Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Fire & Flower Holdings Corp. Q2 fiscal 2021 financial and operational results call. My name is Daisy, and I will be coordinating today's call. You will have the opportunity to ask a question at the end of the presentation. If you'd like to register a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypads. I'll now hand over to your host, Trevor Fencott, the CEO of Fire & Flower Holdings, to begin. Trevor, please go ahead. Thank you very much, and thank you for joining me today on our Q2 2021 conference call. I'm Trevor Fencott, President and CEO of Fire & Flower. Joining me today is Judy Adam, our CFO, and Nadia Vattovaz, our COO. Earlier today, our company published its operational and financial results for the Q2 ended July 31, 2021, and the results are available on the company's website and on SEDAR. Prior to beginning our call, I'll direct listeners to the cautionary statement regarding forward-looking information published on the news release for the Q2, as well as the company's filings on SEDAR. Similar to previous earnings conference calls, we'll be providing commentary on our fiscal Q2 2021 financial results, along with an operational update on our tech-enabled retail business model and the steps we've taken to advance key industry partnerships and secure strategic acquisitions through our newly implemented expanded digital strategy. We focused this quarter on strategically leveraging our proprietary data-driven retail platform, Hifyre, to drive near and long-term financial growth for Fire & Flower, while helping to transform the cannabis retail experience for the industry at large. We'll then conclude with the moderated question-and-answer period from equity research analysts that cover Fire & Flower. First, I'd like to provide an overview of our financial highlights for the Q2 of 2021, as these results demonstrate the strength and continued success of our data-driven retail operations. Our vertically integrated operations, and I'll start with financial highlights, composed of our retail, wholesale, and digital business segments, continue to drive our total revenue performance, resulting in Q2 revenues increasing 51% year-over-year to CAD 43.3 million. Once again, we've delivered another quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA, making this our 5th consecutive quarter, reaching CAD 3.1 million in the Q2, an increase of 176% compared to Q2 2020. Key to our overall growth is the milestone performance of our digital business, driven by our Hifyre digital retail and analytics platform. In the Q2, this business segment generated CAD 3.7 million, representing an increase of 293% from the previous year comparable period. Before diving deeper into the numbers, which Judy will do in a bit, I'd like to review our operational accomplishments in the Q2 and discuss how we're successfully scaling our unique tech-enabled cannabis retail platform to reach a new level of growth for Fire & Flower and build our leadership position in new markets we strategically enter. Again, here are our operational highlights. To date, we operate 93 stores, sorry, with multiple banner brands, including Friendly Stranger, Hotbox, Happy Dayz, and Fire & Flower. All of these are powered by our Hifyre digital retail and analytics platform. While our retail sales have been impacted this quarter by pricing pressure due to an unprecedented number of licenses being issued in Ontario, where we focused much of our retail expansion in Canada, we view this as a temporary industry disruption. Despite our retail sales being slightly down this quarter-over-quarter, we're more energized than ever by the opportunities we've secured this quarter in expanding our digital footprint to acquire an even stronger data set of customer cannabis purchasing behaviors. As you are aware, we are a technology-first cannabis retailer, and our competitive edge lies in our ability to own and drive value from the customer relationships that we continue to build through our data and analytics technology that's employed in every store we own and now every store we enter, either through acquisition or partnership. Our retail strategy is unlike any of our competitors, and as we continue to deploy our digital technology platform across the expanding cannabis retail industry, we're building greater opportunities to generate high-margin revenue growth, and we're more powerfully demonstrating our true competitive edge to drive our leadership position. Our growth this quarter is a direct result of more and more leading cannabis players recognizing the unmatched value of our proprietary data-driven technology and are looking to Fire & Flower as an essential partner for growing their operations. Our long-standing partners have always been key to our growth. Our strategic partner, Alimentation Couche-Tard, owners of Circle K, continued to support our expansion initiatives and exercise their A-3 warrants in Q2, increasing their position to 22.4% as we jointly work to advance our co-location pilot program within their Circle K stores. This program, which enables us to open Fire & Flower stores co-located with Couche-Tard's Circle K stores using their existing real estate, presents an opportunity as we aim to expand across Canada. In this quarter, we've also worked with our partner, American Acres, to drive expansion opportunities across the U.S., targeting key markets like California, Arizona, and Nevada. Through our licensing agreement, American Acres has licensed our Fire & Flower brand, store operating system, and Hifyre technology platform. We recently announced our entry into the California market with the opening of our first Fire & Flower brand store in Palm Springs, California. In addition, American Acres has officially changed its name to Fire & Flower U.S. Holdings, firmly establishing our U.S. entry strategy and laying the foundation for new Fire & Flower branded U.S. store openings. As part of our licensing agreement, Fire & Flower has an option to acquire American Acres once regulations permit. We believe that we have a unique opportunity to expand in the US by continuing to leverage our Hifyre technology as we incorporate our platform into each acquired store to strategically advance our overall data-driven retail offering. Finally, in the Q2, we entered into a strategic supply agreement with Humble & Fume to offer an expanded online catalog of Humble & Fume's newest products, including a wide assortment of the most popular cannabis accessories in the world. With the addition of over 5,000 new SKUs, we have further deepened our relationship with our customers by expanding the Spark Perks program to the cannabis accessories to consumer segment, driving even stronger digital engagement with a broader customer base. Another key facet of this partnership is that it requires little capital investment from our end, as we are able to extend our existing Hifyre digital retail platform to this high-demand line of cannabis accessories and further enhance the e-commerce purchasing experience for our customers. I'd like to talk a bit about our expanded digital strategy in Hifyre Spark members. We spent significant time building the most comprehensive and insightful cannabis digital retail and analytics platform. As you can see by our recent results, the strategy is really starting to blossom. Our early investments in the collective work of our leading engineers and data scientists in building our Hifyre platform is now driving a number of new growth opportunities that focus on commercializing our proprietary technology. With very little capital investment at this stage, we are rapidly building and monetizing the most valuable asset in the cannabis market, customer engagement. As our Hifyre platform has proven to provide the cannabis industry with the strongest understanding of consumer preferences and behavior, market dynamics to advance the cannabis operations in this very competitive market. With that said, we've successfully accomplished the rollout of our expanded digital strategy. As part of our business strategy, Hifyre is creating white-labeled online dispensaries fulfilled by the Fire & Flower retail network that can be expanded to other cannabis dispensaries and delivery channels in both Canada and the U.S. Users of these websites are then enrolled in the Fire & Flower's proprietary Spark Perks membership loyalty program, which now has over 310,000 subscribers. Through the continued execution of this digital strategy, we believe we will drive a much larger Spark Perks member base that prevents exponential value to our business. As I continue to emphasize, the most valuable piece of our business and underlying impetus of each of our growth initiatives is a continued advancement and extension of our retail technology platform into new cannabis markets to capture the most valuable piece of the cannabis value chain, owning the customer relationship. Fire & Flower has always placed technology first in developing our multi-brand cannabis retail network. Our Hifyre platform seamlessly connects our customers to achieve the greatest value from each of our stores and presents the unique opportunity to easily integrate this powerful infrastructure into other cannabis operations. We've secured 2 very important acquisitions in the past month that present another great opportunity to drive our Fire & Flower brand expansion in the US, and most importantly, demonstrate our success as a tech-enabled retailer. Recent acquisitions focused on our expanded digital strategy. I want to talk about that for a moment. As we entered the Q3 of 2021, we announced the acquisition of Wikileaf Technologies, an online cannabis platform that's proven to generate significant user traffic through engaging content and domain name strength. This acquisition officially launched our expanded digital strategy as we will be transforming the Wikileaf website into a virtual online dispensary for cannabis and accessory products utilizing the same e-commerce proprietary technology platform that powers our Fire & Flower retail network. With this acquisition, we launched a larger dedicated plan to create new branded online dispensaries, white labeling cannabis websites, enrolling users into Fire & Flower's proprietary Spark Perks membership program. Not only does this digital strategy offer high-margin revenue through our Hifyre platform, it is very asset light and highly scalable as we expand across North America. Following this acquisition, we announced the acquisition of PotGuide, one of the world's largest cannabis websites and content platforms. Coming right on the cusp of our acquisition of Wikileaf, this significant opportunity demonstrates the strong growth opportunities that are being created by our newly implemented expanded digital strategy. Even further, this acquisition will provide Hifyre with a U.S. base for technology and operations in Denver, Colorado. Once again, the goal here is that we will be able to leverage a significant amount of user traffic by white labeling our dispensary e-commerce software to convert traffic into purchases. PotGuide and Wikileaf together bring an existing subscriber base of approximately 225,000 cannabis consumers into our Spark Perks ecosystem, further strengthening our understanding of cannabis consumer preferences across North America to enhance our overall cannabis retail offering as we expand. Our wholesale division, because we are a vertically integrated business in this sense, also supports our continued growth in the face of industry-wide challenges. Our wholesale division operating Saskatchewan Open Fields Distribution has maintained and remains a steady source of recurring revenue. We continue to source cannabis products directly from licensed producers in this province to distribute these products to our retail stores and other third-party retailers. This business division has proven successful and supports our overall continued revenue growth. Finally, in this, I'd like to provide a Nasdaq update. We continue to progress towards listing on the Nasdaq and expect this to be done by the end of this year. While this has been a longer process than we would have liked, it's an exciting one as it presents a great opportunity for Fire & Flower to drive increased visibility of our rapidly expanding business. Now that our Hifyre tech platform is generating greater interest from the cannabis industry and investors are increasingly recognizing our position as a tech-enabled retailer, we believe our listing on the Nasdaq is well suited for our position as a publicly traded company. I'd now like to turn the call over to Judy to discuss our financials and provide a more detailed overview of the progress each of our key businesses made in the Q2 of 2021. Judy. Thank you, Trevor, and good morning, everyone. I'm happy to provide a financial overview of Fire & Flower and our operations as released to the markets earlier this morning. To begin, I'll remind everyone that Fire & Flower follows the retail calendar, with every quarter consisting of 13 weeks. Today, I will be speaking to the Q2 ending July 31, 2021. We continue to report quarterly positive adjusted EBITDA with CAD 3.1 million for the Q2 of 2021, representing an increase of 176% compared to positive adjusted EBITDA of CAD 1.1 million in the Q2 of 2020. Our adjusted EBITDA performance continues to be driven by steady revenue growth from all 3 business segments, continued monetization of our Hifyre digital retail and analytics platform, and our ability to introduce new cannabis products that specifically meet our target demographics in each of our markets. Total revenue for the Q2 of 2021 increased 51.4% to CAD 43.3 million, compared to CAD 28.6 million in the Q2 of 2020. Fire & Flower's total revenue is derived from 3 primary business segments. The retail segment, which we had 91 stores as of July 31, 2021, across Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory. Our wholesale distribution segment, Open Fields Distribution, that sells cannabis and cannabis-related accessories to both Fire & Flower stores as well as to external accounts in Saskatchewan. Finally, our digital platform segment, operating through the Hifyre digital retail and analytics platform, proprietary to Fire & Flower. It produces revenue from external clients of the Hifyre IP data and analytics platform, as well as industry-leading targeted digital advertising. Of the total revenue of CAD 43.3 million for the Q2 of 2021, retail operations generated CAD 31.8 million, Open Fields Distribution generated CAD 7.8 million, and CAD 3.7 million came from our Hifyre digital platform. Retail revenues of CAD 31.8 million for the 13 weeks ended July 31, 2021, increased by 36.3% from CAD 23.4 million in the comparable period of 2020. The increase in retail revenue is a result of Fire & Flower's expanded retail network of 91 stores at the end of Q2 2021, compared to 49 stores at the end of Q2 2020. 7 new locations opened in the current quarter, which included 2 in Ontario, 2 in British Columbia, 2 in Manitoba, and 1 in Saskatchewan. Traditional formats such as flower, particularly in pre-roll and large format value options, and Cannabis 2.0 products continued to see top line growth. On a same-store sales basis, comparing the 48 stores with operations throughout the 13 weeks of Q2 2021 and Q2 2020, sales decreased by 14% year-over-year. This decrease in same-store sales is attributable to the surge in newly licensed retail cannabis stores in Ontario, increasing 48% from 665 at May 1, 2021, to 981 at July 31, 2021, as well as increased competition and aggressive pricing strategy by deep discount retailers. Wholesale distribution revenue of CAD 7.8 million for the Q2 of 2021 increased 81.3% from revenue of CAD 4.3 million in the Q2 of 2020. Our wholesale distribution segment operates through our Open Fields business, which purchases cannabis products directly from licensed producer and distributes them directly to our retail stores and other third-party independent licensed retailers in Saskatchewan. Open Fields also purchases cannabis accessories and related ancillary products from Canadian-based and global suppliers and distributes them to Fire & Flower retail stores and third-party independent retailers in Canada. Revenue in this segment increased as the Saskatchewan market continues to open up and more retailers sourcing inventory from Open Fields and growth of Cannabis 2.0 products. Digital platform revenue increased 293% to CAD 3.7 million in the Q2 of 2021, from CAD 0.9 million in the Q2 of 2020, as the company continues to monetize the Hifyre digital retail and analytics platform. The year-over-year increase reflects growing monthly recurring revenues in data sales, both in Canada and the U.S., plus continued maturation of our Hifyre Reach ad network and the initial kickoff of branded digital dispensary partnerships. Total gross profit for the company for the Q2 of 2021 was CAD 16.2 million or 37.3% of revenue. Compared to total gross profit of CAD 10 million or 34.8% of revenue for the same period of the previous year ended August 1, 2020. All business segments individually contributed to the increase in gross profit dollars. Expansion in gross profit percentage reflects a shift in mix with a larger portion of gross profit coming from the high-margin, Hifyre business in the current period compared to the prior year. Total adjusted EBITDA for the company for the Q2 of 2021 was CAD 3.1 million, compared to a loss of CAD 1.1 million in the same period of the previous year ended August 1, 2020. All business segments individually delivered positive adjusted EBITDA in the current quarter, with Hifyre leading the way with CAD 2.2 million in adjusted EBITDA. The expansion in gross profit percentage and continued growth in adjusted EBITDA reflects the benefits of being a tech-enabled retailer with a diversified segment portfolio, and it's a clear testament to our ability to outperform in a highly competitive market. The company reported net income of CAD 19.5 billion, or earnings per share of CAD 0.06 for the Q2 of 2021, compared to a net loss of CAD 42.1 million, or a net loss per share of CAD 0.13 in the comparable period of 2020. We have a strong balance sheet, and as of July 31, 2021, the company had cash and cash equivalents of CAD 29.3 million and total debt of CAD 3.8 million. Thank you, and I'll turn it back to Trevor and look forward to questions from the participants on the call. Thank you so much, Judy. As we move forward to the H2 of the year, we continue to build out our asset-light model to generate even stronger financial results in the quarters ahead. We will continue to monetize our Hifyre technology platform and build this technology into our expanding retail network to operate a cannabis retail platform unlike any of our competitors. We look forward to advancing this business strategy that's proven itself advanced and led the cannabis industry. I'd now like to turn the call over to the operator for questions. Over to you, Daisy. Of course. If you would like to register a question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. When preparing to ask your question, please ensure you are unmuted locally. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star followed by two. That's star followed by one on your telephone keypad to register a question. Our first question comes from Justin Keywood from Stifel. Justin, your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my call. Just on the gross margins in the quarter, it showed a nice expansion. I think it calculated around 250 basis points, despite the increased competition in the market. I'm just wondering how sustainable these gross margins are. I think actually, Justin, I'm going to kick that over to. We have Nadia on the call. Nadia would probably be the best one to speak to that. Good morning, Justin. Thanks for your question. If you're talking about margin on a consolidated basis, certainly the margin mix with the really strong performance of the digital platform this quarter has really contributed to an increase in that gross margin, and we expect that to continue. On the retail side, we did see sort of a tale of different provinces. Ontario, as it grows, continues to look really strong. Certainly in Alberta, we're seeing the price compression from the deep discount competition. I think that this is, you know, we're evolving like we did a couple of years ago when the Alberta competition really was increasing. We'll see probably some shakeout in terms of margin. There's also opportunities like private label to increase margins. I anticipate that there will be pressures on gross margin and that there'll be opportunities, Justin, on gross margin. What I'm really excited about is the digital platform, because we know that the margin on that business is really strong. As we continue to grow those sales, particularly in the sales mix, that will continue to keep our margins up. Mm-hmm. Understood. Justin, that's always been our strategy. We started with the end in mind. We knew it was going to be hyper-competitive, which is why we invested in this in 2018 before it was competitive. Now we're starting to see the dividends paid by our digital tech. Absolutely. On that digital tech, I think I calculate a run rate of about CAD 15 million in annual sales and showed some nice expansion in the quarter, and that was prior to the PotGuide and Wikileaf. I'm just wondering if there's any broad goals for where this revenue can trend to. Also just on the PotGuide and Wikileaf, it sounds like there may be some investments required to upgrade those platforms to the Hifyre standard and if there's an amount attributed for that expected investment. Judy, do you want to handle that one? Sure. Yeah. You know, we're really excited about the Wikileaf and PotGuide acquisitions, as we already have a significant base of monthly and annual recurring revenue subscriptions coming out of the existing Hifyre products. You'll see that we've been more than doubling year-over-year quarterly revenue. A s we add new revenue channels and products to the digital platform, this will give us an opportunity to produce more high-margin revenue streams. So far this year, Hifyre has delivered significant year-over-year growth. Yeah, we expect to see the same trends play out for the remainder of the year. Justin, maybe what I'd add to that in terms of color as well is I always like to talk about Hifyre is not our IT department. People often sort of confuse it with it. It's a. You got a lot of SG&A. What is this? Well, it's an R&D arm of the company. It develops and commercializes technology. I t's not even just that one, there's 1 revenue stream associated with a digital product. Like, we keep creating new digital products and services and revenue streams as the market matures. It's a dynamic kind of living thing that's creating new revenue streams. I t's not even, you know, Wikileaf and PotGuide are just the latest instantiation of our tech R&D. I think that's important to kinda factor in when you look at how it could grow. 'Cause remember last year this time, people were asking questions on, "Well, how many data and analytics platform, you know, subscriptions can you sell?" Well, we've proven that actually we developed an ad network, and now we developed a customer acquisition channel. That's how I would look at it. Yeah, I would- Yeah, certainly diversify. Yeah. Yeah. I would just add again, you know, these are all high margin revenue streams and highly scalable, especially as we expand across North America. Great. If I could just fit in 1 more question. In Ontario, the store cap lifting this month from 30 to 75 per operator, what would be the strategy for Fire & Flower in either buying or building or co-locating, assuming the strategy is still to maximize that store cap? Maybe I'll start with this one, and Nadia and Judy can jump in and add some color. I mean, obviously Ontario's gonna be an important. We always knew it was gonna be an important market, and Canada's a 14 million person province, so it's important. You know, having said that, you know, we've taken a real sort of a careful look at our real estate portfolio. We have a shared service agreement with, you know, Alimentation Couche-Tard, so we planned our real estate portfolio well in advance. As we're kind of looking to maximize the cap, I think it's more important that we go into the right locations rather than we sort of run and sprint to just open stores. That's a very early stage game plan, and I think it leads to, you know, potentially capital misallocation. For us, we wanna make sure that we obviously wanna max out our cap, but we wanna do it in a very planful way. The right location's always gonna be the right location. I don't know if there's any other color, Judy or Nadia, you wanna add to that. Well said, Trevor. Okay. I've learned the word planful from Nadia. Okay, I appreciate the additional color. Thank you for taking my questions. You're welcome. Our next question comes from Frederico Gomes from ATB Capital Markets. Frederico, your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi. Good morning, guys. Just to stay on the Hifyre topic, you know, very strong digital sales growth this quarter. I just wonder if you could maybe just provide more color on what's driving that growth. Are you getting more customers or is it about upselling existing customers? Is that coming mostly from Canada or from the US? Thanks. Returning to kind of the idea of layered revenue streams. If you look at kind of our last year's results, I believe it was sort of CAD 6.2 million to CAD 6.3 million in overall digital revenue. The bulk of that was recurring data and analytics subscription revenue, but just a touch of it was the beginning of our ad network revenue coming in. We've continued to kind of layer that on, and that continues to grow. Now we're bringing on sort of different customer acquisition and monetization channels. I would expect it to be almost like a layer cake. You're adding different sort of revenue streams on top of different revenue streams. The mix isn't gonna be completely homogeneous anymore as we diversify the product. With Wikileaf and PotGuide, you have this tremendous opportunity to bring in all these customers in the customer acquisition funnel or channel, and then we can push them out to different branded e-commerce websites or into stores, and we'll monetize it all through our sort of tech chain. I mean, short answer is that there won't be any 1 dominant sort of revenue stream as time progresses, which is a good thing for us. That means that we've got a diversified revenue stream. We are definitely adding customers, and you've seen the growth in our Spark Perks membership. As I said, with 225,000 combined, you know, users or members of Wikileaf and PotGuide, you can see pretty clearly that you start to aggregate that, you can start to monetize that, and that hasn't even started yet. I mean, hopefully that provides some color on kind of where the revenue is coming and the growth will be coming from. The other thing is the opportunities that we're starting to push down the pipe on that one, including the branded websites, that again is just starting. This is something that is sort of like measured in weeks, not quarters. We're excited that we're just at the beginning of that process. I appreciate that, Trevor. That's very helpful. Maybe if you could comment on our pipeline for further M&A on the digital side. You know, are you looking at different companies to build your tech stack further? Or just how's the pipeline looking there? Yeah, I mean, that's a great question because with the PotGuide and Wikileaf acquisition, we are the only company that we're aware of actually that has a fully vertical, fully integrated complete vertical stack from customer acquisition to customer management to digital, you know, modalities like e-commerce, things like delivery. All the way from the beginning to the end, we have this complete vertical stack. It sort of completed our tech stack, so to speak. We're the only one that has these capabilities at the moment, although it's relatively slim, it's complete. I would expect us to be looking at ways to increase things like customer acquisition channels, customer count, because that's ultimately what's going to drive value. We will always be looking for valuable acquisitions in the space. There's a lot of sort of smaller tech offerings that are out there that we will continue to evaluate. We're always sort of interested in growth, but it's got to be appropriate growth. We're not interested in overpriced acquisitions. We're not interested in things that are duplicative. It has to really pass a pretty rigorous internal test before we would proceed with things. We are looking for growth. Thank you. I appreciate that, Trevor. Hop back into queue. Thanks. Thank you. Our next question comes from Andrew Semple from Echelon Wealth Partners. Andrew, your line is open. Please go ahead. Hello. Good morning. Good morning. First question from me is just on the revenues, the retail part of the business. Obviously, retail revenues may have faced some pressures with COVID-19 lockdowns during this quarter. Could you maybe provide some insight as to whether and to what magnitude we should expecting those retail sales per store to recover into Q3, as we move past some of the lockdowns we experienced in the prior quarter? Sure. Maybe I'll start that one off. I'm sure that you're gonna, you know, get color from all 3 of us on this one because it's something that is very topical for us. At a high level, the major force is we're kind of in this trifecta or perfect storm of 3 different sort of competing factors. You've got COVID, which continues to sort of weigh on the industry, and the, you know, regulatory uncertainty, things like build-outs are still stalled out in some cases. You still have reduced foot traffic, you know, it hasn't returned to pre-COVID levels. We're in a 4th wave, this all that sort of stuff. You've also got licensing expansion, which again, a nearly 50% expansion in 1 quarter in the major. A major market is nothing to sneeze at, so that's going to happen. Again, these are things that we faced in Alberta before. Then I think you've got the third pressure pillar of, you know, the predatory price wars happening for the deep discount retailers. You've got these 3 things. All of these 3 things have an end to them. You know, do I think it's Q3? Well, I think that that's unlikely. These things are going to resolve themselves over time because of course, you can't, on the deep discount front, there has to be a sustainable business model underneath it. You can disrupt for a little while, but eventually economic sense has to prevail because you have to operate a business that makes money. On the COVID side, of course, COVID, you know, knock on wood, COVID has to to end at some sort of juncture, but we've been hearing predictions on when that's going to happen for over a year now. Of course, on the licensing frontier, you quite naturally like, this is just a normal part of the business cycle. We saw this in Alberta, where there was a mass licensing. I think the record at the time was 20 licenses a week, and it expanded. You've got a lot of kind of mom-and-pops in the queue that unfortunately, even though there isn't really a lot of room for single players anymore in the market, they have to kind of launch into the market because they've signed a lease and, so they're coming. You know, no matter what, they're going to launch. You got the overcrowding and then a paring back, as businesses unfortunately can't compete. All these things resolve themselves. I doubt they resolve themselves in a quarter, but they eventually do. I'll pass it off to my colleagues to see if there's another perspective they wanna or some color they wanna add. Trevor, I think you're on a roll today. You don't leave me anything else to say. Okay. Yeah. I'll be more fabulous next time. We'll start with Nadia. Yeah, that was very helpful, Trevor. Thank you. You know, just on the one of the points you brought up, I did want to explore your team's value segment of the markets, which, you know, as you guys know, and as I'm sure you've seen your Hifyre data, you know, is coming on quite strong. Could you maybe speak to whether Fire & Flower has a strategy or a plan to unveil a strategy on how, you know, the company plans to address the value segment of the market and, you know, potentially looking at more aggressive pricing strategies within your retail portfolio? This one I am gonna hand to Nadia because she's obviously very close to this. I would just point out 1 thing before, which is there's a difference. It's important to understand the difference between a value strategy, which is giving the consumer what they want at the price they want, and it's a certain type of consumer, which we're very plugged into because of course, we're a data-driven retailer. A value strategy is different than category discounting, which is sort of just a blanket discount strategy. That's market disruption, and it is a competitive strategy for a while. You know, again, just blanket discounting to disrupt the market is not a value strategy. It's an important kind of distinction that I think people need to keep in mind. With that, I'll leave to Nadia, who will explain how we look at it. Thank you. Good morning, Andrew. This is exciting in retail because we are now seeing the emergence of the various types of consumers and how they like to shop and in what brands. We, in fact, in the middle of the quarter, Andrew, launched a value proposition to our customers. We know that there is a value segment of our customer base that shops in our store, and they need to have compelling product and the appropriate assortment priced in the way that is compelling to them, and it was highly effective. We will continue to expand that within our current stores so that those customers are always compelled to come to us. Then we can also offer them other choices while they're in shop with our Cannistas. There is within our portfolio a few of our stores, particularly in the Happy Dayz locations that are more of a value-based offering, and those are also highly successful stores. I think it's fair to say that we will explore that in a meaningful way in the quarters to come for sure. Great. That's helpful. Thank you, Nadia. 1 last question, if I may. You know, I did want to ask on Hifyre. There was another great step-up this quarter in terms of commercializing, you know, the hard work that goes into that ecosystem. How should we be thinking about digital revenues in the back half of the year? You know, if we look back to Q4 of last year, we did see a bump around the holiday period. Would you expect that to reoccur in this upcoming holiday period? More generally, you know, how do you think the pace of that business is building towards the H2? Maybe I'll start that one as well and pass it to Judy. I think that it still goes back to that kind of layered product assortment or layered revenue stream assortment this year versus last year. Last year, as I said, most of that CAD 6.3 or CAD 6.2 was comprised of you know, digital analytics, you know, and data package, sort of subscription, recurring subscription revenue, and that some of that is to do with subscription timing, right? Sort of renewals and that kind of thing. You know, that's part of that business. I would say the difference this year is we have you know, our digital advertising network. We've got these other sort of revenue streams sort of layering on top of that. It's going to be, as I said, a lot less homogeneous, a lot more layered and kind of nuanced. That's just to keep having these sort of growth drivers layered on top to continue having it grow. You know, in terms of Lumpy, we have other different streams that are layered on top of it. You know, Judy, do you have any other color you want to add to that kind of general framework? Yeah, the only thing I'd add is, as Trevor said, in Q4 last year, we really just started to launch the Hifyre Reach ad network. We're seeing maturation in that now. We continue to see, you know, a growing monthly recurring revenue stream in data sales, both from Canada and U.S. Things have started to really kind of, you know, steady out. We also, you know, are seeing an initial kickoff of revenues coming from the branded digital dispensary partnerships. When you look at the front half performance with a doubling of revenues year-over-year, I mean, you know, we really expect that trend to kind of continue into the back half. That's very helpful. Thank you, Trevor and Judy. I'll hop back into queue. Congrats again on the quarter. Thanks. Our next question comes from Aaron Grey from Alliance Global Partners. Aaron, your line is open. Please go ahead. Hi, good morning, and thank you for the questions. First one for me, you know, Trevor, you kind of spoke to, you know, potential other acquisitions, you know, down the line on the technology side, always looking for more acquisitions in the space. Would love to get your thoughts in terms of, you know, where you feel you guys are right now, you know, the recent Wikileaf and PotGuide acquisition and just how you're seeing the overall landscape. You talked a little about, you know, valuations are still a little bit frothy. We've seen some other, you know, competitors on that side of technology, continue to announce other acquisitions. Could you maybe just give some color in terms of what you're seeing out there, you know, in terms of the prices and maybe the pipeline, if you think that's more of a near-term dynamic in terms of more acquisitions or you're kind of focused on integrating some of the recent acquisitions you've had today, and maybe incremental acquisitions down the line. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, that's a great question, because again, it comes down to the idea that our first acquisition was Hifyre back in 2018. Think of it as a team of like 25, 26 data scientists and engineers that are building things for us. You know, as you know, in business, it's always sort of, or it's often cheaper to build things yourself if you started the right way and you build it to be scalable and extensible. If you're buying something, unless it's in the distressed or massively undervalued, you're sort of taking on some of their development costs in that purchase price. We really take a keen focus on what do we need to build or what can we expand, and what can we do ourselves because that is very cost-effective, and what do we need to go out to augment and what gets us farther faster on that front. We started off with a very robust, I'm gonna call it a technical spine or the building blocks being very, very solid. When we add things like Wikileaf is an easy add for us because we have that bandwidth to integrate it. We're gonna focus obviously on PotGuide integration and Wikileaf integration and commercialization in the kind of, you know, obviously immediate term. I would say that in the technical landscape, and yes, we agree the valuations are extremely frothy out there on the tech side. We are hopeful that people, investors will start to recognize that we actually are the only ones with a complete vertical tech stack in the cannabis industry. I think a lot of the acquisitions in the outside tech industry are going to be focused on actually creating a vertical stack for themselves, right? If there's missing pieces. Analogs to all the pieces of our technical stack, whether it's customer acquisition, you know, or customer management, loyalty or e-commerce or all the things that we already have in our stack. I think that that's probably where the M&A outside will look at as they try to fill in missing pieces of their technology. With us, we have a complete technology. The technology is complete. It's the only complete vertical, certainly that we're aware of with the cannabis thing. For us, it's a little different when we look at acquisitions. It is what's gonna get us further, faster, and what's gonna leverage our existing engineering, and technology base. This is all stuff that we've largely built, right? You know, and hopefully that explains a little bit of how we look at acquisitions. It's not simply sort of a, you know, going out on an M&A frenzy. I don't think that's sort of for anyone, but measured planful, kind of what gets us farther faster are things that we would look at. That's really helpful, caller. Thank you for that. My second question will kind of be a follow on to that. Number 1, just could you provide some more color in terms of, you know, you guys are currently have the vertical tech platform, and you mentioned kind of some of your competitors may be looking to go out and become similar. You know, what do you see as maybe the difficulty in you already having it on a legacy basis and already having that expertise versus them trying to go out and acquire it, maybe the difficulties in terms of being able to integrate that. Second, you know, just in terms of what area, you know, of the technological supply chain you believe would be most valuable maybe today that gets you further faster, as you mentioned before, just to maybe think about more clearly might within that pipeline in terms of the different verticals of the supply chain for technology might be looking? Thanks. Sure. Yeah. There's a lot in there, but I can unpack it. I think that the—for us, the most valuable part of the chain is owning the customer relationship, because the job of a retailer is. Like, that's your job. You can't own the customer relationship, then it, you know, in some way you've lost it. Each time you have a piece of technology from the outside, a third-party technology that you are integrating into your operations, you've lost control in varying degrees to that relationship. If you're using third-party e-commerce as a retailer, you've lost, you know, control over that customer relationship. If you're using third-party loyalty, customer loyalty services, then you've definitely lost the relationship with that customer. You know, if you're using third-party delivery, all these sort of things matter. For us, it's driven on the fundamental premise of own the customer relationship. That's what you have to do. I would sort of say the difference between what we're doing and what I think the general technology environment in cannabis outside is doing is we are based in a retail environment. That was by design. What we do and the way that we develop our technology is we are a retailer. The use cases, the technology development protocols, what we need to develop comes from ourselves. We are beta testing on ourselves. We are able to have a feedback loop between what is advantageous at retail to what we should develop and deploy almost instantaneously. It's a very, very small feedback loops as opposed to a third-party software provider, which is, "Well, you know, we'll get to it when, you know, it suits our development process or, you know, our staffing resources." A great example was when COVID hit, to be quite honest, we didn't have in our development pipeline, you know, fast, you know, Spark Fastlane, like the kind of click and collect functionality. We very, very quickly, of course, adapted that. We built it, and it was done, deployed. Things like early on with Spark Perks, being able to message. If you recall, in Canada, there was a lot of product disruption in the beginning. Product availability was a big issue. We, of course, accelerated in Spark Perks the ability to notify our Spark Perks members that, "Hey, your product is in. You're not gonna come to a store and be met with that product. We'll notify you. You can come pick it up. Go back, and we'll reserve it for you, hold it for you." That, I think, is a kind of key difference between what we're doing using the retail platform as a necessary part of that development, feedback loop versus what's happening on the outside. Does that make sense? No, it does. That was really helpful to provide that detail. Appreciate that. Helpful color. I'll go ahead and jump back in the queue. All right. Thanks. If anyone would like to register a further question, please press star followed by one on your telephone keypad. We have no further questions at this point, so I'll hand back over to the team. Well, thank you very much for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with you again next quarter. Please watch the press releases. Lots of stuff going on. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for joining today's call. You may now disconnect your lines.