Cannabis Company Sluggers Hits $60M Revenue as Pre-Rolls Surpass Traditional Flower Sales

U.S. cannabis industry. 4% to 378 million units, according to Headset data cited by @Forbes.

Natura grows 80,000 pounds of cannabis per year inside 18 glass-ceilinged greenhouses on a 12-acre industrial campus in Sacramento, California. The company invested about $90 million to build the facility, which contains over 200,000 square feet of cultivation space plus an extraction lab, an industrial kitchen for edibles, and manufacturing rooms. 2 million joints per month.

Sluggers Hit generated around $60 million in revenue last year and is on track to reach $85 million by the end of 2026. Sluggers’ best-selling product is its five-pack of pre-rolls in a tin wrapped in a metallic mylar bag that contains an eighth of an ounce of cannabis and a collectible card.

The tins sell for $25 to $50 depending on the strain, and Sluggers trading cards trade on eBay with collection asking prices between $150 and $1,000.

Sluggers is now the fifth best-selling pre-roll brand in California. The first batch of Sluggers pre-rolls sold out in a day in 2021 and received re-orders within a week, Ori Bytton said. Sluggers pre-rolls are made with flower grown in-house from a bank of 30 strains and high-quality concentrates; they never use trim, cofounder Seth Sznapstajler said.

About 20% of Natura’s revenue comes from manufacturing and white-labeling other brands’ products, while 80% comes from its in-house brands including Sluggers, Dee, Lola and Iced. Sluggers has expanded through licensing deals to Canada, Arizona, New York and Massachusetts. The brand will expand its footprint to Maryland, New Jersey and New Mexico in 2026.

Ori Bytton, 40, is CEO and cofounder of Sluggers and Natura. His grandfather started a solar company named Ideal in 1959. Bytton sold his own solar company, Canopy Energy, to a private equity firm in 2015.

In 2016 he started a cannabis real estate fund with Barry Shy. In 2019 Bytton and Shy decided to build Natura Life Sciences as a vertically integrated cannabis campus. Josh Schmidt opened a medical marijuana dispensary in Van Nuys in 2005 and later started another cannabis company in Oregon.

Schmidt joined Natura after meeting Bytton at the construction site. Seth Sznapstajler joined as the third cofounder after working at Greenlane.

Sluggers has collaborations with Cookies, Connected, Backpack Boyz, actor Chauncey Leopardi and rapper Xzibit. The pre-roll category grew 9% last year while Sluggers increased its revenue by 51%, Cy Scott of Headset said. Sluggers has a fast-growing line of THC vapes that Schmidt predicts will eventually outpace pre-roll sales.

Hundreds of two-gram Slugger vapes are ready to be packaged. In Canada, pre-rolls outpace flower in both sales and units sold. 75 billion for pre-rolls.