Legal cannabis and CBD products are pretty much everywhere nowadays across Europe, and there is actually so much of a choice that sometimes we get approached by our clients asking us suggestions on what categories of cannabis, hemp and CBD products they should explore in order to maximize their sales with their Harvin weed vending machines. We wrote a blog post a while ago, back in 2018 at the very beginning of the European legal cannabis industry, describing the 5 best products to sell in a hemp vending machine.

Three years in cannabis (and business) time, with a global pandemic in the middle, is a long time. Things have certainly changed in the panorama of available products offered by the legal cannabis industry, and this is if we want just to focus on Europe and CBD, as the scenario of liberalization in many cases also for recreational purposes on the other side of the Atlantic, in countries such as the United States and Canada, has really reached sophistication levels and a variety of products that would have been hard to imagine just 5 years ago.

We are talking of course of the cannabis (and CBD) edibles revolution we already talked about a couple of blog posts ago, and of all of the interesting and inspiring cannabis, hemp and CBD products that have started a new golden era in sustainable economy, with brands becoming iconic staples of lifestyle in a short time, while others launch IPOs to go public and get listed at the stock exchange, and others get billions of dollars from angel investors and venture capital firms to start building the green industry infrastructure of tomorrow.

We might have not reached the US/Canada standards in cannabis branding, communication and most of all ever evolving product lines, but things are moving fast also in Europe, with markets such as The UK, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, France, Austria, Slovenia and of course Italy growing fast. Sure, there has been over a year of pandemic, but as a matter of fact covid lockdowns have helped boost the ecommerce sales of legal weed and CBD products, that reached an historical +300% in sales in 2020, mostly through ecommerce, deliveries and of course weed vending machines, the real lifesafer for many business owners, since the distributors never stopped working during covid19 lockdowns and in many cases turned out to be the only sales channel for many businesses..

All of our clients still keep telling su to date that if it wasn’t for their weed vending machine operating 24 hours a day, 7 days a week even during lockdowns, they would have probably gone broke and closed their cannabis store. On the contrary, the extra revenues provided by weed vending machines gave many legal cannabis and CBD industry operators, and we have heard from many clients that this allowed them to grow their product line, offering now interesting legal cannabis and CBD products not available before the covid pandemic.

Let’s go back to the original point: which are the top 6 CBD products that can easily become an instant bestseller at your weed vending machine? Let’s try to make a list.

1) Legal CBD cannabis flowers / buds

Let’s be real, the main product category that will keep selling as a champion from weed vending machines in… weed, of course. People might be attracted by novelties, or get inspired by a particular product on showcase, but the reality is that your customer made a trip to your weed vending machine in order to buy some legal CBD cannabis.

Since this is your core product, you are better to follow three simple rules:

a) Quality first and always. Always offer a quality selection of CBD weed products from your weed automatic distributor. If you go for everything quality level, your customers will be more prone to try new cannabis types and genetics, and all of your cannabis CBD products will end up being best sellers. Many shops provide some top quality genetics at market price (generally 8-10-12€/gram) but then stuff their shops and weed vending machines with lower quality products they can sell for cheap, thinking they can get a lot of volume sales from those cheap products. This is deeply wrong.

Shops who offer cheap cannabis CBD products from their weed cannabis vending machines risk to impact the overall perception of quality the business should project, and won’t make much volume sales. Sure, they will sell some of the cheap, lower quality CBD flowers, but customers will not probably repeat their purchase in the future.

b) Provide variety to your customers. Make sure to offer different genetics and types of CBD cannabis in order to offer a choice. Don’t forget to add different product sizes for each of your products (i.e. 1 gram, 2 gram, 3 grams, 5 grams, …. and it’s OK to give two or more slots of your weed vending machine to one specific product, if you know that’s the one who sells the most and get Not only, unless you load your weed vending machine only with your own branded products, we always suggest to offer a variety of brands, of course all of them with quality legal cannabis and CBD products. It’s a bit like going to buy a bottle of wine, and being able to choose among as many options as possible, which normally makes the customer happy.

c) Provide discounts on volume purchases. We have seen more and more of our clients choosing a smart pricing strategy that also makes their repeat customers happy, by simply offering discounts on volume purchases.

Say you only have 1 grams bags or boxes of CDB cannabis flowers and no other bigger formats, and say that your average sale price of the product you want to offer with a volume discount is 1 gram ifors 10 euro. You can certainly use the next slots of your weed vending machine to offer 2 grams (two 1 gram bags tied together, or placed in a vending machine box) for 18 euro bringing the volume price down to 9€/gram, and can even offer a third choice of 3 grams at 24-25€, by simply selling the customer three 1 gram bags of boxes of legal CBD cannabis.

Don’t forget to offer the occasional and time limited price promotions for calendar events such as Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Mother and Father’s Days, and of course for 420, the “stoner code” that also turned April 20 (4/20, as our american friends phrase it) into the international cannabis day. A day that gets celebrated all over the world and that generally coincides with promotional offers by all legal cannabis and CBD ecommerce websites. You can certainly offer a 420 promotion too, so your customers will be happy to keep shopping at your store and weed vending machine, rather than considering purchasing online saving money thanks to the 420 discount. If you are intrigued by this pillar of cannabis culture, we invite you to read our previous blog article Cannabis Culture: Everything you need to know about the Legend of 420.

2) Legal cannabis and CBD oils and extracts

While CBD oils could be not an easy sell from a weed vending machine due to their average medium-high market price, you could test in your weed vending machine some CBD products that are always in high request, such as the extractions of CBD hashish and even CBD charas, the purest extract of resins from the live plants with an harvesting technique that is a few thousand years old and that still today is harvested and produced with a manual approach in the lands of origin, the high sierra of Kush plants of the Himalaya.

Another product that will certainly perform well in terms of sales from your weed vending machine is a novelty product in both worlds of cannabis, THC and CBD, the Moonrock. Cannabis Moonrocks are made by dipping compact buds of cannabis in hash oil, or spraying the cannabis flowers with it, before getting rolled in kief, the trichomes and terpenes “pollen” of the cannabis flower.

With your weed vending machine packed with CBD hashish, CBD charas and CBD Moonrocks you cannot go wrong. Make sure as usual to secure a supplier (or a production) of high quality, and the sales from your weed vending machine will be growing smoothly.

3) Cannabis accessories and paraphernalia

Sometimes your customers just go for a walk around the block of their home to reach your weed vending machine, purchase their CBD cannabis products of choice, and then go back home to enjoy their purchase. Some other times, especially when friends decide to consume some legal weed to close the day with a bonding and relaxing experience, they might not have all the tools at reach to enjoy their legal cannabis purchase.

For this reason we have seen many of our clients offering all the basics, from hemp grinders to lighters and rolling papers. In some countries, such as in Italy, a recent law prohibits the sales of rolling papers from shops that are not an authorized tobacco stand / shop. So if your shop is a cannabis store or grow shop in Italy and other European countries with the same legislations about rolling papers, you just cannot provide rolling papers, while if your shop is a licensed tobacco shop you can also offer rolling papers from your weed vending machine.

In both cases you can certainly sell small pipes from your weed vending machine, or even some pre-rolled empty “joint cones”, that are getting more and more popular these days, alongside the empty cigar leaves to make the classic blunt, with the cigar leaves used instead of the rolling papers. Don’t forget the paper filters! You can also “bind” together such items selling them as a unique “kit”, a practice already consolidated with tobacco shops, that have been offering the “rolling paper + lighter” kit pretty much since the beginning of the automatic distributors’ era.

Forget hats, tshirts, backpacks and other cannabis culture merchandising for your weed vending machine. While those articles still sell, they sell better inside the shop, as the custom has the opportunity to see the size, touch the fabric and maybe even try the products before buying them, while all these key points in making that interested visitor into a customer unfortunately are not part of the purchasing experience offered by weed vending machines.

Also, those are generally bulky items that will occupy many slots of your weed vending machine for a potential occasional sale, while you could certainly maximize your sales volumes by putting the hat back in the shop and using those two-three slots of the vending machine to sell more best selling legal cannabis and CBD products.

4) Legal cannabis, CBD and hemp-based food and drinks (edibles)

What’s something everybody loves to do after a good smoke, be it of a THC cannabis or, such in our case, of a rich CBD legal cannabis flower or extract? Eating, of course. It’s “munchies” time! Munchies is a slang term for being hungry and craving for food as a result of cannabis or alcohol consumption, and it generally involves eating convenience snack foods and sweets. So why not offer your customer a more complete CBD experience, from a wide and convenient choice of legal CBD flowers and extract products, the “smoker’s tools” if necessary, and also some CBD snacks to grab after the smoke?

The selection of CBD edible products that can easily become weed vending machine best sellers is pretty easy. Just include in your weed vending machine a couple of varieties of CBD cookies, or some hemp-based snacks such as biscuits, chips or even mexican nachos. Why not some CBD chocolate and CBD candies or jellies such as the classic CBD teddy bears? You cannot certainly go wrong with legal CBD cannabis and hemp based edibles. Read our previous article on cannabis edibles to learn more.

5) CBD drinks, of course!

Summer is coming, and people are thirsty also during wintertime, especially after a smoke, even more if after a munchie break that followed a smoke. When offering CBD food and snacks from a weed vending machine, adding a selection of CBD and hemp-derived drinks it’s generally a no brainer, also because often (but not always) CBD and cannabis edibles require to be refrigerated, so you would need a refrigerated weed vending machine such as our Harvin Master Revolution, or an “hybrid” version between a “classic” weed vending machine such as any Harvin weed vending machine equipped with touch screen display (Magic Baby Touch, Magic Hour Touch and Magic Wind Touch) synced with a refrigerated slave module placed next to the weed vending machine, such as our Harvin Master Mix.

Once you can offer refrigerated drinks, the choices between cannabis and hemp-infused teas and soft drinks of any flavor, or cannabis and CBD sodas are endless. In the specific field of cannabis sodas we have seen (and drunk) many refreshing cannabis colas and sparkling cannabis drinks with flavors ranging from ginger to watermelon, and we loved them all. By the way, your refrigerated weed vending machine doesn’t have to sell just CBD products, you can certainly add small water bottles and regular sodas, too.

In many european countries you might need a special liquor license to sell CBD and hemp-distilled beers, and if you can, you should definitely test at least a couple of cannabis beers, as today they are even available at regular supermarkets because they are getting more and more popular, and not only among the cannabis lovers crowd. A cold beer is always a cold beer, and cannabis beers have proven over and over to have reached a pretty sophisticated level, with many high-quality cannabis beers available on the market today.

6) CBD and hemp oil cosmetic creams, skin care and topic treatment products

This category of CBD products could really be a top seller in your weed vending machine, if only “tailored” for your customer needs. It is very unlikely that a CBD collagen cream with hyaluronic acid for skin beauty could be a hard sell for a weed vending machine, also because of the still average high prices for this high class of CBD cosmetics. On the contrary, if your weed vending machine is located in a very trafficked area during summer season, it could be a win to offer a CDB or hemp-oil sunscreen, a CDB and aloe topic cream for sunburns, or even a cannabis-derived herbal mosquito spray.

If your weed vending machine is close to an area of sport activities or a gym instead, it could be a great idea to offer topic CDB creams and gels for sport injuries and muscle pain, such as the amazing CBD with arnica, devil’s claws and botwella the writer recently used after a twisted ankle accident, and it worked fantastic. Or such as the classic cannabis cooling flex gel with aloe vera the writer got at a cannabis fair a couple of years ago, and it has been a great relief tool since then to relax and refresh tired feet and legs after all day on the floor at trade shows.

The key is to offer items that your customers can need and appreciate, and secure recurring sales. So the suggestion is to stick to basics but needed products in the hemp and CBD category for weed vending machines but hey, you can also experiment a bit. For example, if your weed vending machine is located in a “hip” neighborhood, you can try to place some CBD cosmetics such as CBD lipsticks or make-up removal creams, while if your neighborhood and your clientele is a bit “kinky” you can certainly try to use your weed vending machine to offer to your legal cannabis clientele also other popular items such as CBD condoms and hemp-based lubricants. The opportunities are endless, but they still need to satisfy your local clientele, if you want your weed vending machine products to be best sellers.

This is it, that was our top six chart of cannabis and CBD products that performs as best sellers in weed vending machines, and that are making many or our clients’ business horizons bigger and bigger, and their weed vending machine sales booming.

Do you need any info and expert advice on weed vending machines? Contact the Harvin team, we’ll be happy to learn about your business and your needs, and to guide you in the choice of the weed vending machine that best suits your business and sales needs.

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