Green Vault Systems’ Precision Batcher weighs, blows and drops dried buds into retail packaging using software that quickly sorts product with an accuracy of 0.01 a gram and is designed to reduce labour costs, product damage and financial losses from human error.
“It’s the only one in the industry that was made specifically for cannabis,” said Lisa Keyser, sales manager for GreenBroz Inc., the Precision Batcher’s sole distributor.
Due to the relatively fragile nature of cannabis, traditional food sorters are viewed by some as too rough on dried flower and potentially damaging, and less accurate by weight, so The Precision Batcher moves buds with Air Kush Technology, or gentle puffs of air.
Unlike food products, the higher per-gram costs of cannabis make weighing accuracy important for small companies’ bottom lines.
Designed for micro cultivators, and with a retail price tag of US$139,000, here is how it works:
One person is required to stand atop the machine and individually place dried buds onto one of eight scales. From here, they are instantly weighed by a computer and sorted by gentle puffs of air. It can be set for amounts, such as 1 gram or 3.5 grams, and after determining the weight of individual buds, the system assesses the best combination to reach the set packaging weight within one-one hundredth of a gram.
Using just five amps of electricity, The Precision Batcher has the capacity to allocate 800 to 1,000 on-target batches per hour, according to the company. It has been on the market since 2016 and is sold globally.
The individual batches are then dropped into packaging containers, which requires a separate piece of equipment.