Hara produces some 100 million cones a month—or more than 1.2 billion a year—across 14 factories in and around Delhi, India. The cones are then sent to the United States and Europe and sold to thousands of smoke shops, convenience stores, dispensary chains and cannabis brands. Hara’s cannabis customers fill the cones with ground-up weed, turning the tubes of rolling paper into joints.
Chicago-based cannabis cultivator and retailer Verano Holdings uses Hara’s cones to make their joint brand Swift Lifts, as does Massachusetts-based Curaleaf for its in-house doobies and brands like Grassroots and BNoble. Even the country’s largest independent joint companies, from Jeeter to Stiiizy, are Hara customers. And the biggest rolling paper manufacturer in the world, Republic Brands, which owns OCB, E-Z Wider and Zig-Zag, buys its cones from Hara. All of this translates into a profitable company with real revenue—roughly $75 million a year, Forbes estimates. The entire cone industry, which is largely based in Malaysia, Indonesia and India, produces approximately 350 million cones a month, meaning Hara controls about 30% of the market in terms of volume.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2023/12/24/king-of-cones-bryan-gerber-hara-supply-cannabis-preroll/?sh=5c8322026531
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Chicago-based cannabis cultivator and retailer Verano Holdings uses Hara’s cones to make their joint brand Swift Lifts, as does Massachusetts-based Curaleaf for its in-house doobies and brands like Grassroots and BNoble. Even the country’s largest independent joint companies, from Jeeter to Stiiizy, are Hara customers. And the biggest rolling paper manufacturer in the world, Republic Brands, which owns OCB, E-Z Wider and Zig-Zag, buys its cones from Hara. All of this translates into a profitable company with real revenue—roughly $75 million a year, Forbes estimates. The entire cone industry, which is largely based in Malaysia, Indonesia and India, produces approximately 350 million cones a month, meaning Hara controls about 30% of the market in terms of volume.
Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2023/12/24/king-of-cones-bryan-gerber-hara-supply-cannabis-preroll/?sh=5c8322026531
Subscribe to FORBES: https://www.youtube.com/user/Forbes?sub_confirmation=1
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
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Category
🛠️
LifestyleTranscript
00:00 (car engine roaring)
00:03 In the cannabis industry,
00:06 doing what you say and saying what you do
00:10 goes a very long way.
00:12 And so if 99.9% of the people aren't delivering
00:16 and you are delivering on what you say you're gonna do,
00:19 it's pretty rare and people recognize that.
00:22 I am Brian Gerber,
00:25 CEO and co-founder of Harvest Supply and Hemper.
00:27 (upbeat music)
00:30 Harvest Supply is a vertically integrated manufacturer
00:36 in the pre-roll and combustibles industry.
00:39 And Hemper is a consumer products brand
00:43 that designs and develops smoking accessories.
00:47 Companies compose of multiple different sites.
00:49 So in our headquarters here in Nevada,
00:51 we have about 60 people, employees,
00:54 and then in our offices and our facilities in India,
00:57 we have about 4,000 employees.
01:00 We don't deal with a lot of regulations
01:02 because we're non-plant touching.
01:04 So I don't have all of the nonsense
01:08 that a lot of the cannabis companies have to deal with,
01:10 you know, in the financing side,
01:11 in the payroll and the taxes and all that.
01:13 So I get to have all the fun of being
01:16 in the cannabis industry without all the headache.
01:18 (upbeat music)
01:19 We launched June 1st, 2015.
01:22 It was basically a subscription box with 10 items in it.
01:25 And then six months later,
01:27 we launched this kind of guest curated concepts.
01:30 Smoke like Snoop Dogg was the idea.
01:32 We brought in a celebrity to pick the items,
01:35 curated by them and basically smoke like them
01:37 as you're sitting on the couch for 30 days.
01:39 And that catapulted the subscription box initially.
01:43 And then about 16 months in,
01:45 we started designing and developing our own smoking gadgets.
01:49 And then we started releasing those
01:51 through the subscription box
01:52 as kind of like our own paid test market.
01:55 And then we would take that information
01:57 and data and feedback and go to distribution
01:59 and retail partners and sell it into stores.
02:02 Originally it was, how do I make your ritual easier?
02:06 Right?
02:07 And how do you not have to walk into a smoke shop
02:10 that, you know, it's a terrible experience.
02:12 It's like a bizarre, right?
02:14 And, you know, the guy's yelling at you
02:16 if you say the wrong words or whatever it might be.
02:20 And it was just an awkward experience.
02:21 (upbeat music)
02:24 Once we moved from the celebrity curated stuff
02:27 to the more novelty theme based products,
02:31 what you see behind me here,
02:33 that's when things catapulted even further
02:35 because if you didn't like Snoop Dogg or another celebrity,
02:39 you weren't gonna buy into his box.
02:41 But everyone loves UFO theme stuff.
02:44 Everyone loves the rubber ducky, the Chinese takeout box.
02:48 We actually have a full product development team here.
02:51 We 3D print, we rapid prototype,
02:55 we throw a bunch of darts at the wall and see what sticks.
02:59 It's a team effort, right?
03:00 We're all sitting down trying to figure out
03:02 what's gonna make people's rituals easier, right?
03:05 Or where is there a market void?
03:07 Or where can we innovate on something?
03:09 Or where can we duplicate and lower the price, right?
03:12 There's only a few ways to go about it.
03:15 But that's pretty much how it's done.
03:17 It's, you know, inception to prototyping,
03:20 to sampling, to market demand, market fit.
03:23 And something we've actually learned along the way
03:25 is just because we think there is a market fit for something
03:29 does not mean there is a market demand for it.
03:32 Back in 2018, there was a massive shortage in the market.
03:45 And basically there were no facilities
03:48 producing enough cones.
03:49 All the major brands were sold out completely
03:52 with six month plus lead times.
03:55 And so we got the opportunity to produce cones
03:58 because there was a need for the market, right?
04:02 And we just seized that opportunity.
04:04 More people tried seizing it,
04:05 but we were one of the few who figured it out
04:07 how to do it right.
04:09 And so it was a shortage problem.
04:11 This whole market relies on China
04:14 for all the packaging and other things.
04:16 The problem is everyone believes that China
04:19 is a low labor rate country.
04:21 It has been low labor rate for decades.
04:23 So it's hard to do a labor arbitrage in a country
04:26 that's the labor rates increasing drastically.
04:29 So there's only a few places in the world
04:31 where you could even accomplish this.
04:32 India being one of them.
04:36 If you're comparing like China to India,
04:39 China's very much send me the files, I'll make it.
04:43 India is send me the version from China and I'll make it.
04:47 We went and created a lot of like foundational
04:51 infrastructure there for this market, right?
04:54 The whole cannabis side of the industry
04:55 completely relies on China for packaging and goods
04:59 and all different types of things.
05:00 So we set out to basically get out of China
05:03 and start bringing everything to India
05:05 and start manufacturing most things there.
05:07 So besides cones, there's like injection molding.
05:09 We do like tubes there for pre-roll packaging
05:12 and things like that.
05:14 The existing market, we'll just call it basically
05:18 these shacks or sweatshops essentially is what they were.
05:23 And we came in and wanted to clean up the industry
05:26 and really create infrastructure for this market,
05:29 which it really wasn't there prior.
05:31 So we set out to become the most certified facilities
05:34 in the world.
05:35 So we're GMP certified, we're ISO certified,
05:39 we're HACCP certified, we're FSC certified.
05:42 And so what that allows us to do is basically
05:44 we make cones in clean rooms essentially.
05:46 And we're able to work with Canada and Australia and Israel
05:51 and all these different countries that have to be
05:53 EU GMP certified to even purchase the product.
05:57 So we're able to supply them goods
05:59 where our competitors can't.
06:02 Currently we make about a hundred million a month
06:04 for the market.
06:05 The pre-roll category is one of the fastest categories
06:08 in terms of growth.
06:09 So I don't see that coming down anytime soon.
06:12 When it comes to manufacturing and supply chain,
06:14 nothing goes perfectly.
06:17 So even at our scale, we're producing billions
06:20 of cones a year.
06:21 There's hiccups, there's COVID.
06:25 Obviously we didn't know what was going on
06:27 when that happened.
06:28 And so facilities shut down for a bit, came back online.
06:33 So it was kind of navigating just like the world,
06:35 I guess in that regard.
06:38 But no, just manufacturing at this scale,
06:42 you have to put quality control processes in place.
06:46 We've got, we basically check every single cone
06:48 that comes off the line, right?
06:50 It's impossible to sell grade A cones to one customer
06:55 and grade B plus to another, right?
06:58 This industry is so tiny that like everybody talks.
07:01 (upbeat music)
07:04 Big picture, I think we're entering
07:16 into the consolidation phase.
07:18 I think it's happening faster than everyone thinks it is.
07:22 There is obviously going to be a de-scheduling here
07:27 at some point, sometime soon for cannabis,
07:31 which I think will yield much more capital
07:34 coming into the market,
07:35 which will yield the consolidation to happen faster.
07:39 But I think it's a good thing, right?
07:40 I think getting the bad actors out of the market
07:43 makes sense, getting more people
07:45 who actually truly wanna do good in this industry, right?
07:48 Makes sense, but big picture wise,
07:50 I think we're gonna be bigger than alcohol,
07:53 one point bigger than tobacco,
07:56 but it's still in, I'd like to say cannabis 2.0.
08:01 I don't think we're quite at in 3.0 yet.
08:04 (upbeat music)
08:06 (upbeat music)
08:09 (upbeat music)
08:11 [BLANK_AUDIO]