Hello, welcome to the good natured Products investor call. If anyone should require operator assistance, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. You may ask a question anytime by typing it into the Ask a Question feature on your screen. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It's now my pleasure to turn the call over to your host, Glen Axelrod with Bristol IR. Please go ahead, Glenn. Thank you, Kevin, and thank you everybody for joining our webcast today with good natured Products. Just a quick reminder that this is not an earnings call, and the purpose of today's presentation is to give our audience a better understanding of the business at a high level. Joining us today is Paul Antoniadis, CEO, who'll conduct the presentation, and then we'll take questions from our audience. You should see the presentation in the webcast portal. If you'd like a copy of this document, simply email me at Glen, G-L-E-N, @bristolir.com. I'll be happy to send you one. We'll break for questions at the end of the formal presentations. When we do break, we encourage those questions. As a reminder, we're only taking questions through the web portal. If you're listening over the telephone, please access the web link that we sent earlier today to ask a question. Remember, you can submit a question using the text box within the portal at any time. I'll ask the questions on the air for everyone to hear, and Paul will then answer. I'm not gonna reference any names, but simply read the questions asked. As we have a fairly large audience today, if I can't get to your question online and in time, and it has not yet been addressed during the call but can be, I'll be sure to get back to you by email. I won't read the forward-looking statements, but I do state that they apply and reference on page two of this PowerPoint. With that said, once again, thank you for joining us. Remember, this is fairly informal, and we do encourage questions to help you better understand the business and its growth path. Now I'll turn the call over to Paul to start his part of the discussion and presentation. Thanks, Glenn. Thanks for the introduction. Hello, everyone. Before I start the company overview, which should be about 20 minutes long, just wanna encourage everyone to go to goodnaturedproducts.com. Check out our products. Hopefully, you'll buy some for your kitchen in your home, for your home. There you can find our investor site where you can access our audited year-end financial statements along with the MD&A and our 2023 AIF, which is our annual information form that outlines our strategy in great detail. With that, I'll jump into the overview. I'm gonna start with our North Star. Our North Star at good natured is to become North America's leading earth-friendly product company. We're going to achieve that by creating the largest assortment of plant-based products that businesses and consumers can use as an alternative to the petroleum products or synthetic chemical products they're using every day to run their companies and/or enjoy their homes. Now, the way we build out our product assortment or we call our product authority is by executing our growth strategy. Our growth strategy is a two-prong approach with 50% of our growth coming from our organic initiatives. This is where we design the product, design the mix of the material, manufacture the product, and sell that product directly to market. The second prong is our acquisition strategy, which represents the other 50% of our growth, where we target petroleum-based thermoformed packaging companies or product companies. We acquire them to strengthen our domestic supply chain. We convert their petroleum offering to a bio-based material product offering. By doing that and creating this product assortment, we're really addressing an unmet need, which is we're really focused on making it easy and affordable for businesses and consumers to start to make the switch from fossil fuels. Over the last three years, we've grown the company 10x, from $10 million to well over $ 100 million. That represents a four-year CAGR of 111%. I think what's really important to highlight is that growth wasn't purely due to the four acquisitions that we completed since 2020, but you're looking at 36% organic growth in 2022, which was underpinned by 45% organic growth in 2021. Our organic growth combined with our acquisitions is what our business model is centered on. I think, you know, over the last three years with the changing macro backdrop and operating conditions from COVID shutdowns to supply chain disruptions, inflation to record-setting interest rate hikes, I think one thing that we have built an exceptional level of confidence is our business model. Our business model has stood tall, and that is reflected in despite the operating conditions and macro conditions changing, and that's reflective of our, of our growth rate. I think, you know, over the last three years, despite our record-setting growth, you know, we're still disrupting and we're still in the early stages of disrupting these massive markets, which I'm going to highlight, some of the key macro drivers, and the size of these markets that we're disrupting in my next part of the overview. In the, in the market drivers, or as I'll just kinda call tailwinds, I wanna start with the sustainable, I wanna start with the sustainable products. Whether you look at FMCG or whether you look at CPG or you look at the Food and Beverage market, there's one consistent theme. They are very much focused on growing their sustainable product offering to capture the consumer demand for products that are better for their families and human health, but also better for the environment. This growth of sustainable products is fundamentally driving change in the packaging industry, which packaging is one of our primary businesses. As the marketplace expands their sustainable product offering or retailers expand the amount of shelf space, or e-com expands their sustainable product offering, the one thing that's consistent is those products want better packaging. It just makes sense. If you're making a healthier product, why not move away from petroleum to a bio-based material packaging? good natured is very much has communicated, I would say over the last, you know, three or four quarters, that this is a real focus of ours going into 2023, is we're really gonna lean in and we've set the stage to really lean into our packaging business group, 'cause that's where we're really seeing the growth and the resiliency against this challenging macro environment. What I'd like to do is just highlight three final points on the macro tail, the positive tailwinds. First and foremost, consumer demand for these products continues to grow. They're looking for brands that are built for purpose. They, you know, and also creating great quality products that they can use in their businesses and homes. Second, these same consumers are, and business operators, are embracing climate policies. Whether you look at the policy in Hawaii, where they're very focused by 2023 to transition food packaging to bio-based materials, which we've announced, and, you know, we've got great partnership out there with Sustainable Islands and that's driving tremendous demand. The recent White House announcement where they've committed policies to transition 90% of petroleum materials to plant-based materials over the next, you know, decade. I think all of this is strong indicators that good natured is on the forefront of these strong macro trends and policy trends. I also wanna just finally, you know, step out and highlight this, you know, baby boomer retirement and this transition of wealth is a lot of these baby boomers who are owning these petroleum thermoform packaging companies or product companies are set to retire, and they're looking to transition out of there, and that's opening up our acquisition strategy to, you know, acquire these legacy petroleum thermoform packaging companies and then transition to bio-based materials. Okay. We're gonna talk a little bit about our go-to-market. Our choice for our customers starts with the materials that we offer. We offer fiber, we offer bio-based plastics. These are plastics that are plant-based but can co-mingle downstream with 100% petroleum. We offer products made from our biodegradables, which are fully industrial, can be composted in industrial compost facilities. Our choice starts here with the materials, and our customers love that choice 'cause they all have different needs. Being able to meet those needs starts with the offering of our materials, a wide range of materials. After the customer chooses the material type, it goes into the design. We very much focus on creating products for our customers that are equal to or better than the petroleum products that we're replacing. Better just isn't the physical aspect, it's also we want to either maintain the commercial goal that they're achieving with the petroleum or enhance it by designing products that help access, you know, consumer trends or maximize retail shelf space. We basically wanna through our designs, improve the business performance of our customers. Our approach, which is our third proposition element or go-to-market element, is built around what we call a margin mix, revenue mix, customer mix strategy. We have over 400 products and services across five different business groups. The least represent where we're generating revenue. We sell to a very diverse set of customers, over 1,600. They range from the real big, big customers, big wholesale food producers on the national side, all the way to small businesses like Paul's Bakery, and we sell direct through our multiple e-com channels, which goodnaturedproducts.com I mentioned earlier, plus we also sell through Amazon and other third-party e-com channels. It's this diversity of products, diversity of customers that allows us to deliver consistent gross margin performance in our business unit, which I'll highlight when we review our financial performance. Gonna touch on the operations here. I think what you'll see for folks who are new to good natured or have been owners over the years, you'll see our supply chain footprint has grown pretty dramatically over the last 10 years. This really is designed to illustrate the scale of our operations. Today, you know, we operate over, you know, 150,000 sq ft of own manufacturing footprint, of which we, those are four facilities. Of which we own three of the properties. You know, three years ago, we were 100%, outsourced manufacturing. If you look at our outsourced manufacturing from three years ago, we have extended that footprint of our outsourced manufacturing along with our distribution and logistics footprint to be able to serve our customers coast to coast across the U.S. and in Canada. Okay, I'm gonna touch on the financials. Here you can see our hockey stick that we talked about around the 10x growth. We had an incredible finish to 2022, breaking a $100 million annual revenue milestone. I also wanna point out and recognize our partners and our team members for delivering year-over-year gross margin, variable gross margin improvement and consistency in our gross margin performance. This is all through the disruption and inflation challenges that the operating teams faced. If you look at our quarterly performance, which I won't really get into great level of detail, this kind of highlights that revenue performance and gross margin performance quarter-over-quarter. I also want to highlight, this is our first time in the history of the company on an annual basis of having right at $3 million of positive adjusted EBITDA. I also want to highlight that we generated $ 4.6 million in cash from our operation, which was a record. We finished the year at $ 11.8 million in cash, which I believe in 2021 at least our opening cash balance was around that ten and a half million dollar mark. A real strong focus operationally. You know, although we drove a lot of growth and we cracked $ 100 million, we continue to look to drive productivity, reduce our cost structure, and improve our cash coming from our operation. Just a few, you know, more minutes on the overview here. This kind of highlights the petroleum-based companies that we've acquired since 2022. I just want to highlight there was two plant-based divisions that we did acquire prior to 2020. These again highlight that trend where family-owned businesses built great companies, petroleum-based companies. This transition is real, and it's happening in the marketplace. Obviously, we've been fortunate enough to bring some great people through those acquisitions into good natured, and that this opportunity on the acquisition side remains very strong. On the leadership front, for folks on the call that aren't familiar or is the first time you've been introduced to our senior leaders, Don, Michelle, and Stephanie have been part of good natured for a very long time. Recently, Kevin, who was our CFO, we've announced his retirement. He's still involved in the company day-to-day. We were fortunate to bring Kerry Biggs on as our CFO. Kerry's a tremendous individual. An enormous amount of background in public companies, both on the TSXV but also on NASDAQ, where he played a role along the finance team with lululemon. We, you know, we feel like we've got a, you know, a great senior leadership team that has demonstrated their ability to navigate the last three years and take on any other future challenges that this macro environment can bring forth. With that, I will wanna thank everyone for joining me on the call and to Glenn and his team for setting up the call. With that, Glenn, I'll turn it over to you, and happy to take any questions that you've received. Perfect. Thank you, Paul. Again to our audience, if you have a question, please use the question text box within the portal to ask that question. We do have quite a few questions in the queue already, so I'll just get going. A few people, Paul, have asked about this topic, so I'll just I guess sum it up. Could you just speak regarding the National Bio Strategy that was recently announced by the White House and how it could potentially impact good natured in the near and longer term? Yeah. I think it's really clear that that strategy that was announced by the White House was, you know, very material because they're basically going, and they have frankly already started to put into place policies to expand the biomaterial manufacturing footprint in the U.S. and really begin to drive the innovations to replace 90% of the petroleum-based materials in the United States. If you look at that marker, that's pretty significant. That just shows you where the industry is going, you know, particularly with Plastics News putting it on the front page of their magazine, which is a well-known industry leader in media in the plastic industry. That alone also signifies how critical this announcement was. I think there's a bit of a precursor on what's to come out of that announcement. If you look at Hawaii, which I believe is the starting point of these policies taking place, you know, their transition to food packaging to bio-based materials is just an early indicator that, you know, it's working out there. I think they're using that as a case study of success and, you know, again, we've got a great partnership out there, a distributor out there helping us bring our products to market. You know, based on the business that we're doing in Hawaii, as that continues to get cascaded into different states, it's just gonna be more demand in our packaging business group and why we're again really leaning into that in 2023 is where we're really focused on really driving our packaging growth as because of these policies and the resiliency that we're seeing through these challenging macro backdrops. I just wanna balance that by saying, this is big, and it's happening in Hawaii. This isn't a, "Hey, is this really happening?" Like it is happening. We're really excited about that. Again, we just have to continue to execute against it, right? This is a big deal. For folks who are on a call that may not be aware of that, there's a lot of information available, and I really encourage you to read the policies because it's pretty significant. Okay. Thank you for that, Paul. Next question is, what is the current split of your insourced versus outsourced manufacturing capacity? Is there an optimum mix that you're targeting? I would say, what we do is when we forecast looking forward, we, you know, we look obviously at revenue and demand and our pipeline, which is very robust both on the organic side and, you know, obviously the acquisition, the transition of these baby boomers. The acquisition funnel is also, you know, very active. If you look at, when we take all those factors, we have to plan for available production capacity. I think it's a real balance between working with our partners, outsource partners, giving them visibility to programs, and they're making capital investments and adding machines. In some cases, we have pretty extensive outsource agreements in place that secure capacity. That's a really important part of our strategy because if we take on, you know, large wholesale food producers, we will spill that out into those outsource partners and then not put our current insource production, you know, at timing at risk. Sometimes we do a balance of both. I would say today on the packaging side of our business, I would say it's, you know, give you a range. It's probably about 60%-65% insource and, you know, the remaining is outsource. On the industrial side, it's obviously, you know, I would say We do have one program that's outsourced, but a majority, you know, well over 99% of it is insource. It's a balance that we look at based off our kind of demand forecast. Okay. Thank you. Next question for you. Are other major packaging companies also getting into biodegradables? Who would you say are your main competitors, and where is this segment of the industry at the moment? Yeah. I think in the packaging side, you gotta remember it's a trillion-dollar worldwide market, right? It's, it's quite large. There's still a lot of blue ocean in our, in our plant-based or bio-based material packaging. Although we're out there building a pretty large island, surrounded by defensible moats, there's still a lot of room for other plant-based companies to come out and start to, you know, startups and things to start to take position, without really having a negative impact for us. Our competitors vary by business groups. If you look at, for example, in food packaging, you know, we're very dominant in compostable or biodegradable bakery, deli, whereas if you look at food services, which is, give you an example, coffee cup lids, cups, cutlery, there's more competitors in that space. What we do is we, you know, with our category strategy or merchandising strategies, we really concentrate on areas that there isn't any competitors and really build a strong. You know, even though we offer food services, we really focus on, like, for example, you know, we're doing business in medical. We've added, you know, Bio-PET, which we're dominating the marketplace in rigid food packaging. You know, we look at our material strategy, certain market segments, and that's where we really try to, you know, look at those categories and dominate it. Whereas in food services, that's where a lot of our competitors are. Now I'll balance that food services where we provide a lot of industrial roll stock to what you would deem our competitor that is making food services. You know, it just shows you how much blue ocean's still out there in converting petroleum-based packaging over to plant-based. Now, I think your second question is, what about the big guys entering into this space? Well, I think with this announcement from the White House administration, you know, you got to remember, like, there's still a lot of consolidation happening in the petroleum packaging space. You know, having operated large companies, and these large petroleum companies are run by really good leaders. I'm sure they're reassessing their bio material strategy, and I think their approach more would be to acquire versus just greenfield. You know, when they're running their petroleum lines and, you know, they want to switch to a plant-based material, the first thing that they, you know, you could argue whether it's right or wrong, is they're like, "Hey, do I really want to risk contaminating my petroleum material by cleaning out my machines and bringing in that new material?" Their appetite, in my opinion, would be more to acquire than the greenfield. I'm sure with this announcement they're reassessing their approach. As of right now, 99% of our competitors are petroleum-based competitors. We don't... You know, outside food services, we rarely compete against another plant-based offering. Okay. Super. Thank you for that. Touching on your growth, you obviously have grown fairly quickly over the last four years. Can you talk about what in that growth is organic versus the acquisitions? Yeah, absolutely. If you look at, I'm not sure if my slides are still up, but I'll reference slide 17 in the presentation where we grew from $61 million to a hundred and just over $ 100 million. Of that growth, which we'll just call $40 million, you know, again, it's outlined in our MD&A, 57% of that $40 million was organic. 43% was driven from acquisition revenue. For our business model is really delivering that balance, right? When we acquire a company, you know, it was just our recent acquisition in Houston, it wasn't at full capacity. There was lots of capacity available. We believe that there's tremendous opportunity to drive organic go-growth with that available capacity. Also the ability to cross-sell our wide assortment to existing customers drives a lot of organic growth. Even though we picked up, you know, I think it's around CAD 6 million roughly, depending on the FX and revenue from that acquisition, the upside from the organic will soon catch up over the next, you know... I think July will be our year anniversary. Over the, you know, two years from the point of acquisition, that organic growth will surpass the revenue contribution from the acquisition. That's fundamentally, you know, I'm not just saying that. Like, it's disclosed in our MD&A. We're showcasing strong year-over-year organic growth. That revenue growth contribution from organic of 43%, 57% in 2022 coming from organic, 43% coming from acquisition. All that is showing that the model is working. Like, we feel really confident of our strategy. We feel very confident in our model. We've just been dealing with these consistently changing conditions macroly and operationally, the model's still working. It's not to say that there isn't room to improve. However, you know, our revenue is really well balanced between organic and acquisition. Super. Thank you. I'm gonna stay with this theme here 'cause I have a few questions around it. Sure. Given that you've done these acquisitions, what's your experience regarding converting the petroleum-based customers to your plant-based products in the companies you bought, as a percentage, if you can? A second question to that by a different individual in the webinar is, how fast do you typically convert an acquired plastics customer to an all plant-based customer? Yeah. Okay. Those are two good questions. I'll kind of go back to in 2020 we acquired Shepherd's, which was 100% petroleum. And that's now entered into, I think May will be, or whatever, 3-year anniversary. All of their customers, all of our customers today and all of their customers prior to acquisition have been converted but of one, and one is a international multinational international firm. It's really takes a lot of time to set. They have what they call global standards. We believe it was important for us, due to the upside opportunity with that client, to be patient and work with them. I'm highlighting that because you can convert it. It doesn't require any new equipment. You can run any of our plant biodegradable bioplastics, like you can run any of that material on existing petroleum thermoforming equipment. You know, the only real change is a minor change on the knives that we use to cut the plastic. It's minimal. Like, we're talking, like, thousands of dollars. For us, it's really about our timing is really tied to our supply chain. Our supply chain, whether it's the inflation, whether it's the reduction in resin prices that has take place since July of last year, we've been very, very mindful on how we purchase and when we purchase our resins through this dynamic supply chain environment that we've all witnessed. As an example of that is in leaning into 2021, we saw the disruption. We bought a lot of biomaterial to help with that transition. The shortages due so much demand in our packaging, I wish I would've bought more. That delayed the conversion of any industrial products, and because of that. What we did is, well, do we really wanna go out and, you know, build up our inventory when containers were costing us $ 22,000? If you look at our financial statements in Q4, we really began to push down our resin inventory because of the reduction in the container costs and unpredictability in resin pricing. That led to some communication where we delayed our industrial conversion strategy. It's really predicated on supply chain. It's really predicated on timing of our inventory buildup of our bioresin. We don't wanna build up a bunch of bioresin material at a higher cost, and we don't wanna get trapped in any higher priced resin in which we didn't. I think the team, we navigated that really well, and now the supply chain has opened up again, knock on wood, and it's stable. That puts our supply chain in a better position to, you know, to drive that conversion. There's a lot of moving pieces that we have to assess. The one thing that's certain that in executing the strategy, you know, I kind of was talking to one of our owners, again, it's all, you know, communicated in the AIF and is we will, you know... If we're acquiring petroleum-based companies and converting them, there's a continuation where, you know, there'd never be 100% plant-based, right? you know, when we acquire these companies, we give ourselves 18 months to convert them. If, you know, once we convert Houston, if we acquire another thermoformer, that would change our mix. It would mix in petroleum products because we just acquired that new thermoformer. you know, there's some, these transition of these legacy petroleum companies that are underutilized, it's fundamental to our strategy and our growth, you know, I think now with the supply chain kind of leveling off, it puts us in a better position on bringing in these bioresins. You know, it's nothing to do with the equipment. It's got everything to do with the timing of our supply chain and pricing of our input costs. That's really what predicates that. Okay, super. Thank you, Paul. Next question. Have you continued to see inflationary pressures abate in the market? How is this expected to impact the business fundamentals? The short answer is yes. Particularly on ocean. Ocean logistics have dropped. They've dropped dramatically from August of 2022. We are seeing ground transportation starting to show signs of abating. What I think you're gonna see just overall, particularly customers that we have contractual relationships tied to pricing, will be a natural reduction in average selling price in the products that we sell. You know, if an example, if, you know, one of our wholesale food producers who's, you know, we've got a supplier agreement with, you know, we do these price reviews and, you know, we may see that average selling price of their products drop due to the reduction of input costs. I don't think this is gonna be exclusive to us. I think there's gonna be a natural industry ASP reduction in comparing to, you know, 2022, at least for the next 3 quarters because we were at the peak supply chain disruption ocean container pricing. Until we cycle out of these next three quarters, I think you're gonna see just overall industry ASP decline. Okay, super. Thank you. some, I guess income, and balance sheet type questions, that are here. Sure. That I'll just ask. The acquired companies had EBITDA of $7 million, yet the consolidated EBITDA was $ 2.9 million. Can you just explain the disparity? When we look at our performance, we kind of break it out into, you know, field performance, and then we bring in our corporate costs, and then we bring in our. You're seeing that $30 million adjusted EBITDA. A lot of that is driven through our increase in headcount and our wage inflation that took place in 2022 and for retention. We really began to optimize that and drive that productivity since Q3. We are looking at reducing costs, input costs, wage costs. That's the fundamental driver. That analysis is in that MD&A that you can access on our website, that kind of breaks down the fulfillment costs, you know, wage costs increase, things like that. It's mostly driven off of wage inflation and, you know, public, Like, for example, you know, audit fees, professional fees. Like, there was a general increase tied to wages outside of just good natured wages, right, that drove up our service charges. I will balance that by saying, we've really prioritized building efficiencies and cost reductions, starting in Q3. I believe we'll begin to bear some of that fruit going into 2023. Okay, super. Thanks for that, Paul. Next question is sort of two-part. Part of it is competition, which I believe you've already addressed. The other part is just to comment on why your revenue growth slowed over the past year. Yeah. I think fundamentally if you look at our packaging revenue growth, it literally outpaced significantly our total company growth. In Q3, we saw a real decrease in demand and average selling price in our industrial business group, particularly in the petroleum lines that we didn't convert. That decrease in ASP and also in demand, you know, continued in fourth quarter and is gonna frankly continue in Q1 and Q2, mostly because there was a lot of, I'm gonna call it inventory hoarding, that took place in Q3 of 2022, continued in Q4. When those interest rates hit and demand slowed, people were digesting again. This wasn't purely exclusive to good natured, but they were digesting that inventory. When you look at the comparisons of 2022 for Q1, Q2 in, you know, in particular in part of Q3, there was a lot of inventory being built up because people weren't able to access inventory because of shortages. This demand curve on the petroleum industrial side is just going to be the main driver of that slowdown. What you wanna do is take a look at the MD&A in our packaging. What you're gonna see is, you know, we're growing at 2x compared year-over-year compared to our normal total. I'm gonna say our total company growth. Our focus now is to really drive our packaging growth. The why behind that is as demand curves on the industrial petroleum side, you know, we're just gonna eat up that industrial capacity for our packaging business. you know, we believe that will offset that demand. capacity reduction in industrial will be offset by our growth in our packaging business. A lot of this we talk about in our MD&A, and, you know, encourage everyone to take a look at that. Although I've seen that, as you said, that softening, it's primarily in that segment. That to me is, you know, you know, it's not concerning for me, like, because I see the resiliency and the demand in the packaging business, and that's what we're gonna focus on. Perfect. Thank you. Next question. I think you addressed the first part of it, so I won't ask. The second part of it is how did the margin profiles of plant-based materials and petroleum materials differ? Well, it's not a linear answer. It depends. If you're a small business buying 3 cases online, it's going to be, you know, we have higher margins in our, in our lower volume purchases. If it's a higher volume, you know, I'll just pick a design that's patented by us, we can extract more margin out of it because it's exclusive to good natured. It really depends. I think the advantage that we have in the plant-based space is we're fully integrated. Our virgin, our materials, for example, you know, when we make our packaging, you know, half 50% of it is virgin material, the other is what we call reclaim or recovered, scraps. You know, we have the ability to, you know, utilize our highest speed equipment, mix the product efficiently, leverage better value out of products that are uniquely designed for us. Then for the commodity products that, you know, I think this is where the question's alluding to. If we're just making 6x6 standard, you know, utility container, you got to be priced right. Like, people are not gonna pay two times that for plant-based, and we are priced right. We are, you know, we don't want pricing to impede a person transitioning. Sometimes we price that, those utility container for less because they're buying 15 other products. We're able to price it below petroleum because we have over 1,600 customers that we're mixing in different margin rates. It's pricing is not the necessarily the not what impedes people from necessarily transitioning. Like, if we have a customer that we're talking to and they're like, "Hey, I, you know, I can't transition," it's typically because a petroleum supplier has them locked into an agreement. We just continue to communicate to them and wait for the opportunity to engage. Okay. Thank you for that, Paul. Next question. Can you talk to the different market dynamics between industrial and packaging divisions and your strategy for each? Yeah. The industrial roll stock business is basically where we produce roll stock that, you know, third-party thermoformers use to produce their own packaging. We have some great relationships and partnerships in there, where some of those outsourced partners are producing packaging for us, and they're buying roll stock from us. We intend to continue to offer third-party industrial roll stock in the marketplace. Fundamentally, the reason why we acquired companies in the industrial space is to set the stage for our packaging growth. You know, if we're going to be doubling our packaging revenues, we need to ensure that we have, you know, the capacity and ability to produce that roll stock for our own thermoforming or our outsourced partners that are producing packaging. These acquisitions have done that. It's a balance where we've also put a high-speed line in our Ayr facility. We're in flight in putting a another line, high-speed line into the Richmond facility, all to support, you know, our demand for third-party industrial, but also more importantly, to drive our packaging growth. Fundamentally, our packaging business group is our primary business group. That's where you're going to see in the next, I'm gonna say in 2023, a significant amount of our growth coming out of our packaging business group. Okay. Super. Thank you. next question. You talked a little about inflationary pressures. Are there other kinds of headwinds that you're looking at? Well, I would say that I wouldn't say inflationary pressures. Even though there's a little bit of imbalance with, you know, I think it's starting to domestic freight, things like that are starting to level out. I think the real challenge that we're all kind of trying to wrap our head around is this rapid increase in interest rates and the impact it's going to have on demand. You know, for us, you know, obviously we're seeing that in our petroleum industrial side of our business. However, we're seeing real strength in the plant-based packaging, you know, the overall packaging business group. I think for us, what we need to do is, you know, we got real strong policies supporting packaging. We've got real strong consumer demand supporting packaging. We've got real strong sustainable product demand supporting our packaging. I think for us, I wouldn't call it a headwind. I think tactically, as an operation, it's time for us to make a big move in the packaging space to offset the decrease in demand in EPS on the petroleum industrial side and to also take advantage of the capacity that we've built up in our industrial side. I wouldn't. You know, you could argue, "Well, did the headwinds cause that?" Yep, we saw that in the petroleum industrial, but we're gonna lean into packaging. I think that is the fundamental, both fundamental message that, again, I probably over bit long tooth in my messaging on it. I think for all the owners that are on here or potential owners, like, packaging business group, we're just going to explode. That's our fundamental message that we've been predicating. I would also add, again, I wouldn't call it necessarily a headwind, but we're going to need to continue to reduce our costs, improve our operations ability to generate cash. We really did that quite well to position the company with $ 11.8 million in cash at the start of the year. $ 4.6 million of cash coming from the operations. I think reducing our cost structure, I'm going to call it our fighting weight, is also very fundamental in our focus in 2023. Super. Thank you. I guess your last statement sort of leads into this. How do you think about your capital allocation between facility expansion, outsourcing, and M&A, and have these shifted over the past year with these challenging macro conditions? Well, for, you know, we're prioritizing internal capital allocation into packaging. You know, when we review our capital budgets and capital allocation, you know, we, you know, we cap it, right? We basically say there's a, there's a budget. We make sure that as internal projects are being brought forward, that the packaging business group is really where we're concentrating on the capital spend. On the M&A front, like, the reality is we've got to work within our confines of our balance sheet. This concept of us going out and acquiring a $50 million revenue packaging company I don't think is very realistic. I do wanna balance it by saying, "Look, you know, as petroleum, as demand's beginning to impact the petroleum portfolio of products, it may open up opportunities for right size thermoform packaging companies to be considered, all within the constraints of our balance sheet." You know, this transition of baby boomers is real, and the last three years have been a true test to them, whether it's the COVID shutdowns or inflation or the things that we've been talking about. A lot of them are ready to sell, we just have to be very mindful in balance in what we're trying to do. We gotta cut costs, generate cash from the operation, and drive packaging growth, and making sure we're allocating capital into that packaging business group. I think that is a fundamental focus internally. You know, we need to make sure that, you know, our cash and our capital, let's say cash from our operation and our internal capital allocation, is properly deployed to support that packaging growth. Super. Thank you, Paul. Next question: Does good natured have or are you considering a coffee cup container that could be marketed as a not leaching microplastics or chemicals into hot beverages? Not at this time. We do through our industrial side, we do a lot of business in industrial and the food service sector, of which, you know, decide to live. We do not have that on the horizon. It kind of goes back to the prior question, like if we're gonna deploy capital, we're gonna need to be mindful and concentrate. We're very much concentrated on packaging in the sustainable space. That's really where we're focusing on. Okay. Thank you. Next question: What do you think of the emerging polypropylene technologies as a potential alternative? We're pretty excited about it. Like, when you look at the technology in biomaterials, and it ties back to the White House announcement that we spoke to earlier, there's gonna be a lot of innovation in materials around, not just in the United States and Canada, but just around the world. There is going to be a launch of a plant-based polypropylene. We know what's going on out there, and we know one is coming, and we're pretty excited about it. I fundamentally believe this concept of replacing 90% of the petroleum materials with a plant-based, or bio-based, material, that's not a pie in the sky. Like the innovation that we're seeing, the investment being put into bio material production around the world, not just in the States, it's growing. There's hundreds of millions of dollars being invested by very large companies. What we wanna do is give them a channel to take that innovation to. So whether it's product design, customer range, speed to market, because we have, you know, biomaterial or biomaterial product manufacturing across the U.S. and Canada, we can take that product to market quickly. We just wanna give a platform for those plant-based polypropylene to come to market. And I think we do. I know we do. We have a very large manufacturing footprint, both owned and outsourced, that could play a role in this biomaterial manufacturing footprint in bringing these new innovations to market. So I'm pretty excited about that. I'm also excited about our, the innovations that good natured has announced, whether it's our, you know, microwavable, plant-based microwavable material. Like we feel, we feel like we're, we really have got a great stage to take advantage of these macro environment, macro climate policies and along with these innovations that are gonna come to market. I think it's just a matter of time before we see that plant-based polypropylene. Perfect. Thanks, Paul. Next couple of questions is again related to your income statement. I know you don't give guidance or forecasts. We have a lot of, I guess, questions that are leading to that. Maybe as best as you can at a high level, maybe help investors understand how you think about your revenue ramp for 2023, 2024, given the historical acceleration in revenue and your CAGR. Then, you know, also in that line, how you think about your EBITDA margins and operating cash flow. Okay. We'll start with cash. Like, you know, we're very much concentrated on cash. There's lots of levers that we can pull in that space, whether it's, you know, renegotiating terms, pricing, input costs, introducing new suppliers. Like, you know, I think for us it's really important that, you know, cost reduction, wage reduction, wage optimization, input cost reduction, like that needs to be and will continue to be a focus of ours. At the same time, you know, we've got to drive the right mix of revenue, right? Whether it's product mix or customer mix, you know, that small business regional segment is, it's quite profitable for us. We wanna make sure that, you know, we don't frown bringing on a, you know, 4-store operation and supplying them, you know, $ 100,000-$ 200,000 of packaging. You know, these owners are wanting to make the change, and so we just wanna make sure that we're mixing in the right customers and right product profile to enhance our gross margin rates. I think from the revenue perspective, I just think this. I just wanna sound like a bit of a broken record, right? It's like this demand around industrial petroleum and ASP decline is just something that we just wanna emphasize, like we are gonna go up against the hoarding quarters that took place. ASPs are gonna go on a natural decline. In an example, if you know, if you did $ 100,000 with a customer, you know, you may do $ 95,000 this year with that customer, but it's the same output. The demand level that we see in the packaging space should more than offset that. You know, I think our kind of concern that we've raised is on the industrial petroleum side. Again, fundamentally, we're gonna you know, work to offset that through our focus on packaging. That's, you know. I know I'm being a bit repetitive on here, but it's really important. Like, we're very much focused on cash management and cost reduction and driving significant year-over-year growth in packaging. We're very focused this year on that message. You'll see it in the results. I think you can see that is already taking place or already took place in Q4 when you do the analysis. Like we really. The packaging business group really outperformed. The cash generated from the operation was record. Our margins were pretty much maintained to 2021. There's tons of room to improve, don't get me wrong. That focus will remain in 2023. Thanks, Paul. I'm just doing a time check, and it looks like we're approaching the end of the hour. I guess I've got one question here that I think a lot of people are thinking about, so I'll ask it and you can answer it as best as you can. Obviously, you've done a fantastic job of building the business and going from nominal revenues to well over $ 100 million. I guess with that same, with that same thought, your revenue has increased significantly, but the stock really is sort of flat. Just get your perspective of how you think about your current public market and what kind of message you want to leave with investors, and then we'll end the call. Well, I think first of all, we're very much undervalued. I think there's still tons of opportunity for us to increase our distribution or our awareness around our company. I still think despite all the effort from Bristol and our internal team, there's tons of opportunity there. I also wanna highlight that, you know, if you look at our top 200 owners, they're, you know, they remain very supportive. They own a majority of the value of the company because we believe this is an opportunity to grow a significantly large business. You know, we've grown at 10x in the last three years. You know, the opportunity, because of the size of the markets we're disrupting is, you know, we believe fundamentally there could be another 10x. You know, for us, we got to look at this from a long-term perspective, and concentrate on the long view versus the short-term view. you know, the environments will prioritize and tactically shift our operational activities, like I mentioned before, but we got to keep a long horizon, you know, front and center. we believe our, you know, the owners that are in the long view that I kind of mentioned, that own the majority of the value, fundamentally believe in that. Super. Paul, thank you very much for that and for the presentation. 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