How Sluggers Became A Heavy Hitter In Pre-Roll Joints

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Today on Forbes, how Sluggers became a heavy hitter in pre-roll joints.

[00:00:07]In a 12-acre industrial campus in Sacramento, across the street from a US Navy recruiting center, Natura grows 80,000 lbs of weed a year inside 18 glass-ceilinged hot houses.

[00:00:20]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.

[00:00:32]Everyday, 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.

[00:00:50]Leaning into sports tropes, Sluggers' best-selling product is [music] its five-pack of pre-rolls tin wrapped in a metallic Mylar bag like the kind collectible sports cards come in.

[00:01:01]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.

[00:01:15]Sluggers even has a collaboration with actor Chauncey Leopardi, who played Squints in the classic 1993 baseball movie The Sandlot, >> [music] >> and it just released a limited edition run with a rapper Exhibit.

[00:01:28]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.

[00:01:37]Sluggers' cards also have a burgeoning secondary market on eBay, with asking prices for collections ranging from $150 to $1,000.

[00:01:48]Thanks to the brand's marketing gimmicks and collaborations with well-known producers like Cookies, Connected, [music] Backpack Boyz, and more, Sluggers is now the fifth best-selling pre-roll brand in California, home to America's biggest marijuana market.

[00:02:03]CEO and co-founder Ori Bitton, who is 40 years old, said he knew they were onto something right when Sluggers hit the market.

[00:02:11]He says, quote, "The first batch in 2021, they weren't pretty, but they sold out in a day and we got reorders in a week."

[00:02:20]Sluggers emphasizes its quality.

[00:02:23]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.

[00:02:37]>> [music] >> 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.

[00:02:48]Co-founder Seth Snapstyler says, quote, [music] "Historically, pre-rolls were like a hot dog. The inputs of the beef or pork are usually not the best, but for us, we are the craft sausage or Hebrew National of pre-rolls.

[00:03:01]>> [music] >> It's never trim. It's 100% flower."

[00:03:06]Natura invested about $90 million to build its facility, which has over 200,000 square feet of cultivation space.

[00:03:14]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.

[00:03:30]About 20% of its revenue comes from manufacturing and white-labeling other brands' products, >> [music] >> while the rest comes from its in-house brands, including Sluggers, D, Lola, and Iced.

[00:03:43]>> [music] >> 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.

[00:03:57]Berner, the cannabis mogul and co-founder of the brand Cookies, says Natura is not your run-of-the-mill cannabis manufacturing facility. He says, quote, "It feels like the Facebook campus."

[00:04:10]And actually, it's thanks to Berner's long-time friendship with Natura co-founder Josh Schmidt that Sluggers was born.

[00:04:16]Berner recalls, quote, "We were spitballing one day about pre-rolls.

[00:04:20]Jeter is popping, Steezy [music] is popping, and I said a brand named Sluggers would be a hit."

[00:04:27]In 2016, Biten started a cannabis real estate fund with Los Angeles real estate entrepreneur Barry Shy to build out facilities for cultivators and producers and lease [music] them out.

[00:04:38]In 2019, Biten and Shy decided to build Natura Life Sciences, a vertically integrated campus to grow and manufacture cannabis and cannabis products for other brands.

[00:04:50]Biten says, quote, "It's the China approach. You manufacture for brands and you learn everything."

[00:04:58]For full coverage, check out Will Yakowicz's piece on forbes.com.

[00:05:03]This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.

[00:05:05]Thanks for tuning in.