Wakit Grinders and RollBotz are Making Smoking More Convenient

Wakit Grinders and RollBotz aren’t only making grinding and cone filling simpler but also helping smokers preserve flavor.
Wakit
Courtesy of Wakit Grinders

G&E Innovations Consulting LLC, the company behind Wakit Grinders and RollBotz, know their stuff when it comes to cannabis innovation. The power couple behind the brand, Founder and President Gustavo Reyes and Co-Founder and Vice President Esther Delgado-Lago, are now introducing RollBotz to fill and pack cones in three to five seconds. 

It’s the only company that can fill a cone at such a speed. The ball and chain shreds and trims the flower to a perfect texture for prerolls. “There are no cone fillers being put out there,” Reyes said. “There’s no one putting out these products that are investing the money and spending the money. The reason they’re not doing it is because they’re just turning around and saying, ‘Look, we sell junk. Most of the stuff breaks,’ and they’re good with that. They’re like, ‘We want to sell something that you’re going to break and come back in six months or three months.’ I don’t believe in that. We made a commitment, saying, ‘I’m not going to put out junk that breaks.’ We have a six-month warranty, soup to nuts. We’re the only grinder out there that’s electric that’ll do that.”

The RollBotz has been a long time coming. The company didn’t want to put out a simple, perfunctory cone filler. The invention took trial and error, as any great product does, but Gustavo is proud of where his latest invention landed. “Year one was about making sure that the components I had for the first invention worked for this new invention,” he said. “What ended up happening from there was, to fill the cone, the device was straight, and I kept wanting something small, small, small. I noticed that when I started getting into the flower that was very chunky, and cannabinoids were very sticky and whatnot, I needed extra room, so it took me about 16 design changes. It was the 16th time I finally got that right.”

Wakit Grinders
Courtesy of April Duchene Photography

The RollBotz, which is highly popular among women, isn’t only fast but full of power. It does not require constant charging, either. “It goes through about a couple of ounces, 140 to 160 cones before it needs to charge,” Gustavo added. “My grinder will go through about a pound.”

The ins and outs of how the RollBotz works are complicated, but in action, it’s simple. “When I was talking about the design changes, what I ended up doing is, when I increased the sensor of the speed, it acts like a vacuum that shoots the flower into the first quarter inch of the cone,” he said. “You can actually feel air coming at the bottom. Then I took the motor, and I slightly took it off the center. What it does now, it acts like a knock box. It rotates the filter, so it actually turns the flower as it’s going in a circular motion.” 

Election night in 2016 was when the company was born. Gustavo needed to smoke. A happy accident occurred which led to an invention, and years later, a thriving and growing business. “I dropped my pipe, and I was flabbergasted because I always break my glass,” he recalled. “I picked up a Dyson vacuum cleaner, and I was trying to get the weed without getting the glass. When I got to the glass, it went around in the tube of the Dyson and started making a circular motion, and I kept emptying out the weed and the glass and vacuuming it. When I saw this, it came to me, and I drew up the whole thing right there. I was like, ‘You know, this would work.’ My first invention was called Dr. Budler, and what it would do, it would vacuum and grind it and dispense.”

Wakit Grinders
Courtesy of April Duchene Photography

For Gustavo, the invention was ahead of its time. Ideally, he wants these products to help medical patients, not only help make smoking cannabis easier for recreational users. “I was looking more for medical patients to be able to talk to the medical community, so this way you wouldn’t touch the cannabis,” he said. “You could consume the cannabis and figure out what your ingredients are, what your THC levels, CBD levels, what other medications you’re taking, how it interacts, so that the doctor in the medical community can speak to patients, but no one was ready for that. All everybody would say is, ‘How do you grind the weed so quickly?’ We pivoted, and I put out the grinder.”

These inventions aren’t only born out of ingenuity or innovation. These products are personal to the company’s founders. “The background for this is that my mom had pancreatic cancer,” he said. “My ex-wife had MS, and cannabis always helped, but none of the doctors would talk. Nobody would help in that situation, so I always thought to myself, ‘One day, this is going to be federally legal. It’s going to be shown as a medicine, and they’re going to need devices for consumption.’ That was our original intention, and then we’re still going in the direction. I’m hoping as we move closer to being federally legal, like CPAP machines, how people should sleep, why aren’t we looking at devices to help medical patients?”

Wakit Grinders
Courtesy of April Duchene Photography

G&E Innovations Consulting LLC is looking towards the future. For the present, however, the company is seeking to bring more voices in the cannabis industry, which is predominantly populated by Caucasian men. “In our industry,  it is starting to change,” Gustavo said. “What we’re doing is, we’re saying, ‘Look, we’re a minority-owned company that’s run by a woman.’ As Latinos, there’s not much space here for us in our own cannabis community, and we’re a big part that established this way back in the day.”

Gustavo looks at the industry and can’t help but to think of the past. “If you look back at my own neighborhood, I think about the amount of people that went to jail or died over it. Now that [pot] is becoming legal, the cannabis industry has left behind minorities and women in the space.” he added. “To us, it was like, ‘We need to get the word out that the industry’s open and it’s open to minorities and we did it, you can do it too.’ So that’s the backstory. Esther is from Puerto Rico; I’m from East LA. We’re talking about the innovation on the side of an industry that is not really innovating.”

Wakit Grinders
Courtesy of April Duchene Photography

The woman running the company is Gustavo’s, as he said, better half, Vice President Esther Delgado-Lago. She’s one of the rare women in her position in the cannabis industry. With G&E Innovations Consulting LLC, Esther wants to create opportunities for women such as herself. “It’s a great honor to be in the position I’m at,” she shared. “We have been moving forward with the company since its beginning about three years ago to make it to where we are. Looking back, we’ve accomplished quite a bit. Opening the opportunities to other women, Hispanic, Asian, and other ethnicities is very important. Right now, we have a team that is culturally varied, and it is very important to be able to extend that opportunity to others also to join in the industry.”

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