A Year-Long Journey with Sonoma Hills Farm Pre-Rolls: Crafting a Cannabis Experience
Hey Sonoma Hills Farm fam! 👋 Pull up a chair; We want to take you on a journey through the heart of what we do – crafting an experience that’s more than just a smoke. Grab your favorite pre-roll, and let’s dive into the story behind our premium joints, straight from the heart.
Our entire team are our biggest customers and while we generally roll our own, we often find ourselves reaching for pre-rolls for the convenience. More times than not, this left us all with a bad taste in our mouths, literally. We found the pre-roll market littered with joints filled with terp-sprayed old shake, toxic bleached papers, wasteful packaging, not to mention there were no certified organic flower options.
Necessity being the mother of invention, we set out on two year long process that took us deeper than we ever expected and led us to creating the very first certified Organic pre-roll in the world.
Along the way we learned ALOT about rolling papers, recycling, milling, and then even MORE about rolling papers. And we realized we had A LOT of questions. It proved easy to criticize the pre-roll market, but now we were challenged to actually do something about it.
So how do you show something is “premium” without oodles of packaging? How do you create a supply chain that allows you to ship out SUPER fresh pre-rolls? How do you create simple, elegant packaging that is reusable and recyclable? How do you create packaging that people could also repurpose in their daily lives? How can you create daily moments of bliss and satisfaction when customers interact with the packaging? How do you spend a little extra on each component and still be able to make a living?
To us, luxury is first and foremost defined by quality. Above all else, the stand alone product must speak for itself, without the glitz of packaging. We believe packaging should enhance the product, not distract from it. With our packaging we wanted first and foremost to honor our obligation to the Earth.
All in, we smoked over 125 different types of rolling papers with the same flower. But let’s back up a bit as it all starts with right there, with the flower.
The Flower: Sun and Earth, Certified Organic Magic
We know from our bulk business that people buy all manner of shake and trim to pad their pre-rolls and then compensate with spray terps or add-ins. We wanted to buck the trend and start with quality buds. Plain and simple, we use our own grown Sun & Earth and OCal certified like Organic flower.
Genetics:
Each year in our small ½ acre plot we grow over 25 strains with genetics from over ½ a dozen breeders, including our own house strains. That means lots of strains where we only have 25 – 50 individual plants. We’ve been working side by side, nurturing these buds to perfection. Each one is a piece of our story, meticulously dried, cured, and milled with the care only a team like ours can provide.
We have grown now with partners like Humboldt Seed Company, Conception Nurseries, Compound Genetics, Purple City Genetics, and Purple Caper Seeds to name a few. We also have our own house genetics we brought with us from the legacy market like Pink Jesus created by Sam and Cherry Cheesecake which Sam helped create as part of a team that later became Gold Seal in San Francisco’s 215 days.
Single Strain or Intentionally Blended:
We have always tended to be purists with regards to strains. Whether its our own house strains like Pink Jesus and Cherry Cheesecake, or the strains of our breeder partners, we like to honor the heritage, history and craftsmanship of each cultivar.
One of our other issues with pre-rolls on the market is they are often a random blend of whatever strains are leftover or “floor bud” and “floor mix”. When we set out with our first pre-rolls we wanted to launch with strain specific joints so our customers would know we were intentionally choosing which flavors to launch.
Over time, began to launch intentionally blended pre-rolls. Honestly this usually happens when we love a strain , smoke it too much and and “wear it out”. We found that by blending an overused favorite with another helps bring back the magic for us.
Menu
Sonoma Hills Farm will always carry our house strains, although they often sell out. Pink Jesus is our standing farm favorite Sativa, Cherry Cheesecake our house Indica, and Grandi Guava from Purple City is our current house Hybrid.
Every year we also launch additional blends and in the case of the seasonal blends, they’ll have the same name and inspiration but much like annual blends from wineries, we’ll include the best of the annual harvest that often come in small batches, and combine them into flavorful blends to meet the season. Another fun thing about these blends is that we’ll always donate 10% of the proceeds to a selected charity, so everytime you buy a Sonoma Hills Farm blend, you’re spreading the love well beyond your smoke.
Standing Seasonal Blends
Double Rainbow Blend (Spring to Summer Sativa)
Witches Garden Blend (Summer to Fall Hybrid)
Three Wise Women (Fall to Winter Indica)
Each of our intentional blends is carefully selected and tested by the whole team and sometimes with help from a special friend like Humphrey Slocombe Ice Cream, Lazy Bear, or Nineteen Sixtynine Fragrances. We love to revive the magic of our favorite strains by blending them and experimenting.
Rolling Papers: AS important as the Flower
We never realized how important papers were until we started smoking pre-rolls. The amount of chemically bleached and cardboard tasting cones in the market is tragic. We quickly found out why, it is HARD to source good quality cones and they are EXPENSIVE. Turns out, it is much easier and cheaper to just chemically alter and bleach poor quality pulp.
While it means a lower margin for us, we decided we had to go with the most premium papers we could find on the market. In order to design our pre-rolls we ultimately enlisted the help of the historic French Luxury paper company, Devambez. Founded in 1862, Devambez is the engraver and royal stationer turned luxury rolling paper company.
Hailing from France
The team at Devambez helped us to source our amazing rolling papers. Our journey led us to a small French mountain village, but not before exploring a myriad of options. The papers you hold in your hands aren’t just chosen; they’re experienced, refined through countless smoke sessions over two years that brought our team closer together.
Our rolling papers are produced by the finest producer in the world. The paper mill is located in a small mountain village at the base of the Pyrennes. This French village has been producing rolling paper since the 1800s, it is a craft passed on from generation to generation. All the rolling papers we use are made to the same standards the FDA and EU requires for paper which is in contact with food. The papers are also FSC certified, the EU program which verifies that the raw materials used were sustainably sourced and environmentally friendly.
Size Matters: Sharing the Love
Why are our joints a bit larger? It’s not just about generosity; it’s about the shared experiences of our team. We’ve spent countless moments crafting, rolling, and sharing our creations. From solo adventures with a 1-gram beauty to friend-filled sessions with 0.8 gram joints, each size tells a story of collaboration and camaraderie.
Curing, Milling and Tamping:
Ever gotten a pre-roll that was wobbly at the crux? Or one where the whole cherry falls out? Or one that keeps going out? At SHF we worked tirelessly with our partners to bring you an awesome pre-roll that smokes great all the way through. We are careful to make sure each joint is tightly packed at the base so it doesn’t go all limp.
We also make sure that as the joint is being filled it isn’t in big sections that make you lose your cherry. We also make sure to mill our weed rather than grind, the miller preserves more trichomes and generates a smoother burning flower mix than ground cannabis.
Eco-Warrior Packaging: Where Art Meets Sustainability. NEVER PLASTIC
Often times when we would find pre-rolls in the market we did like, we would be bummed out about the packaging. Plastic Tubes packed into boxes, packed into plastic bags. Layer on layer of unnecessary waste made us feel guilty for our daily indulgences.
We also realized early on that most of the packaging you see in market is standard off the shelf packaging pushed by the large Chinese packaging houses. None of these solutions provided a tight seal and most were of dubious environmental origins. Plus the supply chain waste and absurdity shipping tons of basic supplies from across the world to save a nickel.
As the first ever CCOF certified Cannabis farm, we take extra care to hold respect for the land and the cannabis plant as our highest values. So we knew we needed to use recyclable glass and paper for our joint tubes. We also knew we needed to have simple packaging, without lots of frills.
We made some mistakes with our 1/8th jars years ago and ended up needing to put a riser inside our box. It is recyclable cardboard and we feel good about its impact, but still it is unnecessary waste we will solve in our next iteration. So when designing our pre-roll packaging we took careful consideration to minimize packaging.
No plastic, just the result of our collective effort to find the most sustainable and stylish options. Singles in recyclable glass tubes, 4-packs wrapped in specially treated matte recyclable paper – it’s a testament to our commitment, shaped by the shared experiences of our team.
Freshness:
We originally thought one of the biggest challenges of the pre-roll market would be maintaining freshness. I mean, why are all these things so damn stale all the time? We have smoked dozens of joints packed in all manner of gimmicky solutions people have come up with for “freshness”. From mini-Boveda packs to mini-vacuum pump plastic lids, to shrink wrapped plastic around plastic tubes and yet we generally find the same stale taste.
After years of testing, we came to realize that freshness is 95% about your supply chain and only 5% about your packaging. Once you have ground your flower and put it in a cone, no amount of plastic shrink wrap is going to really stop it from degrading.
The biggest factor is starting with fresh quality flower, storing and transporting it in a temperature controlled supply chain, and getting it as quickly as possible from the time it is ground to the time it is in customers hands. We mill and produce our pre-rolls to order making sure it is as fresh as possible when it gets to you.
To start with we worked to get as tight a seal as possible on our recyclable paper boxes. After experimentation we added a food safe grease paper that helps an even tighter seal and protects the joints. But the real magic is in the supply chain.
We realized that in order to really get joints out to people as fresh as we wanted for ourselves, we needed to completely up-end our packaging system and bring our printing function in-house. What we ended up with is an incredibly flexible packaging system that lets us do hyper-local collabs and get our pre-rolls out from grind to market faster than you can smoke it.
We will never say that a pre-roll is as good as freshly milling an 1/8th, but we believe ours are a close second choice. We smoke at least a couple a day when it is too inconvenient to sit down and roll or when we want to enjoy a unique blend.
Transparency:
From the CCOF, OCal and Sun & Earth logo’s to the scannable QR code that takes you to the full COA Sonoma Hills Farm is all about transparency. On our 1/8th jars we pay the extra for a full terpene panel on each strain and list the top three on the package. The rest are all available when you scan the QR code that takes you directly to the Metrc page with all the test information regarding each product.
In our journey with Sonoma Hills Farm, crafting pre-rolls has been a team effort. We’ve worked together for over two years, smoked hundreds of different papers, and each joint is a culmination of our shared experiences. It’s not just about the smoke; it’s a celebration of teamwork, dedication, and the artistry of cannabis. Here’s to elevating your cannabis experience, hit after hit. 🌿✨