Cannabis Innovation: Aurora’s Weed Vending Machine

Star Bud’s shop located on Arapahoe Road in Aurora is the home to one of the first of the state’s cannabis vending machines. Anna, the company behind the idea, has developed several of the machines and are  set to deploy around the state of Colorado.

Founder Matt Frost said he dreamt up the idea while waiting in line at a dispensary and wondered: “Where’s the automation? I go to the grocery store, and there’s self-serve.” Frost said he became passionate about finding new ways for consumers to buy products at dispensaries three years ago when the idea struck him. Today, his company has built out 24 machines, which he hopes will help achieve his dream.

On the legal side of things, the Denverite reports that any machines which sell cannabis products must be located within dispensaries. Furthermore, the machines are to be manned by staffers who will be double-checking IDs after they enter the sales floor and before any final purchases.

Each Anna machine can hold up to 1,000 individual products. Star Bud is stocking theirs mostly with house-branded products as well as a few top-sellers produced by other companies. For the customer, these automated machines could mean fast-tracking their cannabis buying experience.

From the dispensary’s perspective, it’s a way to squeeze an additional register onto the sales floor without the need to hire more staff. This is especially enticing for shops such as Star Buds, who have pretty much maxed out the registers and budtenders they can fit into the current floor plan.

“To me, it’s not a vending machine,” said Josh Riggs, Star Buds’ COO. “It’s an express point of sale. It’s one more opportunity to do transactions where we have limited space.”

Although the modern world has had concerns about automation making human employees obsolete, Riggs doubts that there would come a day when Anna machines would replace his budtenders completely.

“The more time you spend in a dispensary, there’s something about that interaction,” he said. “Budtenders really still have a significant amount of control and power over what products people are buying.”