Just a few comments, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. Before we get this going, Brent will be presenting, and we will be discussing the business and opportunities. After that, we are taking questions from the audience. Please type your questions into the Zoom Q&A feature. Don't use the raise your hand feature. I don't know how that works, or I ignore it. Type your questions into the Zoom Q&A, and we will try to get through them all. If your question or a similar question has been asked, I may hop over it, or if the point has been addressed. But I highly encourage lots of questions from the audience. You guys have great questions, and it really adds a good new dimension to the interview here. So appreciate everyone for joining us. Brent, you good to get going here? Yeah, let's, let's go. Let's do it. All right. Good day. I'm very happy to have EnWave join us today. I've known the company for many years, and the past year was highly transformative for the company. I've got CEO Brent Charleton on the call today to discuss what all happened last year and how this sets the table for growth this year and beyond. The company has great technology and an exceptional business model with both hardware sales and recurring high-margin revenues. EnWave is the global leader in application of microwave dehydration for agrifood, cannabis, and other industries with its unique royalty-based business model. I'm Martin Gagel with Market Radius Research. It's Wednesday, January the 24th. Please remember, this is neither recommendation nor investment advice. We're here to learn about the company. Brent, great seeing you again. Thanks, Martin. Thanks for joining us. You've been quiet recently, but also quiet and very busy over the past year. How are things going? Please let us know what's going on. Things are going extremely well behind the curtain. And you mentioned the word transformative in the introduction, and maybe perhaps I can expand upon that. In the last 12 months or so, we went through the process of winding down a subsidiary that wasn't performing well and getting our foundation of the pipeline to sell REV technology, a proprietary dehydration platform, to a number of blue-chip companies and putting the business in a situation where we felt comfortable actually investing time, money, and energy, telling the story back again in the capital markets. And we only started doing that about a month and a half ago, given that we have right-sized our expense structure, our pipeline looks strong, and we feel that moving forward here, we can hopefully provide better financial results in the coming quarters and years. All right. So I'm gonna provide the corporate summary through our presentation today. I'm assuming that much of the audience are current investors, shareholders, or stakeholders in the business, but some may not be. So I'll give you a brief overview of the technology and the model of the business. And then, like you said, interactive dialogue with yourself and answer any questions that we have from the attending audience. So your standard disclaimer, I likely will be providing some forward-looking statements in this presentation. Please refer to our AIF that's filed on SEDAR for all the risks associated. Our business is founded on a proprietary technology, vacuum microwave dehydration, and more importantly, the intellectual property that protects our specific apparatus designs and processing protocols that we make available primarily to large food manufacturers, several cannabis manufacturers, and on a sort of blue-sky perspective evaluation in the pharmaceutical space. Now, when you look at the incumbent drying technologies in the food industry, freeze drying and air drying being the two dominant ones, they have several deficiencies in that they don't provide platforms specifically for innovative product development. In the case of freeze drying, the process itself takes far too long, and even air drying, which is considered one of the more fast options when compared to vacuum microwave, still takes, you know, 7-8 times longer. The machinery is larger with the incumbents than it is for vacuum microwave dehydration, producing the same amount of product. For air drying, definitely the end qualitative results are, are underwhelming. Freeze drying products tend to have higher nutrient value, but the textures, the formats still aren't comparable with the quality and the variety that our patented REV vacuum microwave technology can provide to the users. When we look at the technology's principles, the vacuum application allows us to control the boiling point of water at specific temperatures. This is incredibly important in the retention of the nutritive values of said products. In the cannabis industry, it's very important for keeping the drying temperatures low to maintain the optimal levels of terpenes and cannabinoids. Certainly, that's the case in the pharmaceutical industry where they're testing the drying of vaccinations and other pharmaceutical products. You wanna make sure that the bioavailability of the ingredients is high. Then the usage of microwave energy as a method to excite the water molecules before removal is unique in that it penetrates the entire product load, which allows for precise moisture control in the final product, which is something that cannot be achieved with those two incumbent technologies that I mentioned. With freeze drying, you're sublimating the product, so gradually drawing the moisture from the outside to the center of the product. And if you stop at any given time before you get to a very low final moisture, you're gonna have uneven moisture content. And with air drying, you're blowing hot air over it, degrading the quality. And similar concept, you're gonna have a wetter center than you have in terms of the moisture content on the outer parts of the product load. So we have companies producing, as an example, dried fruit that's at 12% final moisture content, 7, 5, 3, depending on what application that final product will be used for, providing our users with flexibility. Further on the value proposition of our specific vacuum microwave drying, and I'll take a moment to say that the competitive landscape for vacuum microwave has been consistent for the past few years. A number of companies have made themselves known that they wish to compete in the space, but from our due diligence and the due diligence of our current licensed partners, we found that they have been unable and successfully scaling up vacuum microwave equipment that can provide reliable and scalable drying. One thing about vacuum microwave, if you don't get it perfectly correct, you have uneven distribution of microwave energy under vacuum, which can cause extreme hotspots and extreme cold spots, and in many cases, burning the product load, making it not feasible. That's the genius of the intellectual property and the implementation of that intellectual property in that our operating lines that have now, I think the longest term has been since 2012, have consistently provided top-quality, consistent results. Brent. Yes. On the IP, how did you, you've been working on this technology for a while, so you've got original patents, then you've layered on new patents since then. What does your patent portfolio look like, and how long-dated is it? So the portfolio consists of 18, we call them patent families. These families are filed for in a variety of different international jurisdictions in an effort to obviously protect the rights that we're granting through these licenses. The majority of them are process patents, but the most integral are the apparatus patents. And the, the apparatus patents tied to our nutraREV and quantaREV lines extend out to 2036, 2037, which aligns with the term of the license agreements that we have, with all of our royalty-paying partners. That's uniform across every single license in that every partner who adopts our technology has agreed to pay a royalty in whatever form that may be in the individual license for the life of our IP, meaning that if we file for an additional layered-on patent, whether it be process or apparatus in the future, and it's successfully granted, that will then further extend the timeline of royalties being paid by all of these partners for another 20 years. We've still got a lot of runway for royalty collection. Of course, we continue to invest and look at different ways to innovate and make our machines more efficient and useful to the commercial partners that we have. Beyond the like, the patented IP, you've got a lot of operating knowledge. Like you said, like, if you do it a little wrong, you blow up the like, we've all blown something up in our own microwave oven. I'm sure it's similar, but bigger magnitude of what could go wrong on your production lines. There's a lot of sort of soft knowledge that on actually how to run bananas or strawberries or whatever you're working on. You've built up a lot of internal expertise on how to work with new products and how to achieve certain results. That's correct. Yeah. And we cataloged all of that, incredibly valuable know-how and then use it to our advantage to shorten the lead time when we're doing product and process development for different parties. That's critical. I mean, you use the cannabis industry as an example, only been working there for a few years. And when we first started doing processing, we had no idea what the optimal processing parameters would be. And so thankfully, given the opportunity to collect the quantitative data for different protocols and obviously implement that at scale with our larger machinery, we now feel incredibly confident that we know the ins and outs of optimizing the use of REV technology in that space. And likewise, for different food applications, it's very much similar. All right. So this slide shows the different verticals in the food industry that we're currently active in. Historically, the majority of our licensed partners have come in the fruit and vegetable area, both for direct-to-consumer products and also selling on a business-to-business basis, both ingredients and snacks primarily. In the meat and seafood space, we've had companies collaborate with us, but frankly, we haven't had historically that much traction. We expect that to change in the very near term here. You know, we'll wait to consummate certain arrangements and then share more details. But we've had breakthroughs on the processing protocol side, which lends itself well to validate certain business cases, which should lead to capital investment in future REV machines. In the dairy industry, cheese has been a very successful snack product launch with several companies internationally. We have yogurt products now in the market. We're working to gain more partners in that area. And we're also looking at different formats of both high-value milk protein formulations, and also some alternatives to dairy, like plant-based dairy alternatives to mimic the products that we've already produced in full dairy form. And lastly, one area which is newer, and again, we feel there's opportunity for growth in this year is in the baked good and noodle area where, again, the flexible ability to produce end products with different variations of moisture content and that will affect the textures, of course, have been deemed of value to certain players. And hopefully we'll be announcing some new deals in that area later this year. I never thought of that. Pasta obviously has to be dried. And that, I guess you mentioned pasta. That could be, I don't know, they air dry it or something now, and they could run it through one of your machines. Primarily, yeah. And the folks that are interested in our tech in that space are looking at premium ramen noodles. So ramen noodles that when you rehydrate them by cooking them with whatever toppings are included, will feel and taste more like a fresh ramen noodle than I remember the Ichiban that I used to eat as a college student. That was, you know, you put it in the pot and it's you just eat it because you need the sustenance, not necessarily the culinary experience. And so that's a product application that we're hoping to see more broadly sold later this year. Well, on a personal note, I am looking forward to that product. I'll send you some samples when it comes to commercialization. Okay. We did some work updating the TAM. And so from the reports that we've been able to source, the new freeze drying spend, so the CapEx spend on new freeze dryers as of 2023 was about CAD 4.3 billion. We haven't included air drying equipment in this equation, showing us that we have a small, small, small sliver thus far in terms of machine sales per annum. I mean, last year we were about a $12 million business, $10.5 million of that, let's call it on machine sales, and $1.5 million in third-party royalty revenue. And that means that we need to do a better job of accelerating growth and sales of our technology and competing against the existing freeze dryers. And so as we get through this presentation answering questions, I'll definitely touch upon the strategy moving forward to do that. I mean, historically, we've sold 4-6 large-scale machines the past few years. And it's like, how do we get from 4-6 to 10 or more machines, and not just continue to take step by step in growth, but really stimulate that? So I'll talk about that near the end of the presentation. And in terms of the size of the actual products, the value of the products that are dried and then sold, I mean, the food industry is already quite large and $36 billion of freeze-dried food sold per year. I expect it to grow significantly at 7.6% CAGR. Cannabis market, I mean, we participate in that, but we're, you know, I really hone in on the food industry right now. Cannabis, who knows how fast it's gonna grow to us, between now and 2030. And so as we move forward, again, primary focus this year will be on food. And if serendipitously we sign cannabis deals, great. We'll still, we'll still put some effort towards that. So we have unique technology, certainly a unique business model. And this is where sometimes the sales process gets prolonged a little bit as folks do their due diligence on alternative technologies, is that we have that royalty component tied to the gross revenue produced by each licensed partner, typically between 2%-5%, or the royalty structured as a per pound or per kilogram fee. And then lastly, certain new licenses, which won't be affected necessarily from like the lack of success or the, large success of our partners is based on time. So every quarter they pay a set fee, and that goes, consistently through the term of the license. But that being said, during the sales process, we need to be able to justify that carried interest, which is supported by the ongoing technology support, 24/7 remote support on all machines, making sure they're operating efficiently and optimally, and ultimately sharing. And you mentioned, you know, how are you expanding your intellectual property protection and new innovation? Well, when we do find something that's innovative and creates value, we share that and make it available to all parties that are appropriate. We have seen a good growth in royalties the past few years, as illustrated on this slide. And that's our primary focus, is diversifying the portfolio and growing it as fast as we can. The toll drying service that we established a few years back that we branded RevWorks has done some very good things for us as a sales tool, having many companies come through and have that perceived risk that they had perceived deteriorate and lower and move forward with next steps during the sales process. We've done a number of line trials and small-scale production runs for Canadian entities. For 2024, right now we have lined up a very large dairy company, a very large cranberry company, and we're hoping and an instant noodle company for a few line runs for the, you know, first half of this year. Ultimately though, at full capacity utilization, it's gonna be de minimis in regards to impact on revenue. I mean, the max revenue we've forecast for that particular operation would be around $2 million-$2.5 million, whereas every time we sell a large-scale machine, it's gonna be north of CAD 2 million as we're selling it at around $2 million per unit. So on the toll drying, it's whatever, a little bit of business, but really it's more for business development where clients can then run small batches and sort of do some test marketing and to get more comfortable to then really pony up for the big spend on a machine and the ongoing royalty. Precisely. If it's convenient enough to do the processing in Vancouver and the economics work in the initial stages, then this is a great platform to launch new products to then justify the business case and allow them to feel comfortable about the point CapEx to bring manufacturing in-house. And it will continue to act in that manner. I don't foresee clients of RevWorks to be long-term partners necessarily, but just using it for what I just summarized. All right. So further to the technology's value proposition, like why do folks choose to work with EnWave and enter these long-term technology licensing arrangements? I, I have to say that our team has done a phenomenal job historically in the support, again, both on the technology's use, training, product development, process development, and ultimately that know-how, which we've, we've already spoken about that we've built over the past dozen years or so, allows for quick implementation and hopefully launching products to market that resonate with each of our licensed partners and consumers. Our sales process varies in time. It's, it's starting to shorten given the number of commercially successful products in market. But it usually starts, as we talked about, collaborative R&D, people coming to our innovation center in Vancouver, doing product development or renting a machine, a 10-kW small unit replacement at one of their facilities after the process protocol and products have been done. We look at the COGS models and then forecast what the payback period could be on the CapEx. Assuming all those boxes are ticked and de-risked on the buyer side, we are concurrently negotiating a license agreement with the commercial terms, including what area they can use the technology, what products they can produce, and of course, the structure of the royalty that they'll be paying ongoing. Once that's done, we're sending machines out for installation and support by our group and then continual support thereafter. Wanna make sure they're using those machines as much as possible and that there are no hiccups along the way. Right. When you reach out, you've been doing this for a while now. When you reach out to companies, do they now kind of know who you are, the basic technology, or do they, you have to sort of walk 'em through the basic steps of what you do and it's brand new to them? Or has the understanding within the food industry sort of accepted this as an alternative or an option for drying? We are far more known now than perhaps we were even three years ago, as a function of partnering with more blue chip licensed partners. You know, our portfolio of licensees used to be relatively quiet or unknown business-to-business co-manufacturers or SMEs when they're going to direct-to-consumer. But more recently, we've attracted some well-known names and, and of course that goes out in form of news releases where other competitors are monitoring what they're doing. And as a result, we're getting a lot more inbounds from larger companies than we had in the past. So, there still is a learning curve, certainly, once you start the dialogue, but at least they come in with some baseline understanding of what the technology could prospectively do for their individual businesses. I guess they appreciate that there's not other large players already using it, so there's not that you're not the first guy trying this out, that other big names are using it. So there's gotta be some level of comfort that you can go industrial scale on this. Very much so. And they can collect data from certain consumer products that are already out there to see what, you know, the velocities are and how well they're doing in market. And from a category standpoint, how is the category growing or not growing and whether it's time to invest. And of course, you know, if we partner with a blue chip company, that's already in market, they have to determine do they wanna go and compete with them or go a different direction with products that are complementary but may not be exactly the same. All right. So this slide provides an overview of some of the companies, most of the companies that we have license agreements with and have purchased machinery and are commercializing products in different verticals within the food space. On the right, you can see obviously a few of the packages that are already available. And I could talk about individual companies here, but maybe I'll save it for the Q and A for folks to ask about from a high level. Just more recently, we finished a large-scale installation at Calbee in Japan. Dole's been operating large-scale machinery since June, July of last year and growing capacity utilization. MicroDried, which is one of our longer-standing partners, is running a great business, but B2B and very quiet, not necessarily promoting who they are, supporting very large consumer packaged goods companies. So they'd sell to the biggest cereal companies in the world. It's not, you know, Kellogg's or General Mills doing the manufacturing. They're actually buying the products from MicroDried and of course driving royalties for EnWave through that structure. And then there's a few other companies that just this year have invested in, I'd say more material marketing and sales efforts. Alpina in Colombia for cheese snacks and cheese snack mixes. Say Bridgford, who will be doing the cheesecake production for the U.S. Armed Forces, gets their machine installed in February, March of this year. So looking forward to that. Yeah, there's, I mean, I can go on and on. There are 50+ partners for updates, but, you know, overall we're seeing good royalty growth within our current portfolio and communication and guidance based on what they know for volume estimates, and hopefully we see additional purchase orders on large machines within the year. Our machines themselves, we have three primary scales. We would recommend that they buy one of these three primary scales given the additional cost of changing it from 60 to 80 or 100 to 90. But the 10-kilowatt unit is primarily used for product and process development. We have over 40 of these machines deployed globally with different companies, many of which are only using them now for product development, whereas in the first instance, they were using it for commercial production and then graduated on to a larger scale machine. We have 18 large-scale machines deployed right now and a number that are just being started up. I mentioned Bridgford as being one of them, Calbee more recently, another that will add to that amount. And our large-scale machines come in either the 60-kilowatt or the 120-kilowatt range. The size of these machines are optimal when you max out the processing protocol times. If you make a machine that's too big, you're not really harnessing the full energy utilization available in the machine. And so we won't build larger machines. More so, we'll just work to try and be efficient in terms of footprint utilization, putting multiple machines side by side within the processing facilities of our partners. So right now, our manufacturing capacity with existing personnel and our expense structure, which we've done a good job at reducing the past year, significant reduction in expenses, could produce up to 10 large-scale machines. And that is, aligns well with our key suppliers for, you know, stainless steel, magnetrons, power supplies, et cetera. With the ability to get to that point and deploy up to 10 machines per year, we're looking to grow our royalty portfolio, as I've alluded to prior, which will help smooth the quarter-to-quarter revenue. You know, and, and historically, EnWave has always been quite volatile, based on how many large-scale machines we sell each quarter, given that they're, you know, over $2 million a pop. And as I mentioned before, we're about a $12 million business. That is, that is impactful at this point. As we continue to grow and advance as a business and get to the point where we're not generating 100 or, sorry, CAD 1.5 million in royalty, but in a few years' time, get to the point where we're, you know, $4-$5 million in royalty per year, which at that point would cover the majority of our expenses, those large-scale POs are less, well, they're still important, of course, but less materially important on a quarter-by-quarter basis. By growing the royalty streams and reducing our expenses, we've also done a good job at maintaining healthy margin within the business. On the machine sales, royalty, of course, is 100%. So on a blended basis, still very strong margin at EnWave. This slide illustrates royalty growth from third parties as we've seen it year by year, year by year fiscal. You know, the material uptick between 2021 and 2022 was as a result of deploying, installing, and having folks start up their machines during that period, which means that we sold them between, call it 2020 to 2021. And we didn't sell many large-scale machines that were actually installed and used between 2021 and 2022, which then sees a small uptick for 2023. Now, if we look to the next slide here, where we see a more material uptick in the number of kilowatts of machinery that we have actually deployed and installed between 2022 and 2023, our expectation is that we should see a more similar jump in royalty growth between 2023 and 2024 based on that increased installed capacity, but also on the increased capacity utilization from many of our current licensed partners. So looking back over our fiscal year 2023 and the highlights within Q4 more recently, we signed a new license with Michael Foods, which for those of you who aren't familiar, one of the largest purveyors of egg products industrially in the United States, and they're part of the Post Holdings ecosystem. And so we're really happy that we had this technology into their innovation arm and how that's proliferating into different parts of the business. We're hopeful that we'll see new projects outside of egg applications spawn. And also, the U.S. Armed Forces is very focused on introducing egg-based shelf-stable ration components in the future. And we're hopeful that Michael Foods can be a beneficiary of that need. We also are working right now with a major pet treat producer in the United States, and we're at the point where decision is imminent on a go/no-go basis for large-scale machinery. And we're hopeful that this moves ahead. We're doing all that we can to ensure an amicable outcome on the negotiation side. And then lastly, in Q4, we did confirm another large-scale line for a company called BranchOut Snacks, which is also publicly traded on the NASDAQ. They are commercializing a line of high-quality fruit and vegetable snack products. They've got distribution into Walmart and Costco and a bunch of other meaningful retailers. And we've seen as a result, on a quarter-by-quarter basis, their royalties continue to grow. We're very optimistic about this relationship and, and looking forward to delivering this next machine to them in the latter half of 2024. From a financial perspective, we had small revenue growth year-over-year on the continued operation side. We had small royalty growth, and we showed adjusted positive adjusted EBITDA in fiscal 2023 as opposed to a small loss year-over-year, which is good progress, but not good enough progress. We again need to accelerate the number of machines that we're selling, in order to get to a better financial position. A few things that I'll, I'll touch upon before jumping into the summary, regarding NutraDried, which was our former operating subsidiary producing the Moon Cheese product. For the longer-standing shareholders who know the struggles in that business, and that was the primary cause of the cash burn that we saw the past 2.5-3 years, deciding to, to wind down that business and ultimately sell those assets in the early parts of calendar 2023. Having completed that transaction as of March and having the new operator in place with a reduced expense structure, we've seen good royalty payments through the continued sales of Moon Cheese in the U.S. and a number of other co-manufacturing projects that are in the pipeline for the acquirer, makes us believe that we'll continue to see royalty growth from them. Partly to do with the wind down, but we'll also be receiving up to an additional $700,000 in cash from the IRS based on employing folks in that business through the COVID pandemic. To date, we've received just under $500,000, and anticipating that the remaining amount will be awarded sometime this calendar year, which obviously hasn't been attributed to our current cash position that we reported as at the end of the fiscal year 2023 at CAD 4.2 million. Again, no debt on the balance sheet. Having just talked about NutraDried and the plans moving forward, just to quantify the sales of the assets, we ended up selling one of the 200-kilowatt units to them, as well as the brand assets and all of the other know-how associated for $2.6 million. The majority of that has been paid, with the exception of monthly installments that we're receiving for the payment of the 100-kilowatt acquisition. So longer term, we have in the range of, call it another $700,000 to be collected month by month. And, there's interest also being collected on that principal that's being paid to pay off the 100-kilowatt acquisition. With that sale of assets, really helped our team, obviously tighten up the expense structure, but more so the focus from management and sales on selling more REV machines and driving the pipeline, to expand upon our royalty portfolio. So what we look forward to in, in 2024, 2025, quite simple, sell more machines and do so on a less lumpy basis and, ensuring that the pipeline remains full, working through the sales process as fast as we can. Part of the plan for growth, as I mentioned earlier, is that, we are evaluating the possibility of hiring between 3 and 4 new technical sales full-time employees that should be domiciled in specific regions. So we have boots on the ground to help accelerate these different projects. We have historically engaged with a number of third-party machine resellers to help bring in new projects and sell more machines, which has been fine. We've had a moderate level of success, but considering that they're also representing a handful of other technologies, most of which don't have a licensing royalty model to implement, they have, you know, to deploy their resources appropriately to the products they're gonna sell the most of. And so we wanna make sure that the folks that are working towards selling our tech are just focused on our tech and not others. And so that's part of our plan this year is to roll that out. The second part of the plan is to continue the consideration of having machines ready for deployment, once POs are signed to shorten the lead time of delivery, which obviously accelerates our royalty recognition on a percentage completion basis and starts the royalty generation with the purchaser sooner than we can now, which when we get a purchase order, the build time is still between 6-8 months before commissioning. So just to clarify that, you're gonna be building up a little bit of inventory or at least work in progress, sort of key components, so that when you do get the purchase order, it's less time and till you ship it out the door. That's the goal. Of course, with our current cash position and our inventory levels to where they are, we're comfortable with our inventory being around that CAD 3 million mark. Near-term deployment opportunities for our 10-kilowatt inventory will then turn obviously inventory back into cash, and then we'll allocate more of that commitment towards larger machine componentry versus the fleet of 10 kilowatts that we now have. It's gonna be a bit of a balancing act and being able to execute on, but that's something that we're focused on achieving, assuming that we contemplate some of these larger near-term opportunities. I would think if you've got a more steady production schedule on your manufacturing side, that allows for better manufacturing efficiencies where it's not stop, go, stop, go. You're just continually in that process as long as you don't build too much. Correct. You absolutely. Also you can achieve economies of scale with suppliers. You negotiate better terms when you're buying two instead of one of whatever that widget may be. We know what those savings are 'cause we're constantly collecting quotes to make sure that our costs are always appropriate and based on the pricing strategy that we have. And so, yeah, more sales, the better helps everywhere in the business. That's for sure. Yeah, that's for sure. Path to profitability is maintain the expense structure that we have, selling at a minimum 4-6. 4-6 large-scale machines makes us a break-even business for the year. And so getting past that point and selling more in any given year obviously is gonna lead to profitability. So that's our focus. Continue to use RevWorks as a sales tool, which it has been for us the past few months. We see, as I mentioned before, some different new food application opportunities that we think can become material in the scope of our portfolio rather than just reliance primarily upon fruit, vegetable, and dairy as driving the majority of our royalty generation. The competitive advantage and positioning of EnWave right now is still strong. We continue to monitor all new patents that are filed in this area through our, our IP lawyer, and, we'll act if anything comes about that, that perspectively could be competitive at scale, as we go. So I won't talk through our board of directors. Most folks on the line know who our director makeup or what our director makeup is, but just wanted to point out on the management team, Mehmet Sucu and Dr. John Zhang, who have really been the drivers of, the technology and process improvement that we've seen over the past six or so years and are the leaders respectively on the delivery of the machinery in Mehmet and John, the post-sale servicing and support and new product development and execution. So with that, I'll pause and we can continue the discussion and answer any questions that there are. All right. Brent, thanks. That was, yeah, quite in depth there. I don't know. Obviously, it was a hot topic a bunch of years ago, not so much now. Can you just give us a bit of an overview on the cannabis market? How has the traction and your success been in drying it out and speeding up their inventory and drying process? And does that translate into better sales for your customers or just give us some perspectives on the cannabis market? Short story on our experience, clearly when it was hot and we'd been a factor of that with, to be frank, a completely overinflated stock price at the time, like a market capitalization that had nothing to do with our fundamentals, but just the hype in the space where we sold a few machines to Tilray, Aurora, TGOD at the time. Only one of those companies, TGOD, actually took a machine and installed it. And even they purchased too many machines. So they asked to put some back, which we took a few back for pennies on the dollar and then redeployed. But thankfully, they did use that one machine and collected enough quantitative data to prove out what we were promoting as a value proposition. And so they were in the space and it was working. And then we entered into a second large Canadian LP, about a year or so ago that's been installed. They've been using it every single day, maxing out the usage of it because it is fast. Like we're talking an hour and a half and it's producing smokable product with all of the quantitative metrics that they needed to match up with their current air dried product or, you know, room rack dried product. And so it works. It works. There's a clear value proposition here. The challenge in the cannabis space is engaging now with companies that have enough capital to deploy new CapEx, that feel comfortable perhaps displacing some of their current processes. We do have leads in, and I'm sure there's gonna be news this year in the cannabis space for us, but it's not a supreme area of focus for us because that quality of partner, it, there it's few and far between. It's few and far between. Whereas, we're quite busy right now with both our current food partners and new ones we're trying to convert. All right. You've announced some big food agrifood companies in the past. Dole is probably the most well-known of those names. Your arrangements typically have they purchase one and then there's sort of a follow-on order for expansion. Do we find out, let's say, obviously if you make an ongoing sale, we hear about that. If it doesn't go ahead, like, how do we get updated on how those businesses are progressing? Obviously, while things are in negotiation, you can't really comment on it, but I guess more conceptually, what can you say on how that process works in keeping investors up to date? Yeah, that's a challenge. Part of it's a challenge because of the confidential nature of certain relationships where they don't want their name out in a news release associated with a slowdown in their business development efforts. You use maybe Dole as an example, right? Dole, a marquee blue-chip partner, has machinery sales that are growing, royalties are growing quarter to quarter. They've asked for a bit more time this year, the latter half of this year, to make a decision on their second large-scale machine, but have also concurrently engaged with a number of our additional licensed partners in, in Mexico and other spots to do co-manufacturing for them. Rather than buy more machines, they'll just leverage their available capacity and take more products to market. Both, both scenarios are driving royalties for EnWave. And so, would I have been able to say, you know, Dole's delayed six months in a news release? No, not able to do that. But, you know, today I'm here, I'm providing an overview and an update, and those who are paying attention will understand, you know, the challenges that we're, that we're facing in that area. All right. All right. You mentioned it briefly. You did several years ago have some news on the pharma side. Are there still opportunities there and are you, like, how are you approaching that? What could potentially be a gigantic market, but obviously that's such a regulated industry and lots of hurdles getting into that. Is that still something on the future horizon? Definitely an iron in the fire. But the strategy when we signed the joint partnership with GEA Lyophil, which is one of the largest sellers of pharmaceutical grade freeze-dry equipment, they have a plant in Germany and they've been collaborating with several of the largest pharmaceutical companies globally on different vaccinations and what have you. And those collaborations are direct between those two parties with support remotely from our scientists to optimize processing protocols. If any one of those projects moves forward, meaning a larger scale continuous line to be delivered to one of those pharma companies, then certainly that's an announceable material development and we'll make sure that the capital markets knows that. If anything does evolve that way, we have an arrangement where the larger machinery, which has to have certain obviously certifications and it's gonna be more expensive given the componentry that needs to be used, would be built by GEA Lyophil. And so we would take a cut on the revenues that are generated through those arrangements. All right. All right. So I guess the good side of that is you're partnered with a specialist in domain expertise there and you don't have a large burn rate of you, you're working with them as needed, but it's not a heavy lift for you until something does emerge out of that. Correct. It's a bit of time, and that's at the moment. That's what we wanted to do is eliminate any burn internally in a subject matter area that frankly we didn't have the internal expertise and weren't willing to go and hire a CAD 300,000-CAD 400,000 a year person to come in and try and work on it for five years to get it to commercialization. Wanted to outsource it to GEA. The military industry is, you've got one product in there, the cheesecake. When you develop that, you develop that in partnership with the military as well as a manufacturer, right? So if it works for the military, then they could possibly go to other vendors and say, hey, we've got this great technology, can we do some other good products? Does it leverage like that where the military can sort of help develop your business pipeline? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So right now they're collaborating with BranchOut Snacks, one of our partners to do different fruit and vegetable inclusions. Mentioned Michael Foods earlier, of course, Bridgford with the production of cheesecake rations among some other baked goods, and the collaboration is close and tight-knit with our CSO, our Chief Scientific Officer and the lead at NATIC, which is the organization that is developing these new military ration inclusions. And so full, open, transparent dialogue and, and that's helping to speed up the process of potential new inclusions in the years to come. And what is the military's interest in your, in using your technology? Is it that they know they can sort of get a cheaper product 'cause they don't spend a lot on this? Or are they trying to keep their soldiers on the ground eating good meals and having, sort of whatever, the happy, a full soldier is a happy soldier kind of a thing? Yeah, exactly that. They're trying to improve the qualitative experience for these war fighters that are going out there to protect freedom, not only the U.S., but I, I'd argue many other countries, domiciled close to the U.S. The cost of these products are likely to be more than what they've typically included, but not out of the budget range of what they can spend on a meal by meal basis. So it's qualitative improvement and doing so with products that wouldn't otherwise be producible using incumbent technology. So the cheesecake itself, as I mentioned, it's a, well, it's a chewy, malleable experience. It's not like a super dry, hard brick. And you can't use freeze drying or air drying or other technologies to achieve that level of texture with that level of moisture, which still affords long-term shelf stability in incredibly, you know, hot environments. Yep. There's a question here from the audience. Are you able to give any sort of forecast? They're asking specifically for a royalty forecast with cheesecake or military, or can you give some sort of, like, hopefully it's gonna grow presumably, but any more nuance to that? Like perhaps give some structure to like modeling out, okay, where can the existing installed capacity go? And so given the, the variation in, in royalty structures on a large scale deployment, large scale machine at 80% capacity utilization, you're looking at royalty generation anywhere between $150,000-$400,000 a year. It really just depends on the application itself. And of course, whether it's a 60- or 120-kilowatt machine moving forward. In terms of royalty generation for 2024, conservatively we're guiding and targeting, I say targeting, to surpass the $2 million threshold, but that comes down to, both new machines being installed and started up and of course continued business success with our licensed partners to date. We have a question here with 3-8 months deployment for a new machine seems slow. You've discussed why it's so slow in terms of manufacturing it. Have you already built up that inventory in your position now where you could deliver it sooner? So our smaller units, the 10-kilowatt models, you used to be a 3-month build time. We take it upon ourselves to have several inventory. So those are deployed immediately. So that initial evaluation phase, like that happened anytime, like get the order submitted, get your machines there in less than a month. For the larger scale machines, it's not that we're incompetent in building machines, but you have to order the supplies and the suppliers give you a 12-week lead time for the stainless steel to arrive at your facility and then you have to do some augmentation. So this is not something where like we can all of a sudden miraculously deliver in 2 months. It's just not feasible. And also this is standard through like large scale OEMs delivering big machines. That is not out of line at all. It's not like if you go and buy a large air dryer tomorrow, it's gonna take a minimum of 6-8 months, sometimes longer for delivery on that product. So, to answer the question with, with a bit of respect, like you just don't know the industry, like that's standard. That's the way it is. Unless you have multiple in-house rates to deploy. But even then there's subtle customizations based on plant layout, you know, what side of the machine the doors need to open or exit. There's things that need to be considered prior to finalizing the manufacture of any large scale sophisticated processing technology. So a large scale machine is basically the same one, but there are some adaptations or customizations, let's say which side the door is open on or some tweaking on it. Basic things. Yeah. But it takes time. And as well, even if you could deliver it tomorrow or next week, the buyer, they have to set up their facility, get the processes in place, get electrical and plumbing and who knows whatever else in there and installed, as well. They've got their whole planning process to work through as well. Yeah. I mean, I can use another example. We've been ready to deliver that machine to a partner, or say a large-scale machine to a partner, that was supposed to be started up in November. We were ready to deploy it and they haven't had their utilities completed and all of the input, output, hookups done until February. So that's now been pushed out to February to deliver and finish. Yeah. So it's out of our control there. You know, you can't do anything about it. Yeah. There is a question here on the ability to pay dividends. Obviously it's a little early right now. I don't know, any commentary you make on that? If you were to implement a dividend paying program, you wanna be confident that you're gonna be able to do that on a consistent basis. At this point, given our cash position and our need to invest for growth, I don't foresee that happening in the near future. That all being said, in the past few years, we have shown an appetite to buy back stock at certain points where we've felt that we've had a robust cash position on our balance sheet and the stock being underpriced, based on our perception. So what you'll see, into the future is if we can build ourselves back into a stronger cash position and we'll take advantage on the dips in the stock price to likely buy back stock versus issue dividends at this point. That makes sense. Yeah. You, you'd wanna be at a bigger scale, have a very, very, like you never wanna cut a dividend. So you wanna be super confident that it's, that going forward. In terms of use of capital, is M & A ever contemplated at this point, or? It would be if a prospective competitor emerged where we're like, okay, they compete, we need to do something about this. And of course we have a history of doing that in 2012-ish. We acquired the intellectual property from a German manufacturer called Hans Binder Maschinenbau, put their IP into our IP and eliminated them as a viable competitor. So likewise into the future, if something evolves in that manner, that would be the strategy that we would be implementing to date. No, there is not something that we have identified as being a potential target. Okay. All right. Question here about the share price. Obviously a lot of stocks are feeling pain here. You said you've in the last, what, 6, 8 weeks or so you've started getting the message out. We're here talking, trying to get the message out, understand all the levers of growth. Any comments on share price or? I mean, like you said, the microcap space has been smashed, which is at a conference again, trying to broaden the awareness of our story as we hope to execute operationally going forward here in 2024. And looking at all the stock charts seem to be all going in the same direction. But there is a level of optimism. That is the, I think, the capture to this, for the upcoming 12 months where folks are now looking at the small microcap space and saying, whoa, like these guys have been crushed the past 12-18 months. This could be a good time value to get back in and establish a foothold position. So, you know, it's been frustrating to say the least, to watch this happen. But the bottom line is our focus the past 12 months is being reduced expenses and prepared to execute operationally. And if you can execute operationally, the stock price will take care of itself. Yeah. Yeah. And you're not, there are a lot of companies out there with big burns and limited balance sheets and you're not in that situation at all. So it's, you can, like a lot of this is macro related. You can wait out the tough markets. It's not like you're gonna need to raise some money and dilute or anything like that in the near term. Yeah. So we got, you know, just over CAD 4 million on the balance sheet and an expense structure, which is, you know, we've ripped out pretty much every piece of fat you could. And then the more recent investment in some of the investor relations activities is hopefully going to be concurrent with operational execution, hence the spend. Otherwise we wouldn't be doing this. Yeah. With the, there's a question here on, I guess, camping, I guess camping, dehydrated food for camping and outdoor sports and that. Are, are you involved in that market? Are any of your, royalty partners, targeting, that market? And is that that big of a market? It's, substantial, but I don't know how it's substantial. It's growing. I mean, not just necessarily outdoor enthusiasts, but the prepper market. So folks that think the world is gonna come to an end eventually and are preparing as such. So yeah, there, there is a sizable market in North America specifically for those type of customers. And we do have a few partners that are producing dried or shelf stable ready to eat meals, in our pipeline. There are a few more considering this. It's, it's a part of our, portfolio of, of users, but, hasn't yet grown into something that is dominant like as fruit and vegetables have become. Yeah. You talked about hiring regional technical salespeople. Is that, is that a 2024 process that's going on or can you, any other additional details? Is it all North America or is this a global salesforce or what can you say there? Well, say in terms of the regions right now, we're looking at, Western and Eastern Europe as well as South America, and Southeast Asia being the fourth. We have good coverage in certain areas within Asia. Japan being one of them. And North America, we have a good handle on engagement with some of the bigger companies and feel like that's, that's in a good spot. So, you know, I'm not going to share the, the minutia of the plan on a call like this until we start executing it. And then once we've executed it, we'll talk more. But the investment into these type of professionals is not immaterial. So there needs to be a calculated ROI on that investment and a time period where we expect to see results. And of course, the necessary training planned and timed and ensure that they can, you know, hit the ground running. So it's not a, you know, 12-month lead time before they can close their first deal. We wanna make sure that it is a concentrated effort in the first three months to train them up and then let them loose thereafter. All right. One final question here, just clarification on your royalties. How do you structure? Is it based on weight or value? Is it before or after drying the weight of it? Obviously each client, I believe, is structured differently depending on the nuance of their business, but any additional detail you can put into that? Sure. I mean, the reason that we will accept that structure is that it de-risks the price fluctuations in the product once it goes to market. And so we basically reverse calculate. We say, okay, what is the finished weight of product that can be produced on this particular scale of machinery? Our goal, as I mentioned before with large scale lines, is anywhere between CAD 150K-400K in royalty revenue per annum per large scale machine with adequate manufacturing capacity utilization. So then we can essentially multiply the number of kilograms or pounds that can be produced per annum by whatever that rate may be. And it better fall between that range. Otherwise we won't accept it. And so it could be, you know, CAD 0.40 a pound. It could be CAD 0.20 a pound. It could be CAD 0.70 a pound. That's gonna be negotiated and consummated based on the business case, the type of product that's being produced and its value in the market. And looking at it another way, I don't think you necessarily do it, but it sounds like it's roughly 10%-20% of the CapEx on an annual basis. If it's a $2 million machine, you said between $150,000 and $400,000. Is that fair math to do? That's correct. And I mean, the $400,000 is more so some of the earlier deals where we were able to get away with like a 5% royalty on gross revenue and good throughput on a highly priced product in market. But the majority would be between like the $150,000 and $250,000 threshold, given, you know, past experiences here. Gotcha. All right. Brent, I'm out of questions. We covered a lot of territory. I appreciate that. Is there anything you can just to wrap things up here, any final comments before we call it a day? Well, thanks for the opportunity to provide a bit of an update to an audience of our current stakeholders. I would request that if there are future questions from shareholders, that they directly contact management to get the truth versus assuming things where it's a bit quiet during a period. Our internal management is optimistic about the future of this business. We've done a great job in maintaining our expenses after making significant reductions and feel confident that at the very least, you know, 4-6 large scale machines consistent with the past few years is achievable, not only based on new orders coming through, but repeat orders, which have already been guided by our partners. So, baseline now with like a stock price at almost a 52, almost an all-time low is a pretty attractive place for folks who don't own the stock to, to get in. And I think the downside is minimal and the upside is material. All right. Well, on that, we'll call it a day. Brent, thanks a lot for giving us your time and the update on where EnWave is and where we're g oing. Thank you. Excellent. Thanks Martin. Thanks Martin.