How Much Money are You
Losing to Manual Filling?

When it comes to achieving production efficiency and maximizing total output at the lowest possible unit cost without compromising your product quality or brand experience, few processes look as mundane, yet as costly, as manually filling vape carts, unless for small-scale craft production batches. While the technical implications of errors are well recognized, the financial impact of manual filling is often overlooked.

In this article, we’ll break down just how much money is lost to manual vape preparation and production, and why assessing whether to implement automation could deliver a strong return on investment (ROI) for manufacturers.

The hidden costs of manual vape filling

Labor costs

Operators and technicians can spend 73 to 88% of their shift preparing vapes, often filling thousands of vapes by hand with syringes that must be heated with an external heating tool. Filling and capping vapes manually relies solely on human speed, accuracy, and consistency. However, we can’t forget the inevitable employee fatigue, constant oversight, and the time it takes to fill vapes manually. Workers can experience a 10 to 25% decrease in efficiency over the course of the day due to hand-filling fatigue.

Time is an especially crucial component of labor costs. As production volume scales, the time dedicated to manually filling vapes scales significantly but not linearly. It ends up causing bottlenecks across administrative tasks and scheduling, which demands additional staff hours and results in diminishing returns.

So if an operator earning $20/hour spends 7 hours per shift manually filling vapes, that’s $140/day, or $35,000/year per operator or tech. If you have 5 to 10 operators to help meet production demand, that’s anywhere between $175,000 and $350,000 per year.

Material transfer loss or waste

Manual vape filling leads to 10 to 20% material transfer loss due to overfilling vapes, material left in the syringe or clogging the needle, spillage, or other errors. In a manufacturing facility using approximately $500,000 worth of oil annually, that equates to $50,000 to $100,000 lost in material transfer loss or waste.

Error-related expenses

There are always error-related expenses for any manufacturer. Error-related expenses from adverse events associated with manual filling of vapes include, but are not limited to, incorrect volumes or weights of oil, contamination, debris, hardware with defects that has been manually filled, inconsistent formulation, and product recalls. All of these result in lost revenue.

The cost of fixing a preventable error in a cannabis manufacturing facility is estimated at between hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars annually. This cost is highly individualized and depends on a myriad of factors, including the size of the operation, the scale of production, the skill level of staff, state rules and regulations, and more.

Consumable supply costs

Manual filling of vapes increases the use of transfer containers, gloves, reagents, wipes, syringes, needles, and other materials. Consumable supply costs at a mid-sized operation are estimated to range between $30,000 and $40,000 per year.

Hand-filling vapes is estimated to use between 20,000 and 30,000 disposable syringes annually, costing $3,000 to $15,000 depending on syringe size, quality, and bulk pricing. Operators manually filling vapes can end up using 3 needles per day or more due to clogging, or about 6,000 needles per year across the fill team. That’s roughly $1,000 annually. This is the price for syringes and needles alone.

Adding automation averages savings of 15% on consumable supply costs, which could mean $4,500 to $6,000 annually for a facility to reallocate toward other assets, projects, or products.

For reference, if a mid-sized manufacturer produces 25,000 units a month and spends approximately $1 per unit on hardware, that amounts to an even $300,000 on hardware per year. That is a direct material cost, not a consumable supply cost, and is not included in the figures above.

Return on investment (ROI) of automation

Investing in automation for vape filling can seem expensive, with automated equipment costing $90,000 to $250,000. However, when you add up your manual labor, material loss, error cost, and consumable supply expense savings, the automated vape filling system pays for itself well within the first year at mid-size volumes, and within 12 to 18 months at smaller operations, depending on your operation’s size and current throughput. If your operators are using semi-automated vape-filling equipment, a fully automated system will shorten the time to ROI while increasing scale.

Example ROI calculation

If automation equipment costs $150,000, the ROI in the first year is ($280,250 minus $150,000) divided by $150,000, which equals 0.87, or 87%.

Payback across the equipment price range

The numbers don’t lie. Manually filling vapes is costing manufacturers hundreds of thousands of dollars each year. By investing in fully automated vape filling systems, facilities can scale up to thousands of units per hour with minimal human intervention, improve operators’ work environments, free up resources for better workflows and production processes, and reap significant financial returns.

Final thought

Manually filling vapes might seem cheaper on the surface level, but it’s clear the hidden costs add up fast. Automation is no longer a luxury; it is a financial necessity for survival in a volatile industry.

The figures above are industry-informed estimates meant to illustrate the calculation, not guarantees. Your facility’s actual savings will depend on current volume, labor rates, waste rates, and error history. We can help you build a model specific to your operation.