's involved from start to finish, how many production days does it eat up, how much time disappears into cleaning, changeovers and breakdowns, and what happens the day you run your stickiest flower instead of the vendor's perfectly prepped demo material?

We didn't ask those questions early enough. And it cost us.

Eventually, with our backs against the wall, we built the very first FlexPak system for our own production floor. We weren't trying to launch a machine company. We needed something we could actually depend on every single day, something that produced the volume we needed at margins that made sense. Nothing we had tried up to that point gave us that.

We want to preface this series by making one thing clear: We are NOT anti-automation.

There's nothing wrong with full automation. Plenty of operations run it well. But “fully automated” is a marketing phrase, not a production plan, and it's not a reason on its own to spend six figures. If the data doesn't make sense, that's really the root of the issue.

If you don't have a solid understanding of your core pre-roll production data, you need to start there before anything else.

Run the numbers on your own flower, your own crew and your own production calendar before you buy anything. If the math holds up, great. If it doesn't, you just saved yourself one hell of an expensive lesson.