So, you’re launching or expanding your cannabis brand, and you have spent way too much time and money crafting an identity for it. You have seen more shades of green than you care to remember. Fonts… don’t even mention all the fonts! But you did it. You perfected every aspect of your branding only to discover that regulations often only allow retail customers to see packaging, not product, and nearly all cannabis packaging looks the same.
How does your brand stand out?
For the past 9+ years, over 1,000 cannabis brands have answered that question with Calyx Containers, a vertically integrated, U.S.-based custom packaging and labeling partner whose humble roots are highly relatable to the culture that they cater to.
For too many years, brand builders in the cannabis space have settled for tools and ideas borrowed from totally unrelated fields or industries, essentially trying to pound a round peg into a square hole. Then came Calyx Containers, who saw that square hole and said, “Hold my dram, fam.”
A far cry from the film canisters and ziplocks of yesteryear, and a major improvement over the repurposed pop-tops and terp-trashing mylars currently flooding the market, Calyx Containers has hit a homerun with their hybrid style, blending freshness with a CPG eel, and giving brands a multitude of methods to properly express the quality of their products.
With just a 1-2 week lead time on custom containers or bags for flower, pre-rolls, edibles, and concentrates, along with multiple eye-catching labeling options for orders totaling anywhere from hundreds to hundreds of thousands of units, Calyx Containers has proven to be a reliable branding partner for some of the industry’s most successful multistate operators and mom n’ pops alike.
Calyx Containers: How Vertical Integration Boosts Innovation While Driving Down Costs (Also, WTF is a Dram?)
Founded in 2016 by two college roommates, Calyx Containers changed the game from Day 1 when they dropped the “Dram”, a cubically-formed cannabis jar specifically designed to contain and preserve cannabis products for retail sale.
So, if you’re like us, hearing the word “dram” for the first time may have you running to Google, but let us save you the search. In pharmacy jargon, a ‘dram’ is simply a unit of measurement of mass.
The 25 Dram Jar from Calyx Containers, for example, is optimized to hold 3.5 grams of flower (or a serving of ~10 edibles, or even a pack of pre-rolls) for retail sale.
Featuring a patented bi-injection molded and gasket-sealed lid, the Dram from Calyx Containers is available in multiple sizes, accommodating anything from a gram up to a full ounce of flower, and offers an affordable, child-resistant, senior-friendly packaging solution proven to minimize the loss of moisture, cannabinoid, and terpene content compared to competitors’ containers.
What does that mean? Fresher, more flavorful, and more potent cannabis every time you sit down to sesh.
Calyx Containers Combines Quality Control, Science-Backed Innovation, and a Grassroots Desire to Do Better
Fun Fact: The first jar of legal cannabis sold east of the Mississippi was sold in a Calyx Container Dram Jar! Their vertically integrated operation is now headquartered in Utah, which serves as a useful, centrally-located distribution hub, contributing to the unrivaled turn times on orders of all sizes.
The crew at Calyx Containers was also behind the wildly popular “square-neck” glass jars that have housed dozens of award-winning cannabis concentrates, and that grace top shelves in dispensaries from coast to coast, offering the ideal way to present, preserve, and indulge in high-grade hash.
If you have ever tried to get the last bit of peanut butter out of a tall jar with a short knife, you know how bad that sucks, and the same applies to a jar of hash where every last bit matters! It is from this mentality of “we can do this better” that Calyx Containers was founded.
Some of the best ideas in human history were cooked up in a college dorm room, and Calyx Containers honors that tradition. Matriculating in Massachusetts, Alex and Simon, the co-founders of Calyx Containers, began by upcycling stuffed animals into padded bong bags, which proved to be a hit across campus.
That concept led to the need for an integrated flower container and the gears really began to turn. Unfortunately, it was around this time that Simon suffered a broken back and traumatic brain injury, forcing him to drop out of school. The gasket-sealed silver lining to that experience was his discovery of CBD and the therapeutic side of cannabis use.
As Simon was discovering how cannabis could help him reclaim his life, Massachusetts was standing up its regulated adult-use cannabis market. So, Simon and Alex began touring the dispensaries that were cropping up across the Commonwealth, asking what pain points both brands and retailers were experiencing.
The resounding feedback they received was that the industry desperately needed innovations in labeling and packaging. Store after store told them of the detriment posed by poor packaging. Not only was it not catching the eye of the customer, but it was accelerating the degradation of the product inside! This meant that even if someone picked a nondescript jar from the shelf, they’d probably never pick it again once they tried the overaged weed inside.
Calyx Containers was created to meet this need, and at their first trade show, their concept and their reliability would be put to the test. Without revealing the name of the brand, one of Alex and Simon’s first customers heard their sales pitch at that show and promptly placed an order for 400,000 units covering multiple styles and SKUs. Oh, and they wanted them labeled, too.
With help from friends, that first order was literally labeled by hand and delivered in a U-Haul van. Now, with over half a billion units sold nationwide, Calyx Containers is vertically integrated, heavily automated, and reliably delivering orders on time to the biggest brands in cannabis.
When you ask them, though, they say they’re just getting started. “After starting as a packaging design & distribution company, buying a building and scaling a manufacturing operation completely upended our business model. We had no idea how hard it would be, but it’s allowed us to deliver value to our customers and innovate even faster than we thought was possible so we can continue to help push this incredible industry forward,” Simon says. Yes, they play on ‘Simon Says’ all the time at Calyx too. They know to survive in cannabis this long, you have to make sure you have fun along the way!
Details like custom color matching to ensure brand uniformity, or choosing the color of the gasket seal in Calyx Container lids, may seem over the top, but it is that attention to detail that highlights the benefits of vertical integration and sets Calyx Containers apart.
For example, they spent over a year in R&D designing just the hinge on the lids of their joint/pre-roll tubes to ensure they wouldn’t snap from repeated use. Those “tubes”? Yep, they feature the iconic “square edges” that Calyx Containers are known for, but the interior of the container is still rounded so that the pre-roll is housed more naturally and so that the container is easier to clean for repeated use. This stuff matters to consumers, so it matters to retailers, so it matters to brands, so it matters to Calyx Containers!
“If you are a brand watching your competitor crush sales because they are using Calyx Containers, what are you waiting for,” asks Bill Levers, co-founder of Beard Bros Pharms and pre-roll connoisseur. “The best thing you can do, right now, is upgrade your labeling and packaging to Calyx Containers to cash in on the earned reality in consumers’ minds that the best cannabis comes in Calyx Containers.”
Always innovating, the latest banger from Calyx Containers is their line of Calyx Cure cannabis storage bags. Conceived and crafted to simplify and optimize the curing process for freshly harvested cannabis, Calyx Cure is a 9-layer modified atmospherice pouch designed to effortlessly maintain an ideal balance between humidity and gas exchange.
Forget burping jars (since you probably already forgot, oops!), and let Calyx Cure technology take your crop to the finish line without costly loss of moisture, terpenes, and cannabinoids. On average, a pound of “wet” weed stored in mason jars or a turkey bag will wind up SIX GRAMS lighter than if that same pound was kept in Calyx Cure. Not to mention, the weed will be better coming out of a Calyx Cure! Whatever your price per gram is on the wholesale market, it is easy to see how that one aspect alone will have this new tech paying for itself, even before you factor in savings on labor. Let the bag do the work.
Calyx Containers are often referred to as the world’s first cannabis container. Crafted with intention and proven in the marketplace, it is easy to see why. But it’s not always easy to be first at something, and while Calyx Containers was initially saddled with the conclusion that ‘they are the best… but these other ones are cheaper…’, their push to become vertically integrated has cut out the middle man and tightened that price gap considerably.
Compliant, eco-friendly, consumer-capturing containers and packaging are just a click or call away when you partner with Calyx Containers.
So, like Bill said, what are you waiting for?
To learn more, to speak to a rep, or to place an order, visit https://calyxcontainers.com/
