Vape Hardware Trends
Vape products provide a unique, and affordable, consumption experience that lends itself to all levels of cannabis consumers. Cannabis concentrates offer consumers enhanced flavor and potent effects, making this commodity group extremely appealing to cannabis brands, retailers, and customers alike.
So, it’s not hard to understand why cannabis vape sales are booming throughout North America. In the United States, vapor pens were the second to flower, as the largest selling cannabis category in 2021, netting nearly $2.6 billion in retail sales across California, Colorado, Michigan, Nevada, Oregon and Washington.
As popularity increases, so do consumption patterns, and the data shows that for the first time, sales of 1g cartridges have surpassed the sales of their half-gram counterparts. One gram cartridges (or 1ml in Canada) were the hottest-trending products in 2021. Over 50 million of these units have been sold this year already among the 11 North American markets, generating upward of $1.7B in revenue.
One-gram units debuted in the US in 2017 with a mere 1.5M unit sales. That number increased 5x to 7.5M unit sales in 2018, before vaulting to just over 18M the following year. In 2020, the sale of 1g cartridges nearly doubled once again to 34M units, overtaking the 0.5g package size for the first time, and this past year the segment share of 1g cartridges grew to 67% of all cartridges sold nationally.
In addition to the popularity of these larger sizes, the market has witnessed an uptick in the sale of disposable vape pens. As we enter post-COVID territory, and canna-tourism returns to legal markets, we expect to see this trend continue.
Greentank: Adherence To Excellence
When it comes to hardware, however, not all vapes are created equally. Well-made vaporizers account for the safe temperature thresholds of common approved device manufacturing materials, and tend to adhere to similar exemplary standards of makeup. Food-grade stainless steel, for example, is indicative of a quality-built vaporizer and is one of the safest and most relied-upon, non-allergenic metals in the world.
Some inferior products use nickel-plated brass that can leach heavy metals into extracts and flake over time. Some plastics, like food-safe plastics, including polyethylene terephthalate glycol (PETG) and poly cyclohexylenedimethylene terephthalate glycol-modified (PCTG), are suitable alternatives at lower temperature ranges to stainless steel, provided they can withstand high temperatures and are resistant to corrosion. Cheaper plastics that cannot withstand high temperatures and are not resistant to corrosion are unfit for vape hardware.
When it comes to heating technology, coils have replaced wicks as the go-to core solution for cannabis vape hardware. Still, there are some major differences between the two predominant coil options on the market today: ceramic and quartz. Ceramics are the industry’s preferred coil material because they offer superior heat retention than quartz coils and deliver more robust flavor profiles and consistent vapor. But there’s a trade-off, they take longer to heat up than quartz coils.
Quartz coils, on the other hand, heat up more efficiently than ceramics and deliver pure flavors but they retain heat rather poorly and burn through batteries rapidly. Their temperature controls are also less accurate than ceramics, making them a poor choice for low-viscosity oils and extracts.
Mastery of these elements, materials, performance standards, durability, and producing the desired user experience requires not only adept engineering skill and marketing understanding, but the resources and facilities to conduct legions of research and development iteratively innovating the best products. North of the U.S.-Canadian border, award-winning Greentank knows this well. The company designs, engineers, and manufactures high-quality vape devices for brands and producers across North America. The Toronto, Canada, based company is considered an industry powerhouse with a proven track record of over 200+ successful custom vape launches in the US and Canada.
Greentank has consistently manufactured the safest, highest quality, and most reliable vape hardware available on the market today. By implementing rigorous quality control processes, managing the entire supply and fulfillment chains, and maintaining the highest ISO and GMP certifications, Greentank boasts the lowest failure rates in the industry. Greentank offers peace of mind to its brand partners in a market where reliability means everything.
“Strict additional industry regulations can be difficult for smaller hardware manufacturers to overcome, but they create the types of evolutionary bottlenecks that challenge businesses to innovate,” said Pete Duckett, Chief Engineer at Greentank. “We see them as opportunities to demonstrate our commitment to quality and innovation.”
Greentank prides itself to have worked hard to become the safest and most transparent vape hardware solutions provider in the world. From universal factory and product certifications, to third-party heavy metal and child-resistance testing, Greentank adheres to a standard of excellence that its competitors struggle to match.
Vape Research & Development Advantages
Part of the company’s competitive advantage is due to its aggressive capital spend and commitment to state-of-the art research facilities, equipment, and licensing. Greentank paired its extract experts with the first 7,000 sq. foot, world-class, research and development, vape device innovation lab in North America. With this facility, Greentank can bring product development visions to life by enabling:
- Expanded innovation capabilities
- Expedited validation of new hardware technologies
- Accelerated product speed to market
- Full suite of on-site product and emission testing equipment
- High fidelity 3D prototyping
- Partner formulation testing
“Greentank is the only cannabis vape hardware manufacturer with a Federal research and development license,” said Derek Champoux, Vice-President of Brand & Marketing at Greentank Technologies. “This allows our designers, engineers, and product specialists to conduct critical safety, quality, and performance testing with our brand partners. It also allows us to innovate and bring forward more ground breaking product developments quicker and more efficiently.”
Additionally, the Canadian cannabis industry’s first cannabis research license was issued to Greentank. The license grants the teams access to materials and permission to conduct activities to pave way for further safety, reliability, and performance research and development in the company’s manufacturing process.
- Handle up to 10,000 grams of dried flower & 2,500 grams of cannabis extract
- Test extracts for viscosity, fluidity, constituents, emissions, and interactions with different materials
- Import cannabis from legal foreign suppliers
- Conduct focus-group studies with brand partners
- Collect critical vape data
- Efficiently validate new hardware technologies
Market Matching
A Greentank blog post clinically describes what cannabis connoisseurs already know and will tell you, concentrates aren’t optimally consumed using “one-size-fits-all” vape hardware. They have different compositions, viscosities, ideal heating temperatures, and more. So selecting the appropriate vape hardware for your concentrate type isn’t as easy as selecting from a model number in a catalog if you want to bring out the true flavor profiles and experience of your product.
Unique to Greentank is its “Market Matching” data-driven hardware development and selection process and partner offering that addresses this reality and the market forces driving brand product development decisions. Any multi-state cannabis brand manager will tell you, each market is unique with its own set of consumer tastes, sales trends, and nuances. As Greentank defines it, “Some of these trends follow basic, logical patterns; others defy predictive models altogether.”
“We know that every market is wildly different,” said Champoux. “Understanding real world consumer sales trends allows us to not only build smarter devices, it empowers us to bring these sales trends to our partners. Intimately knowing what is happening inside each territory allows us and our partners to get on top of market trends faster and more efficiently than the competition.”
From the multiple point-of-sale data platforms Greentank gathers datasets from, it is able to study and understand vape market trends, patterns, and anomalies. This market intelligence allows the company to educate its partners on which hardware sizes, types, prices and formulations are currently trending, or will sell best when launched, in their current or target markets.
Based on the types of concentrate formulations being produced, Greentank is able to prescribe the precise hardware to yield the optimal, most native consumer experience possible from a vaporizer.
Concentrate Trends: Live Resin
Distillates may still be king in the North American cannabis industry, but live resin concentrates have catapulted in popularity – becoming the industry’s fastest growing vape segment. But just what is live resin, and what makes it so special?
As defined by industry experts Respect My Region, live resin provides the consumer with a very diverse cannabinoid and terpene profile because it’s a whole-plant extract. For this process, the cannabis flower is frozen within an hour of harvest to preserve the maximum levels of cannabinoids and terpenes.
By freezing the cannabis immediately at harvest, and extracting using Butane Hash Oil (BHO), labs can typically get an extremely flavorful result. This full-spectrum form of concentrate has a much stronger potential to activate the entourage effect and provide a strain-specific high for the end-user.
When live resin vape products first debuted in the market (in late 2018), not much was known about them – other than that they were more expensive than your average distillate. Ultimately being branded as a niche product aimed at cannabis connoisseurs.
However, in today’s market, live resin products have become the second-most sought after extract type in the US. With data showing improved revenue, unit sales, and market shares in 2021 relative to 2020. Additionally, national live resin vape sales spiked more than 150% last year.
This increase in sales has influenced brands to drop new live resin SKUs weekly according to Greentank data. The company has been a major cartridge supplier. A year ago only 10 Canadian brands offered live resin vape products – this number is set to surpass 50 by the end of 2022.
Greentank: Your Solution To Live Resin Vapes
Unlike distillate oil, the characteristics of live resin extracts can vary, making them highly incompatible with one-size-fits-all hardware. As the only vape provider in the world with a federally issued research and development license, Greentank is able to expertly design and craft affordable (and fully customizable) live resin specific hardware for a variety of extract formulations.
“Live resin, rosin, solventless, and other speciality extracts are only going to get more varied and complex,” said Champoux. “Having a vape manufacturing partner who is able to be nimble, adaptable, and willing to adjust quickly is crucial. Things like absorption rate and varied resistance levels are key to maintaining high-quality vapor, flavor, and reliability.”
Three things to consider with every new live resin hardware product launch according to Greentank include:
- Is there a need for custom intake holes?
With any extract, it is important that the hardware allows for the absorption of oil into the heating core. This is critical for ensuring even and consistent heating for maximum flavor.
- Have we solved any specialty needs?
Live resin absorbs differently than distillate. Heating cores must allow for even absorption. Greentank’s proprietary ceramic heating core is designed to do so.
- Have we accounted for oil viscosity?
Every live resin is different, and therefore requires different heating elements. Greentank designs its hardware to accentuate the unique properties of each live resin extract.
Below is an infographic developed by Greentank illustrating their industry-class vape hardware live resin approach and solution.
