How Sluggers Became A Heavy Hitter In Pre-Roll Joints

In a 12-acre industrial campus in Sacramento across the street from a U.S. Navy recruiting center, Natura grows 80,000 pounds of weed a year inside 18 glass-ceilinged hot houses. Most of the cannabis will eventually be ground up and made into pre-rolled joints, which are infused with hash and dusted with an extra punch of THC, the compound that gets people high. Every day, Natura produces 40,000 of its pre-rolls for its in-house brand Sluggers Hit, or about 1.2 million joints a month, generating around $60 million in revenue last year and is on track to hit $85 million by the end of 2026. Leaning into sports tropes, Sluggers’ best-selling product is its five-pack of pre-rolls in a tin wrapped in a metallic mylar bag like the kind collectible sports cards come in. Sluggers’ branding is eye-catching and riffs off sports teams—its New York Diesel pack is emblazoned with a logo reminiscent of the Knicks’ orange and blue and its Green Monster five-pack is an ode to Fenway Park. Sluggers even has a collaboration with actor Chauncey Leopardi, who played Squints in the classic 1993 baseball movie The Sandlot, and just released a limited edition run with rapper Xzibit. The tin, which contains a total of an eighth of an ounce of weed and a collectible card, costs between $25 and $50, depending on the strain. (Sluggers’ cards also have a burgeoning second market on eBay, with asking prices for collections ranging from $150 to $1,000.) Thanks to the brand’s marketing gimmicks and collaborations with well-known producers like Cookies, Connected, Backpack Boyz and more, Sluggers is now the fifth best-selling pre-roll brand in California, home to America’s biggest marijuana market. CEO and cofounder Ori Bytton, 40, said he knew they were onto something right when Sluggers hit the market. “The first batch [in 2021], they weren’t pretty, but they sold out in a day, and we got re-orders in a week,” says Bytton. Whole New Ballgame: In addition to its cannabis products, Sluggers' trading cards have become collectibles.Sluggers HitSluggers emphasizes its quality. For years, pre-rolls were known as a good way for producers to make money off the undesirable byproducts from flower (known as trim) and masked with THC concentrates and terpenes to make them more potent and taste better. But Sluggers’ pre-rolls are made with flower they grow in-house from a bank of 30 strains they pay breeders royalties for, and high-quality concentrates. “[Historically, pre-rolls were] like a hotdog, the inputs of the beef or pork are usually not the best,” says cofounder Seth Sznapstajler. “But for us, we are the craft sausage or Hebrew National [of pre-rolls]. It’s never trim, it’s 100% flower.”Natura invested about $90,000 million to build its facility, which has over 200,000 square feet of cultivation space. Outfitted with greenhouses, an extraction lab for THC concentrates, an industrial kitchen for edibles, and manufacturing rooms where hundreds of employees pack joints and roll them in kief or THC diamonds, Natura’s campus is the heart of its business. About 20% of its revenue comes from manufacturing and white-labeling other brands’ products while the rest comes from its in-house brands, including Sluggers, Dee, Lola and Iced. The Sluggers brand has been a home run, and Natura has expanded it to Canada, Arizona, New York, and Massachusetts through licensing deals and will expand its footprint to Maryland, New Jersey and New Mexico this year.Berner, the cannabis mogul and cofounder of the brand Cookies, says Natura is not your run-of-the-mill cannabis manufacturing facility. “It feels like the Facebook campus,” he says. And it’s thanks to his longtime friendship with Natura cofounder Josh Schmidt, that Sluggers was born. “We were spit balling one day about pre-rolls,” Berner recalls. “Jeeter is popping, Stiiizy is popping, and I said a brand named Sluggers would be hit.” Bytton was not born into the cannabis industry. Growing up outside of Tel Aviv, his grandfather started a solar company named Ideal in 1959. Fifty years later, Bytton was in Anaheim, California at a solar trade show looking for material vendors. He decided to stay in the U.S. and build his own company, Canopy Energy. By 2015, he sold it to a private equity firm and decided to get into another burgeoning industry in California, legal weed. The following year, he started a cannabis real estate fund with Los Angeles real estate entrepreneur Barry Shy to build out facilities for cultivators and producers and lease them out. In 2019, Bytton and Shy decided to build Natura Life Sciences, a vertically integrated campus to grow and manufacture cannabis and cannabis products for other brands. “It’s the China approach,” Bytton says. “You manufacture for brands and you learn everything.”Before Natura launched, Josh Schmidt—a legacy cannabis entrepreneur who opened a medical marijuana dispensary in Van Nuys in 2005 and later started another cannabis company in Oregon—heard about what Bytton was building and wanted in. Schmidt came to the worksite and found Bytton in a trailer office, explaining that he needed help attracting big brands. Schmidt knew about half the founders on Bytton’s customer wish list and joined the company. Seth Sznapstajler, who was working at paraphernalia and packaging company Greenlane, soon joined as the third cofounder. But by 2020, the white-labeling business was not consistent enough and they knew they needed their own brand. After Berner blessed them with a good name, the trio rented an Airbnb for a few days, brought a whiteboard, and started designing a logo, packaging and developing the brand’s mission and ethos. “We wanted a new form factor that was completely different and nostalgic,” says Schmidt. “We wanted someone to grab a pack and open it, and it would take their mind somewhere they’ve been before.” Frank Talk: Traditionally, pre-rolls were the hot dogs of cannabis—made with scraps. "We are the craft sausage or Hebrew National of pre-rolls," says cofounder Josh Schmidt (left, with Ori Bytton and Seth Sznapstajler).Manny Cobian/Sluggers HitFocusing on pre-rolls has been critical to Sluggers growth. Companies like Jeeter, which makes the country’s best-selling joint, built its entire businesses around the category. And thanks to the fact that joints are easy to smoke and much cheaper than flower, pre-rolls became the fastest-growing sector for the first time last year. Pre-rolls now out-sell every product category in terms of units sold. Over the last 12 months, consumers bought 410 million packs of pre-rolls— 14% growth from last year—compared to 378 million units of packaged flower, down 0.4% in the same period, according to Seattle-based cannabis sales data firm Headset. Flower is still number one in terms of sales, generating $9.58 billion over the last 12 months compared to $3.75 billion in pre-roll sales but that is because flower is more expensive than a joint. And as price compression whittles away margins, pre-rolls are driving growth for the industry. In Canada, which federally legalized marijuana in 2018, pre-rolls outpace flower in both sales and units sold. Cy Scott, the founder and CEO of Headset, says Sluggers has emerged as “one of the clearest young brands in the pre roll category.” He notes that while the category grew 9% last year, Sluggers boosted its revenue by 51%. But as smoking weed continues to become more unpopular, it’s unlikely that pre-rolls will be the best-selling category forever. That’s why Sluggers has an impressive line of products on the bench—most notably their fast-growing line of THC vapes, which will eventually outpace their pre-roll sales, Schmidt says. “Soon, vapes will overtake pre-rolls,” says Schmidt, as he stands next to a rack of hundreds of two-gram Slugger vapes that are ready to be packaged and sent to dispensaries. “Everyone is in rush, and I think vapes are the future. Smoking is becoming more taboo and you can get high anywhere with a vape.” More from ForbesForbesMeet The Kings Of The Pre-Roll JointBy Will YakowiczForbesThe King Of Cones: Inside The Cannabis Industry’s $75 Million Pre-Roll EmpireBy Will YakowiczForbesMeet The Billionaire King Of Rolling PapersBy Will YakowiczForbesMeet The Cannabis Industry’s Trump WhispererBy Will Yakowicz