Morning. Welcome to our Midlothian facility. My name's Greg Gaba. I'm the VP of Corporate Finance. I'd like to thank all of you for coming today and spending this time with us. We're extremely excited to have you here at our facility. Before we get started, forward-looking statements. Our presentation will contain forward-looking statements. We cannot predict the future. I shouldn't offer undue reliance on those statements. Please see our Form 10-K for risk factors that could cause our actual results to materially differ from our projections. Our agenda for today financial algorithm of the construction and overview of this facility and the complexity of aseptic manufacturing. We'll have concluding remarks and Q&A. Once the presentation is done, we'll have a five-minute break, followed by a tour of the facility as well as tasting. On your name tag, you will have a group number, that's where you join. We'll have 5 groups for the tours, we'll go over that after the break. Just so you know what group number you're in. Some housekeeping items. Wi-Fi password is organics, all lowercase letters. Coffee, water, beverages on the back corner here. The restroom is when you go straight out the door, on the left-hand side, there'll be a ladies and a men's washroom out there, as well as we have a washroom right out by the reception as well. The deck itself will be posted online later today, so everyone will have access that way today, so no need to scramble to get notes here as it goes through the presentation. Our first presenter today will be our CEO, Joe Ennen. He will take us through the strategic update. Scott Huckins, our GM, of the fruit-based segment and CFO, will take us through his financial algorithm. Chris Whitehair, our SVP supply chain, will take us through the construction and overview of this facility. Bryan Clark, SVP of R&D and QA, will take us through the complexity of aseptic manufacturing. On the right-hand side of your page, you'll see other team members that are here today, who you will meet as we go through the tour and the tasting. Finally, a special welcome to one of our board members, Leslie Keating, up here at the front, who's joining us here today. With that, let me turn it over to Mr. Joe Ennen. Thanks, Greg. Morning, everyone. Thank you for making the trek to Texas. I'm fired up. I mean, this is so exciting, to have all of you here in this facility, but more importantly, just to have this facility, right? This started, I don't know, 18 months ago, two years ago, where we were looking at our capacity, looking at the growth, looking at our ambitions and saying, "We gotta grow." Like, we are not gonna be able to meet our long-term objectives with just the manufacturing footprint that we have. We set out to build in the heart of COVID and the teeth of there's no structural steel anywhere in the world to be had, and there's no people, and there's no equipment, and there's no nothing. We said, "Damn it, we're gonna do it. We're gonna build this plant. We're gonna make it happen." It's incredibly exciting, for all of us to be able to... I think every single person in the company wanted to be here today, to kind of show this off. It has been an absolute team effort. I think every single person in the company has been involved in building this facility. We've made a very clear point to everyone in the company, no matter what your job is, if you're needed in Texas, that is your number one priority. I don't care what else you're doing in the company. I don't care what else your job is. For the last 18 months, if we have needed somebody, needed help, we have been... It's like, you know what? You ever watch six-year-olds play soccer? You know, they all run to the ball. That's exactly what this has looked like for the last 18 months here and an amazing result. What I want you to take away from today, we're gonna do a quick debrief of the strategic priorities that we outlined in June. I really hope, number one, and maybe just most importantly, that you appreciate and understand our growth story. This is all about growth. This facility is about growth. Our aspirations are about growth. Our product development efforts, our innovation is all about growth. You can't grow if you don't have capacity, if you don't have manufacturing footprint to grow. This is singularly my hope for today is your takeaway is, man, these guys are built to continue to grow, right? We have been on a great growth trajectory for the last several years. Hopefully, you leave confident that we're gonna be able to continue to drive industry-leading growth rates. In terms of what are we trying to do, what are we trying to build here, our corporate tagline, our mission, our vision is fueling the future of food. We are passionate about that. You're gonna hear a lot about sustainability today, how we're building products that are better for people and better for the environment. We're gonna lay out some ambitions around going from $1 billion to $2 billion. You know, we absolutely believe that we can turn this into a 2-plus billion-dollar company in the next handful of years, 5, 6, 7 years. The growth platforms are very clear, very consistent with what our core capabilities are today. You're gonna see some dimensions of our multiple-prong go-to-market strategy. We talk about private label, we talk about co-manufacturing, we talk about our own brand. You know, when we first started pursuing our own brands and we purchased a couple brands from Hain, everybody kind of was head-scratching. "Joe, how's that gonna work? Nobody's ever done that." Some of the people in this room might have asked me about those things. Super proud of our flexibility and our agnostic approach. it absolutely drives our innovation agenda because it gives us the ability to commercialize, develop, and commercialize product and then have multiple ways to make money off that. As opposed to just saying, well, the only way we make money is to do private label, or the only way we make money is if we can convince a national brand to take this product, or the only way we make money is if we launch this with one of our brands. We love the fact that we can build product platforms like protein shakes, nutrition beverages, like coffee, plant-based drinks, and then say, "How are we gonna take this to market?" Let's talk to our retail customers, see if they're interested. Let's talk to our co-manufacturing customers, see if they're interested. Let's think about how we might launch this under one of our own brands. That is absolutely a catalyst for us, it's a driver for us, and it absolutely fuels our innovation ambitions and how we can continue to drive growth. We talked about these in June. These are not new. These are the five strategic imperatives that we have. Transforming the portfolio, fortifying our competitive advantages, leveraging our capabilities to expand the TAM of the business, be recognized as a sustainability company, and we've made great progress there with some of the external rating agencies, along with our own efforts and ambitions, and then codifying our vibrant culture. You know, this is probably the hardest one to get your head around, maybe that and the complexity of what we do. We're certainly gonna try to show you both of those things today. I think you're gonna hear from 11 different people on the team, from production managers to R&D managers, et cetera, et cetera. It's not just gonna be the senior leadership team. We're gonna get you in touch with literally the people who run and drive the business every day. 'Cause if you don't understand the culture, we're just PowerPoint and Excel, right? The difference maker is always all about the people. You know, I have a phrase that I use, which is, "It's always all about the people." 'Cause when you look back on an accomplishment, whether it's building this facility, whether it's bringing on a new customer, da, da, da, when you look back, it's always about someone who did it, right? Like building this facility, it didn't build itself. Sure, we had a contractor who we paid a lot of money. At the end of the day, it was people who made it happen. It's always all about the people. Hopefully, as you leave today, you have a better sense of the vibrancy of the culture here. You know, we've managed to hire 150 people into this facility in a very, very short period of time. Why? Like, there's just more people in Texas? No, it's about the people. Hey, how did you stand up and build an entire new plant, 285,000 sq ft in 16 months in the heart of a supply chain meltdown? People, great problem solvers. I can't overestimate enough the importance of the people in this equation and our business equation. We wanted you to kind of see and talk to and feel some of the people who make the business happen every day. Super proud of this. I will say I'm more proud of the people in the team. The people in the team that I just talked about, they're the ones who delivered this. $20 million of EBITDA in 2019, $84 million last year, 4x. We've quadrupled EBITDA in the last four years. Quadrupled. Our plans are to go to $100 million this year. That's our guide number. $120 million next year, $150 million in 2025. I think if there's one thing this team has demonstrated, it's the ability to drive the EBITDA of the business. Super proud of that. We absolutely are convinced and convicted around our ability to continue to deliver these numbers. It makes it easy when you can point to a quadruple in EBITDA over the last four years and then just ask you to simply believe a double in the next two. Talked about $2 billion and where is that gonna come from? We're gonna unpack these a little bit more, but nutrition beverages, we believe is an absolute future growth driver for us for the next decade. Huge category. Fits with our core competencies very, very well, and you're gonna see that today as kind of a starting point of how we believe that will be a huge growth driver for us. Fruit snacks, the little business that could, right? It was $50 million a couple of years ago, now $92 million. Amazing growth in that business. I spent a chunk of my career at Frito-Lay, in different brand management and marketing roles. I have a affinity and certainly a knowledge around the snacking category. It's a mere $100 billion dollar category, $100 billion. There's roughly $50 billion of salty snacks and $50 billion of sweet snacks. You know, it doesn't take real courage to say, I think we can do $200 million, $250 million, $300 million of revenue in a $100 billion dollar category. Snacking, again, is something we've got a lot of momentum on, and we plan to continue to drive significant growth around snacking. Certainly our core plant-based business is our third key lever. We continue to roll up market share from our competitors in that space. We continue to see category growth. We continue to find new ways to drive innovation and take that plant-based milk capability into new categories and spaces. Again, you know, some of these words are easy to say, right? Transform the portfolio. We've done it. If you look at 2019, we were 70% commodity-oriented. 70% of our revenue was commodity-oriented. It was just ingredient sourcing, et cetera. Through a combination of growth and divestitures, we've completely flipped the mix in a matter of three or four years to this year, we will do over 70% value-added manufacturing. Only 30% of the business today is commodity-oriented, and we would see that kind of continuing to decline over the next several years as the value-added segment continues to grow. When we take a look at what are the characteristics of the spaces that we get excited about and that we're interested in investing and continuing to grow, there's a couple of common denominators. One is we are in category constraint spaces, right? Category constraint spaces and/or sort of, let's call it specialized or bespoke manufacturing. Our fruit snacks, hey, there's $100 billion worth of companies manufacturing snack foods today. What's our little position in that market? Very bespoke manufacturing. Between the idea of sort of bespoke, niche-y manufacturing practices and/or capacity constraints. You know the world that's a well-documented, well-written about on nutrition beverages, capacity-constrained environment. Again, it's a $6.5 billion category that's growing double digits and dominated by co-manufacturers. If the co-manufacturers are not keeping pace with the category growth, you end up with a situation which happens fairly frequently, which is it's undersupplied. For those of you who follow any of the public companies in this space, I'm not telling you anything you haven't heard on some of their public calls. In terms of fortifying our competitive advantages, again, we have talked about this extensively, world-class operational and technical expertise, complex manufacturing at scale, project management. Again, this facility is a great testimony. I'm not asking you to believe something that you're not experiencing. Just sitting here is our ability to execute in a very complex space. Integrated solutions, right? You think of oat milk. I mean, we go from working directly with organic farmers in Northern Canada all the way through to delivering that product to a barista at your local coffee shop. You know, we're vertically integrated all the way through some of our supply chains. Same on, say, fruit snacks, where we are sourcing 20-plus million pounds of organic apple from around the world. That's not an easy task. Just to kind of unpack these a little bit. Operational expertise, and again, we shared this back in June. We have three of the highest performing, highest functioning plants in the entire Tetra Pak network in North America. That is data from them, not created by Joe or anybody on our team, not created by Chris Whitehair, our Head of Operations, as part of his performance review. We get this data from Tetra Pak. These are 3 of the highest performing plants. I can't tell you how impressive that is because we're compared to plants that run one SKU of one product for one brand. Like think of somebody running Tetra Pak, and they're just making 2% milk. They're just running one product. We run hundreds of products, hundreds and hundreds of products. I would love to be able to run one product all day long every single day. We've talked many, many times about this scaled network. Huge investment in capacity, right? $230 million invested in the last 24 months, 2.5 times our 2022 EBITDA. Huge investment. It's all delivering, it's all performing, and it's all invoiceable. There's no hope for, there's no wish for here. All of our capital projects are executed and delivering. Integrated solutions. Again, we are a full-service model. We do not stand on the, hey, you know, we're only the low-cost producer. Come and do your own R&D, et cetera, et cetera. We deliver a full service model, and that works very, very well with big co-manufacturing national branded customers or big retail customers, because they are very persnickety, and very demanding when it comes to things like quality and manufacturing and R&D, et cetera, et cetera. One thing we don't talk as often about, but is again, a core part of our competitive advantage is our service level. You can't quite read the numbers, so I apologize for that. This is our biggest customer. There's 60 data points up here. This is our top five customers last 12 months. What's our case fill rate? Okay. 60 numbers up here. The worst number is our second biggest customer in July of 2022, we were 96% case fill rate. That's our worst number. Five biggest customers, 12 months of data. Customer number one, our biggest customer. I'll read them to you. 99%, 100%, 100%, 99%, 97%, 100%, 100%, 100%, 97%, 99%, 99%, 100%. That's our case fill rate at our biggest customer. The biggest customer. 100%, 100%, 100%, 98%, 98%, 97%, 100%, 100%, 100%, 96%, 100%. That's our case fill rate. Nobody's talking about that. Nobody in the industry has those kind of case fill rates, right? You continue to still read about other food manufacturing companies who talk about, "Yep, our case fill rate's getting better. We're in the high 80s now." Are you kidding me? Look it. If you don't think that matters to our customers, you're crazy. That absolutely matters to our customers because they're selling a product for $3, and they're making 40 margin on it. So that's $1.20 per unit they're making. Our customer's making $1.20 a unit. If 20% of the product you're ordering isn't showing up and you're out of stock 20% of the time, working with some other co-manufacturer besides SunOpta, but getting 80% case fill rate, and you're losing $1.20 on every single one of those cut orders is not a big idea. Right? That's fast, isn't You know, so maybe we're a little more expensive. We don't position ourselves as a low-cost operator. But case fill matters when you've got out-of-stock issues. Certainly, this is a key point of difference for us with customers. You know, I talked about what does this mean to our customers. Again, we've talked about these are our competitive advantages, but why are those important to our customers? You can see just the value that our customers derive from our competitive advantages, whether that's case fill rate, whether that's being the low-cost operator, you know, delivering great cost to them, whether that's. Again, all of our customers, probably 70% on the plant-based side, 70% of our customers pick up their product here or at one of our plants. They own the freight, okay? They own the freight. If you're working with one of our competitors who only has one plant somewhere in America, they then have to ship that product everywhere where they're distributing. We have four plants, north, south, east, west, Minnesota, Texas, California, Pennsylvania. When you're paying for the freight, when the freight is on your dime, you love working with a company like SunOpta because we afford you the opportunity to minimize the freight miles that you're paying for. Next, I'm gonna talk a little bit about our core capability expansion. One of the things that I think again is underappreciated around our story is just the dramatic TAM expansion that we've been able to put together in our core business. In 2019, we would roughly describe the TAM as $3 billion. Today, it's $15 billion. We have fivefold increased the TAM of the competitive spaces we compete in. You can see at the bottom of this upside-down layer cake, shelf-stable plant-based milk's a billion-dollar category, three-year CAGR, 5%. We entered into the creamer and barista space, added another $1 billion of TAM, growing 33%. We started to develop and push into refrigerated plant-based milks, really as an ingredient supplier, $3 billion TAM growing 10%. BFY snacks, better-for-you snacks, a $3 billion category. We would say just the BFY, better-for-you snacks total $9 billion. I mean, it's massive number. alt dairy, we've talked about plant-based ice creams and yogurts, et cetera, adds another $2 billion, growing 16%. Now, our entry into the nutrition beverage category, $5 billion TAM growing at 10%. You can see on the left-hand side how we participate. I talked about why we love our multiple go-to-market optionalities. You can see almost every one of those, we have multiple ways that we're making money. We have multiple ways to win. We have multiple customer touch points. We have multiple ways to make money on that initiative. three key growth platforms that you're gonna hear about and have heard about from us for a long time. Number one is scaling our plant-based business. We believe $1.15 billion of revenue is our, again, long-term goal. Second is accelerating better-for-you snacks. Our long-term goal is $250 million of revenue. The third priority is expanding the nutrition beverage space. Again, a quarter billion dollars is our long-term aspiration. Just to kind of unpack each of those in a little bit of detail. Plant-based milks. You can see one of the things, again, I think that is underappreciated or misunderstood is just how broadly penetrated the plant-based milk category is. Forty percent of U.S. households, 113 million U.S. households, 40% of U.S. households have two or more plant-based milks in their house in a 12-month time period. Okay. 53% of U.S. households have bought plant-based milks at least once. Fifty, over half of America, half of American households have purchased a plant-based milk in the last 52 weeks. 74% of households have both plant-based and dairy milk in their house. This is not a niche. This is not a fad. You know, plant-based milks have been around since I graduated from high school, in the mid 80s, with soy milk, et cetera. Again, look how old I am. That's how long plant-based milks have been around. Okay? You look at how these products are used, added to cereal, in smoothies or shakes, as an ingredient in baking, drinking it just as a glass of milk, or adding it to coffee and tea. Again, broad household penetration, broad usage for a long, long period of time, and we continue to see the growth in plant-based milk over and over and over, year after year after year. Just a couple stats. I mean, some of these partners are sort of well understood in terms of who we work with, and our market share position via them in some of these categories. Number one brand of oat milk, number one brand of almond milk, number one brand of soy milk, number one brand of rice milk, number one aseptic tea, number one brand in MULO, number one brand in natural. Again, we have amazing partners that we work with and have worked with for, in some cases, multiple decades. In terms of the growth levers around building out our core plant-based milks business. Category growth, we continue to see momentum. We continue to see opportunities in scaling our food service and barista business. We believe that will be a growth driver for a considerable period of time. You will see our Dream oat milk running today. That is going into the world's largest coffee shop directly out of this facility. Super excited about that as a kind of core platform here in Texas for us is oat milk for Starbucks coming out of Texas. One of the very first products coming out of here is for our single biggest customer. We see opportunities to continue to grow market share. We have been taking market share from existing customers. It's a dynamic environment, right? You know, the goal is always winning more than you're losing. We certainly feel great about our ability to win new customers, and we have been winning new customers. This facility has resulted in two of our large customers saying, "Great, I was dual-sourced. As soon as Texas is up and running, we're gonna shut down that other guy and consolidate volume with you." That kind of dynamic is going on in the market. Product innovation. Again, think about oat. 2019, we did $1 million of oat. $1 million of revenue in oat. Last year, we did $120 million of oat revenue. From $1 million to $120 million of oat for us. Huge innovation platform for us. Huge growth driver. You're gonna taste a product today. I think everybody is fairly familiar with the size and momentum of ready-to-drink coffee. We now have the ability to do ready-to-drink plant-based milk. Think plant-based lattes. You're gonna try one of the products that we are in development. Again, innovation platform for us to continue to leverage our core competencies in plant-based milks. Add some coffee concentrate, and you have a beautiful plant-based milk latte. Tons of momentum in that category. We think, again, a long-term growth platform, for us. Then you're gonna hear on all three of these opportunities, the opportunity for inorganic growth. You know, we think in each of these three spaces, there will be opportunities for us over the next, kind of call it five years, to consider acquisitions in the space in terms of rolling up capacity and/or expanding capabilities. In terms of better-for-you snacking, I referenced this $92 million in revenue last year, up from $50 million a mere 24 months prior. Huge. You know, we are absolutely out of capacity. We have capacity coming online in the Q3, but right now we are making every single pound of products we possibly can. We are incredibly excited about that capacity expansion. We have, one of the world's largest retailers ready to throttle down the minute that capacity comes online. We have done a test with them in their stores, blew the doors off, and they are ready to drive expansion as soon as we can give them more product. Again, super exciting platform for us. you know, the consumer is absolutely interested in better-for-you snacking for themselves or their kids. For the majority of these products, they're organic or clean label. They're no or low sugar added. so just great snacks for kids, and we continue to see momentum in this direction. I talked a little bit about, just the size of the market here and, you know, two key things that we do. One is around the manufacturing side of this, which is really running specialty bespoke manufacturing. You know, I won't say it's handmade, but it's this is not a high-speed, high-scale operation. It's kind of very finicky, very fussy manufacturing. We do a very bespoke manufacturing process, allows us to deliver that clean label experience, allows us to produce products that taste sweet without dumping 100,000 pounds of sugar into a batch. Gives a great product that, candidly, a lot of other manufacturers just wouldn't wanna touch because it's too fussy. Better-for-you snacking, how do we continue to see growth? Again, same touch points, category growth, market share, product innovation, and inorganic growth. Again, as we look at how do we build out this capability? How do we build out this platform? We absolutely think there's a role for potentially some small-scale M&A to add capabilities to our quiver. And you will see it today, which is our new 330 mL entry into the nutrition shake category. We are incredibly excited about where we are. As we have said, we have effectively sold out the entire production line. We sold it out a year before, probably a year ago, right around now. 12 months before we were even starting production, we had sold out all the capacity on that. That customer was here last week. They're here again tomorrow, doing QA validation work, et cetera, et cetera. Excited about the progress we're making there. $5 billion category, growing 10%, dominated by co-manufacturers like us. Huge opportunity for us to come in with our unique set of capabilities and competencies and again, continue to roll up market share and build momentum on the business. You can see there is again, category household penetration available. Ready-to-drink nutrition beverages, 25% household penetration. Total sort of protein-oriented products, so think bars plus powders plus drinks, 54%. Again, huge opportunity for continued growth in that space. One of the things we're excited about is bringing our plant-based capabilities to the nutrition drinks category. If you look at milk, kind of the universe of milk products at retail, $16 billion category, 16% of those are plant-based. Think all cow dairy, all plant-based put together, plant-based milks, 16%. If you look at ready-to-drink nutrition products, $5 billion category, 2% plant-based. Two. Doesn't make any sense. If you look at protein powder, protein powder is something like 25% or 30% plant-based. You have protein powders at 25%, 30% plant-based. You've got ready-to-drink milk, 16% plant-based. Ready-to-drink nutrition, 2. Again, key opportunity and one of our core theses in making this investment is we can bring our plant-based capabilities to ready-to-drink nutrition. You can see the growth on the right-hand side, off of, obviously, a smaller base. You know, the world's largest food company made an acquisition in this space not that long ago to buy the leading brand in the category. That brand is doing exceptionally well for them, and I'm sure their marketing muscle and their $80 billion of revenue and capabilities, as they lean into this, we again see expansion in the plant-based protein drink space. You're gonna taste a product later this morning, which we think is phenomenal. A blend of pea, flax and barley that our amazing R&D team has put together. I think you would see we didn't do the easy job, which is to put a competitor product next to it. If you've had any of the plant-based ready-to-drink nutrition beverages, I think you're gonna find this is an amazing product. Again, a very logical extension for us of we know how to make plant-based milk. Adding protein to that for us was a relatively easy task. He ducks as the R&D team in the back look at him for describing their work as easy. A logical extension of our capabilities and something that we're very, very excited about. In terms of where do the growth levers there come from, again, $250 million is our long-term ambition. The capacity-constrained environment. There's an easy play to run here, right? Which is just continue to kind of keep pace and add capability with the category growth. you know, product innovation I mentioned. You'll continue to see work there on our behalf. Then inorganic growth. Again, a lot of co-manufacturers in this space. Some, it's a very strategic business for them. Some, it's more ancillary. We think, again, there's gonna be an opportunity over the next, kind of call it, five years to do some strategic and surgical acquisition. Last two points from me before I turn it over to Mr. Huckins, is the idea of being and being recognized as a sustainability company. We have made great progress this year and in the last several years around this goal. You know, I won't drain this. Net zero in all our U.S. manufacturing facilities. Net zero to waste. Net zero means we're not pushing any waste to the landfill. Okay. We recycle, we reuse, we repurpose, et cetera. Something we're very, very proud of. Policies. We've updated our Palm Oil Policy, our human rights policy. We've updated our code of conduct. We're joining Sedex as a key component of transparency around our ingredient supplies and building transparency there. We're preparing Scope 1 and Scope 2 disclosures. Those are the kind of legislated components that are kind of on again, off again. Certainly, this is helping us make smart business decisions, smart investments. One of the things we're gonna talk to you about is our investment in a wastewater treatment facility here. Certainly, it has turned out to be an incredibly fortuitous effort on our part. You know, fairly significant investment in this facility, but really represents what we would describe as a triple win for us. You know, good for the environment, good financial, and good for our business planning. We'll go into that a little bit more. Again, I think it really defines how we think, and these decisions that we're making are absolutely demonstrating strong returns on investment. Lastly, the culture. You know, a lot of people talk about culture and sometimes people say, "How do you measure culture?" I think you can see it and feel it in people. For those more analytical-oriented minds in the audience, of which I think there are probably a few, we offer data. This we have done since I started with the company, an org health survey. We do it, two or three times a year. Same questions, same measures every single time. It's a five-point scale in case you're looking at it saying, "Hey, Joe Ennen, 4.0 is not that great on a 10-point scale." On a five-point scale, it's freaking amazing. I mean, we had, by the way, 92% employee participation in our org health survey. 92%. We set up kiosks in every plant, Spanish and English. We ask people to take it. We don't mandate it. You know, we don't stand there and, you know, hold them hostage. Ninety-two percent of people take the opportunity to give us feedback on how we're doing. 26 questions. We just pulled out kind of four of them, one around purpose, one around strategy, one around culture, and one around engagement. Just to give you a flavor, every single measure that we have in the company has gone up. Every single measure, all 26 scores have gone up since 2019. Something we track and measure ourselves against. Each leader gets a report out on their part of the culture and their organization, look for opportunities, et cetera. Again, there's a soft side to culture and a hard side to culture. This is the kinda hard side to the culture. Hopefully, you'll see and feel a bit of the soft side as you meet some of our amazing teammates throughout the rest of the day. With that, I'm gonna invite Scott up to take us through a financial algorithm update. Mr. Huckins? Thank you, Joe. Down and up. Down and up. Good morning, everybody. We're gonna go through three topics, just a few pages. I think we'll start with a recap of the outlook for the company in 2023-2025. We'll do just a quick refresher on capital allocation framework and priorities. We'll show you what the math looks like for what we call the aspiration beyond 2025, being what does it look like to be a $2 billion company? How might that look and feel? First, I wanna just kind of frame the outlook. If you were around the company in June of 2022, you would have seen something similar. The point is, these are some of the assumptions. The first is, this is a roll forward of the current economic climate. We've not tried to reforecast changes in interest rates and commodities, just a roll-forward. Second one is that this is a model for 23 to 25 that's, my phrase, internally consistent. The revenue, the profit, and the capital are all the in-motion projects. We don't have revenue without the capital or capital without the revenue. It hangs together. The third we get a few questions about, it's really for simplicity. We've not assumed operating leverage in the business. The management team is not committing that there won't be operating leverage. We're just sharing that for simplicity. We have not credited the economics and the outlook for operating leverage. Okay? The very last one is that current portfolio construct as we sit here in early 2023 is what we have rolling through 2025. Okay. The outlook, again, recap. This is a business that started with about $20 million of EBITDA in 2019. You can see the recap of the 2022 results. The guide for this year, you know, center of the column, $1 billion-$1.05 billion, excuse me, in revenue, $100 million in EBITDA, $30 million of free cash flow. You can see the outlook more specifically than we've shared in the past for 2024. Again, $1.1 billion of revenue, about $120 million of Adjusted EBITDA. 2025 remains unchanged. That's the $150 million target that you've seen. I think it's important to keep in mind, and you'll see this as you walk the plant today, there's an inherent lumpiness in the revenue, right? As we're onboarding new customers and new SKUs, it's actually easier to predict the business on a full year basis than quarter-to-quarter. Just keep that in mind. I think you'll see it in practice. I think the last piece of this that's important to keep in mind is that when we talk about free cash flow, again, for clarity, this is a free cash flow profile without new growth investment, right? Without new growth investment. If we do identify incremental growth investments, that obviously changes the free cash flow profile and the forecasted financials, which is probably a good segue to the next topic. Okay. On capital allocation, again, this is just a reset. We have for several years said we'd like to run the business between 2 and 4 times leverage. We think that's the sweet spot given the revenue and earnings and profits engine at SunOpta. Within that 2-4 time zone, there's three choices. Each of these compete for capital, and they're not mutually exclusive, right? We could have, 1, incremental growth opportunities, organically speaking. Two, we could have a return of capital, such as a share repurchase. Three, as Joe foreshadowed, we may find ourselves with attractive bolt-on or similar acquisition opportunities. Sitting here today, I think we're pretty bullish about identifying organic growth investments as you heard from the outlook in our three core growth drivers. Okay. Over the last several months, we've got a lot of questions as you would probably guess, and many of you have asked, how do we think about the business beyond 2025? In the Q4 call, we shared this framework, right? In general, we would expect to see low double-digit top-line growth. Again, three core growth drivers, right? We've got plant-based beverages, nutritional beverages, and fruit snacks. 2, this is where mix is your friend. The gross margin profile of those businesses are advantaged. If you just roll forward a model, if you'd like, you'd see a high teens gross margin profile. Without any assumption of accretive or dilutive OpEx operating expense, we would have a low teens Adjusted EBITDA margin profile. The hardest one to get right in a year would just be, on average, we would see roughly 5% capital investment per $ of revenue, right? Again, so that things hang together. That's our estimate of the average capital investment to facilitate that growth in revenues and profits. Putting it all together, what would a $2 billion portfolio we aspire to develop look like? You'd have $1.15 billion of plant-based beverages. As you've heard from Joe, you'd have $250 million each businesses in fruit snacks or better-for-you snacking, along with nutritional beverages. We have some growth built in for our frozen fruit business at about $350 million. I think the takeaway is this is what the management team is working on for the generation of the company beyond 2025. Okay. With that, I'd like to bring up Chris Whitehair. Chris, SVP of Supply Chain, has been to Texas probably 40 times in the last 50 weeks, something like that. Looking forward to having him share with you how the journey. You know, Joe said, he was fired up. I've been fired up for the last couple of years. I mean, this has been a great project. I've been doing this for 35 years, I tell you what, this was actually a lot of fun. I'm really excited for you guys to see this today. I've been with the company for 6 years. I run our operations supply chain, we're gonna start with a little video. Oops, sorry. This music will get you a little bit fired up as well. Just a little bit of fun facts about the building. There's 21,000 cubic feet of concrete that was used in the facility. That's about a third of what it took to build the Empire State Building. 29,000 linear feet of piping, about 7,800 feet of electrical wire. We had over 300 contractors working on this facility at a given day. It was a seven-day operation. As we've talked about, it was 16 months from the day we broke ground until we were operational. It was not easy. We had a lot of problem-solving. We had challenges that came up along the way, such as electrical components and, you know, all the chip shortages that you've heard about. We actually bought a lot of that equipment before we actually broke ground. We bought structural steel before we broke ground. We had very good project management, and then we have, in our culture, a tenacity to overcome. That really is what set us apart. 'Cause a lot of people thought we were crazy trying to pull this off. I'm sure you all hear about delays or, you know, stopping projects. We were able to overcome a lot of those challenges. Very proud of the team and the culture that, you know, our company has, you know, and the tenacity that they've had over this project. We also talk a lot about sustainability. Sustainability was very much a part of how we built this facility and how it was designed. You know, we talk a lot about the diamond shape and how many miles we're gonna be able to take off of transportation by building this facility here for our customers. 50 million freight miles, that's 59 million pounds of carbon emissions. We've also had an investment, a $6.5 million investment in our wastewater treatment facility. You can imagine with a growing population that we see in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, if we hadn't made that investment, we likely wouldn't be even starting up. You'll see today that we can take the water and it's drinkable when it comes out of our wastewater treatment facility. We were able to operate. It also gives us the ability to grow in the future with that investment. Again, we've designed our systems around utilities with centralized HVAC, recycled materials. A lot of that went into the investment as well. This plant was also built for growth. You're gonna see phase one today. We're already working on our phase two expansion plan as well as our phase three. Within the four walls that we have, that you'll see today, we're gonna show you some areas where we can grow and put more lines in. You can see the two additional line four and five, and then you'll see, we have a lot. This site was built with 33 acres, and we can add another 150,000 sq ft to this plant, making it almost a 400,000 sq ft facility to add three more additional systems. The growth is gonna be tremendous here. This is not, you know. The whole design was built assuming that we would have a three-phase growth potential here. Very excited about that as well. The one thing too that I don't know that everyone appreciates is what it takes to start up a product here. You know, months go in advance of not just, you know, designing the sanitation design, but training our employees. Obviously, we have to pass audits, so a lot of work. Not only, you know, as we were building this plant, we were also training employees, hiring those 150 employees, bringing them to our existing plants to train them on how to operate the equipment, how to do things in a food safe manner. We also have to pass audits for our customers. We've had, you can imagine, in the last couple of months, a ton of audits. We've also, as we ramp up those customers, then as we pass those audits, we order materials. We do trials. Once we get those trials complete, then we can start up product. You're gonna see the product of that, where you actually will see commercial product running in our plant today. Those steps are in place. We're on track, we're doing very, very well. You know, I will say right now as we stand here today, I couldn't be more excited about, you know, what we're delivering from this plant from all the work. You know, thanks to the 1,000 employees of SunOpta to make that happen. With that, I will turn it over to Bryan Clark, SVP of R&D. Thank you, Chris. As my colleagues have said, we're very thrilled to have you here today. Thank you for making time to spend with us here. We're really excited to showcase our state-of-the-art facility, our newest state-of-the-art facility. I'm the last speaker between you and the tour, I will be brief. What I'd like to talk about today is some of the complexities associated with aseptic manufacturing. I'd like to start with an analogy that I find very helpful, and that's that of a symphony orchestra. That's because success is only attained with every section, every line, and every chair performing in harmony. Very similar to our aseptic processing systems. They're highly sophisticated. They're automated, integrated systems. The front and the back are directly tied together. Without that harmony and without that working well together, we're not able to be successful. First, I'd like to talk a little bit about why we do what we do, and specifically, we'll get into thermal processing in a moment. There are many, many techniques used to preserve foods. And it is a complex but finite matrix of consideration. We think about what ingredients are in the product, what attributes do consumers want for those final products. What's the best way to give the best product to the consumer? My education and background is in thermal processing. I've worked over my career, pushing 25 years now, with all of these, specifically expertise in thermal processing. What I can say is that aseptic processing is the most complex and has some of the most high demands for precision in what we do every day. The other things that we like to consider are how do we optimize? Really it is an optimization equation when picking the preservation technique. How do we optimize the food product safety and maintain those nutritional and sensory benefits? It's a lot like a supply and demand curve. I'm trying to hit the optimization point where I can have the best quality product, but safety is table stakes. We must optimize those factors. When we talk about products like we make here at SunOpta, in regulatory speak, they are low-acid canned foods or low-acid beverages in the case of SunOpta. There are two primary techniques that are used. They're by far and wide the best for the application, but they're also the most common. You'll see and hear about these very common. Aseptic processing as well as pasteurization or extended shelf life. In aseptic processing, we take a very high temperature, approximately 290 degrees Fahrenheit, and we expose the product to that temperature for seconds, nominally in 3-6 second range. That product is then taken into a sterile package in a sterile environment, which is really where the complexity comes in, and you'll have a chance to see and hear from that on the floor here in a few minutes. Those things come together, and that gives the product what we call, in technical language, commercially sterile. That means we can distribute and store that product at ambient temperature. Consumer can keep it in their pantry at home, has a shelf life of at least 12 months. Technically, that product is safe for years. It's usually the nutrition facts panel where it says how much vitamin A, how much vitamin D. That's typically what drives that shelf life. It's certainly safe long beyond that. When we think about how that compares to pasteurization treats a much more narrow spectrum of microorganisms. It's a lower temperature. It's not packaged in the same sterile conditions that aseptic is. As a result, there are still some microorganisms that without refrigeration could spoil that product. If you wanna do an experiment, I probably wouldn't recommend it. You could take a carton of an oat milk that we make and a carton of oat milk from the fridge. Give it 4 days. That'll be an interesting science experiment for you. Really the difference is higher temperature, we're killing more microorganisms in an aseptic process, and the packaging is sterile, relative to pasteurization, which kills fewer microorganisms, requires refrigeration to get that shelf life. We've talked about what we do. We talked about how we do. Now I'm gonna tell you what makes SunOpta unique in this equation. What have we done to differentiate ourselves to be successful as well as a leader in the industry? It's a very complex manufacturing scenario. You will get a sense and a gravity for that as we walk and take the tour today. I talked about the symphony analogy. This is a direct coupled manufacturing system, meaning the front end and the back end are tied together. If I have a speed bump or a hiccup at any part of that process, it all starts to cascade like a bad case of dominoes. What we have done to be successful there, I would say, you've heard this from Joe and others, is really our culture. We are a learning organization. We embrace a continuous improvement mentality and culture. By the fact that we now have five facilities, we are learning and sharing those things five times faster than someone that has one line, one plant, other. If we didn't have this culture and commitment to being a learning organization, it could be really challenging for us. We have fantastic forums weekly where we collaborate, whether it's operations, R&D, supply chain, all those functions are talking about how did you solve this problem? How did you overcome that obstacle? We share those learnings. The next part is the diverse portfolio. You know, Joe opened with the number of SKUs that we manage in our portfolio, the number of customers that we manage in our portfolio. We're very proud of that. I had a mentor once that talked about how do you take a challenge and make that into a strength? I would say that embodies everything that we do here in Midlothian, for sure, and in SunOpta in general. Here we have high volume process systems. We make large volumes of liquid. We process at high rates of speed. That could be an opportunity to lose a lot of money. We don't do that. We don't do that because our counter here is our people. We have experienced people. We have tenured employees. We continually invest in training, the continuous learning and continuous improvement culture I talked about earlier. I personally echo with what Joe led with, which is it's always about the people. Our solution to complexity is our people. Finally, we talk about the scale, the scale at which we operate, and how we operate. Three of the top four performing lines in the Americas cluster when we think about aseptic systems. What's not happening in many of those instances, they're not making the same portfolio of products that we're making. They're not managing the same number of changeovers that we're making, and we embrace that challenge. Points back to the tenure and the training we invest in our employees. I wouldn't be very fortunate R&D leader to say if we didn't have our proprietary processes, our tips and tricks, and our trade secrets that we've built here at SunOpta over the last 10 years, we certainly wouldn't be in the advantage place that we are. My closing comments, what I'll say is we have a complexity multiplier that I'd love for you to appreciate. It is five plants, 12 plus processing systems, 300 SKUs, 100 customers, and we crush that. We crush that with the service levels that Joe talked about. That's how you can judge the performance that we have. It all comes together to do that, and we're very proud of the culture we've built here. we're very excited to showcase the facility to you today and thanks again for being here. With that, I will have Joe come back up for some concluding remarks. We're gonna do Q&A now because we wanted the people who are on the phone to have an opportunity to hear the questions from all of you as opposed to coming back at the very end and doing a Q&A and the folks who are on the phone would have to sit there for 1 hour and a half waiting for folks in here. We're gonna do some Q&A now, then we're gonna go on the tour, and then we'll kind of reconvene in this room, kind of any wrap-up thoughts that y'all would like to share. It'd be great. There'll be some a to-go lunch. I'm not quite sure what time flights are, but we're a little bit ahead of schedule now, which is great. Kind of open the floor for questions before we head out for the tour. Cool. Yes, no operating leverage assumed in the 2025 model. I'm just curious if you're willing to say what's possible there if we do assume operating leverage in terms of the gross margin or incremental gross margin, or if you don't want to say anything, that's fine, too. I understand. Scott? I have two mystery questions. Oh, you do? Okay. Somebody's gonna ask this. I'll try to speak up just so people can hear. I think, again, I would really go back to a simplified assumption, recognizing the development type of revenue development informs what the operating expenses are. For example, if the development happened to be more brand heavy, that would pull forward more SKUs than for, say, co-manufacturing or private label. Is it possible to pose the question that we'll see some operating leverage? Absolutely. We've got precedents out. Thank you. Do the 2025 numbers assume that you guys will do that 150,000 sq ft addition or is that? Yeah. Okay. That would be additive. Correct. Just to layer on to that, do you need all of the lines that you showed us to get to the 2025 assumption, or is it a portion of the line? No. So I guess- None of that's in the 25. Just the three lines that you showed. Correct. [audio distortion] after that it's. Yes. Yes. Just phase 1. Just phase Just phase 1 is in the 25 numbers. You know, kind of given lead times right now and given we're, believe it or not, almost in the middle of 23, you know, we're gonna be coming up on some decision points here of, you know, how and when we're gonna fill that expansion space. John. [audio distortion] You have a unique manufacturing footprint in plant-based milk, aseptic, right? Your share is 170%. You're coming into nutrition beverages in a different kind of position with 1 facility, not the, you know, the diamond footprint that you like to talk about, and there are others out there doing this. Could you just talk a little bit about if you're not as competitively advantaged out of the gate in protein shakes? Is Is that a fair statement? Do you, over time, try and replicate the competitive advantages you have in plant-based milks in the nutrition beverage business? I'm supposed to be repeating the question, I forgot for the folks on the phone. John's question was really how do we think about building competitive advantage in the protein shake space? I would tell you immediately out of the gate, our competitive advantage is geography. The nearest person who manufactures nutrition drinks is in Missouri. You think about Texas as the second biggest state in the union, one of the fastest-growing, and every single person in that $5 billion category today is at best case shipping product from Missouri, and likely from further points afield. I can tell you when we had our very first conversation with our customer, who's going to consume that line, they were like, "Wow, you've picked a great location. You could not have picked a better spot. We're super excited to start talking to you." That's our starting point. The second is, you know, from a processing product manufacturing standpoint. We absolutely believe that in short order, we will be in that top tier in terms of manufacturing performance because, you know, you'll get a chance to see it, but I mean, it runs very, very similar to our existing plant-based milks. We think all that manufacturing prowess and capability that we have, not that it's not different, not that it's not a little bit trickier, but we absolutely believe we will just again, check the box on that. Third is just the full service model that we bring. We absolutely see value and benefit in that, as does, the customers that we're potentially working with. Lastly is the innovation piece, right? Again, plant-based, highly underdeveloped in nutrition beverages. Why? You know, I would contend nobody has brought to the table the ability to really be great at plant-based with the manufacturing ability to do 330 mL. [audio distortion] Sorry. Are there, you know, are whey-based protein drinks superior for some reason? Are there technical hurdles that need to be overcome for that kind of consumer? The question was, is are whey-based protein drinks superior? It depends on your definition of superior. The protein density of whey is higher, so in the same volume of liquid, you're gonna get a higher protein content from whey-based. Not that you can't get there with plant-based, it's just a little bit more technically challenging. In the category today, you would see the plant-based products are circa 20 grams of protein. The whey-based are 30 grams of protein. Now, not everybody wants or needs 30 grams of protein, but that is one product difference between whey-based protein drinks and plant-based protein. How do you see the new FDA guidelines for labeling effective your growth trajectory? The question was, how do we see the new FDA guidelines impacting our growth trajectory? We don't see really any significant impact. I mean, they came out and said, you can continue to call these products milk. There's some discussion around if there's a nutrition difference between plant-based milks and cow dairy, you're gonna have to call that out. You know, there's 2 solutions there. You can call it out or you can just add the fortification to have the plant-based milk be parity to cow dairy in terms of say, vitamin A and D, etc. You know, we're already exploring some of that, but we don't think from a consumer behavior standpoint, I don't believe it'll have a material impact whatsoever. [audio distortion] In the past track building, have you seen anything else coming in the category, adding capacity? From the branded side, you know, there seems to be a little bit of a push on self-manufacturing a couple few years back. Has that shifted at all? Have people been more open to using co-manufacturers or still self-manufacturing? Yeah. The question was, are we seeing any shift to self-manufacturing? The answer is no, we have not seen that. In fact, we've probably seen a bit more of the opposite, where some people are looking at outsourcing, manufacturing versus insourcing. The second question was around competitive intensity. Have we seen anything? You know, there's always projects going on. There's always competitors doing things. I mean, it's not a static environment, but nothing that we're particularly stressed about. I mean, we have competitors just like every single business on planet Earth. You know, they're putting capital in, they're developing products, so are we, and at the end of the day, our job is to grow, you know, consistent with the revenue projections we put out there. You know, as far as kind of who's steel in the ground, there's a couple projects going on, but we would expect that. I mean, it's a growing category. You have competitors and, you know, they're looking to grow as well. [audio distortion] All right. You've illustrated one of the slides about shift revenue from commodity to value and enhance your margin. I was wondering if you could talk about margin profile for the fruit snack business and the nutrition beverage business. Also what for your customers, what is the margin profile of those customers? Their margin profile, is it higher than some of your others, which might allow, you know, pricing power? Yeah. The question was, and Scott jump in here, but the question was, the margin profile of the customer, and does that give them more pricing power on fruit snacks? Yes. More pricing power to you. If their margin profile is higher- Yeah. [audio distortion] theory that versus something where there's thin margin for them, they kind of squeeze you. The margin profile of the fruit snack business is margin accretive for us as a company. Again, probably consistent with a strong margin structure for them. We don't know exactly what their margin structure is, but we can infer it. The nutrition beverage is similar. Yes. One of the challenges, and I hesitate to wade into this topic, gross margin sometimes is a tough calculus. There's two different models as like in the kind of on the co-manufacturing side of the business, there's two different models. One model is we buy all the ingredients. That is a pass-through cost to our customers. We make a tolling or manufacturing margin, okay? We do not mark up the ingredients. If we buy them for $1, if we buy them for $2, it just goes straight through. It shows up as revenue for us, okay? Because we invoice the ingredient. On the nutrition beverage side of things, it's gonna be a bit of a hybrid. Our customer will send us some of the ingredients. They're purchasing because they're larger than us. They're procuring, say, all the whey protein. They send it to us. We're procuring some of the ingredients, they're procuring some of the ingredients. Revenue would look... On all things being equal, revenue would look smaller, gross margin will look bigger. Because we're gonna make the same amount of money per case, whether the revenue number is $10 or $5. Does that make sense? Yes. The 330 mL, the nutrition beverage business, is a bit of a hybrid pricing model for us. It should be gross margin accretive, but the revenue number might not be quite as eye-popping. Ben? [audio distortion] Your current cost, effective cost sequence when all of this is online to get to $20 million-$25 million. Good question. The question was, what incremental sales do we need to realize those 2025 numbers? There's not a huge leap of faith in any of those. There's no, "Oh, we got to go find a new $100 million customer." It is very much existing customers. Again, remember, our sales development pipeline or cycle is at least 12 months out. In many cases, if you kind of measure back to first conversation, probably more like 18 months, 15-18 months. You know, again, many of our customers are giant, you know, $10 billion, $20 billion, $30 billion, $40 billion CPGs. They're not necessarily moving at the speed of sound on some stuff. You know, it's like you have a conversation, and there's a process, et cetera. We have pretty good line of sight, you know, certainly into the growth levers for the future. There's always a little bit of, okay, we got to, you know, go find customer X, Y, Z. I don't There's no stress for me in any of those revenue numbers of like, holy crap, you know, who is mystery customer X or mystery customer go get that we have to fill it with. Brian? [audio distortion] Maybe roughly a year since you initially provided the 2025 outlook, anything that you would point to as either making you incrementally bullish about achieving those targets or anything that's changed that would have an adverse impact on your ability to hit that? What are the two or three things that maybe stand out to you the most? Yeah. The question was, relative to the 2025, projections that we put out, what are potential headwinds or tailwinds, and are we incrementally more bullish or less bullish? Is that accurate? Yeah. You know, I still think, Brian, relative to when we put those out in June, the environment's still is pretty much the same. You know, you look at there's still instability in the consumer landscape relative to inflation and, you know, real wage decline, et cetera. What impact is that gonna have? You know, you're starting to see it in some of the categories. You know, you continue to see the consumer kind of making adjustments. I think that would be a question mark or a risk to any business, including ours. Relative to things that make me incrementally bullish, I would say this facility, you know, you're gonna see. You know, you can't lean into the expansion side of it till you get the first job done, right? You know, to DJ's question and Coleman's, you know, do we have any of this expansion built into our 25 numbers? The answer is no. Would I pull the trigger on that before I knew we could run the facility as it is today? Absolutely not, right? You know, we've had discussions about, do we put another 330 mL system in? You know, and we've kind of said, "Well, let's prove to ourselves we can run the first one before we write the check for the second one." The more confident we get there, the more likely we are to make a move on that, and therefore, that would impact the 25 outlook. [audio distortion] If I could just ask one more. Being at the Expo West trade show, what I heard, obviously, conversations everywhere, and what we heard a lot was, you know, in a snacking component, so bars, shakes, et cetera, the question was, how do we infuse plant-based while delivering sufficient protein? It seems like the question there is doing that at a quality level where the taste is not sacrificed. That seems to be the big unlock, right? Delivering plant-based beverages with sufficient protein in the 330 mL category. How close do you feel you are to that, to achieving that? I think we've done it. Okay. You'll have a chance to taste it in an hour. Perfect. Thank you. Sure. What do you sense for the timing of larger, private label oat milk launches at retail, like with your discussions with customers? Yeah. The question was, what do we see around larger private label oat milk launches at retail? You know, Mike, feel free to kind of chime in here. There was some momentum about a year ago with a couple of the, you know, world's largest retailers. And it's kind of hit a little bit of a, I don't know, speed bump or... You know, it wasn't a huge thing for us. We were gonna supply some of the oat base, et cetera, et cetera. We haven't seen huge momentum there. I would just call it kind of incremental activity, but nothing... You know, we haven't seen anybody do the proverbial cannonball in the middle of the pool, in terms of like, "Okay, we're gonna own this with private label," et cetera. You know, they're starting to introduce products. The biggest traditional grocer, you know, has done a bunch around oat milk creamers. Mike, anything to add? Mike's the general manager of our plant-based business unit. Yeah, I would just add, I mean, I think you're absolutely correct. You know, what we're still seeing is some testing in retail. We're certainly engaged with brands and retailers in doing that. Where we're seeing a lot of the growth still is in food service. I would say food service, whether it's direct or through contract manufacturing brands, there's still a lot of runway, there's still a lot of growth. I would say food service is where you'll see a lot of our growth. Certainly we're participating outside as well. We're excited about both. Yeah. I think you said, you know, 100 customers. How do you see that evolving over time? Is there an aspiration to see that consolidate? Does that give you more leverage in terms of visibility, contract margins, anything like that as you roll forward? Yeah. The question was, you know, Brian referenced 100 customers. We don't have 100 customers on the plant-based side, which is the more technically challenging piece of it. It's a finesse, right? You know, we are always in the mode of, you know. As you might expect, a lot of smaller companies come to us and want us to co-manufacture for them. We are optimistic, and we actually make them present a business plan to us like we were a banker. Basically, like convince us you're gonna get big. We try to place a couple bets a year. We try to find a couple new partners that we're like, "Hmm, these guys seem to have a great product, know what they're doing, have funding, have momentum, have built an organization. We're gonna take a bet on them." We certainly probably turn down more customers than we say yes to. Mike, I don't know what you would say the ratio of who we bring on versus who we say no to. Probably 10 to 1. We're in a unique spot. You know, a lot of launches from emerging brands. Yeah. I would say on the plant-based side, We lean heavily towards big national brands and customers, right? I mean, That scale and our diamond shape, you know, capacity is a perfect match. There's a lot of people still looking to get into this space. I would say 10 to 1. We talk to a lot of people that have ideas for, you know, the next potato milk and, you know, sunflower milk and lots and lots of different ideas. That helps us to understand what's going on in the market. We can help them with some of our R&D, et cetera. You know, at the end of the day, I'd say we're a better fit in plant-based for big, large brands that have big global One of the things every customer hates to hear is what's our MOQ, our minimum order quantity. You know, we love entrepreneurs. They're fantastic. They drive the category. They bring innovation. You know, we can't sign up a customer where we run their product twice a year. You know, you'll see from the scale of the operation we have and that we're trying to run, it's just not practical when they say, you know, "We're gonna do $1 million at retail." And you're like, "Okay, that means we'll run your product twice in a year." Like, that's just not productive for us. You know, we do place some bets on emerging customers, you know, we gotta be convinced it's the right, it's the right partner, so. How long is the average contract for these customers? When's the last time you lost a contract? What are the material reasons why you lost them? Yeah. The question was, what's the average length of contract, and when's the last time we lost somebody? Average length, I would say, is 3 years. You know, we won't sign any contract less than 2. We have some that are 5. I would call 3 pretty standard. In terms of when's the last time we lost a customer, I would say we haven't lost a customer certainly since I've been here, so probably 5 years. What happens, though, is they'll shift, right? Say you were doing 70% of their volume, they might shift it to 30 or vice versa, right? People don't tend to move wholesale move away from somebody, but they might shift volume to a competitor. Price would typically be the main reason why we would see that shift. You know, we've seen a little bit of that shifting. You know, we were pretty aggressive on taking pricing in Q1 of last year, to protect margins and reflect the increased costs. You know, we saw throughout that a little bit of shifting here and there. We haven't lost anybody. Probably more prevalent on the private label side where they're working with, say, you know, some of the biggest retailers, they're working with three or four suppliers, and if you take price and they take umbrage with that, you know, they'll kind of, "Okay, fine. You know, we're gonna shift 20% of your volume, put us in the penalty box." We also benefit from that when other people do it. You know, the whole thing kind of is moving. You know, that's why Scott referenced, I mean, it's important. You know, annual numbers, you know, it's not like. I worked at Frito-Lay, right? You know what I mean? It's like Doritos sales. You know, there's never really a big surprise in the Doritos sales. Leslie looks at me like, "Really, Jeff?" You know, it's a much more predictable curve, right? Whereas with us, you have so many customers and so many dynamics. That's why I think, you know, the annual numbers were super confident. It's lumpy, right? 'Cause you're bringing customers on, and you think they're gonna come in on this date and, you know, gets delayed. Just given kind of the length of the sales cycle, when do you guys reach a decision point on what to put in those incremental lines that you have available? What drives the decision of we're gonna do another 330 mL, or we're gonna do another whatever you end up choosing? The question was what drives what we do and when do we decide it? There's a pretty... One of the roles that Tetra Pak plays in the industry is they're a bit of a center point for people looking for supply and manufacturers. They are probably one of our best sources of sales development leads because they play that role, right? It's in their best interest to match demand and supply, right? It drives their business, it drives equipment sales, it drives laminate sales, et cetera. They play that role. They will point potential customers to us and say, "Hey, you should talk to these guys. Hey, you should talk to these guys." In terms of what drives it, I would say stickiness of the demand is a key thing, right? Like 330 mL, again, we are bullish about because you look at the totality of that, which is $5 billion TAM growing double digits. It has been growing double digits for the better part of a decade. Big, giant companies behind the growth, right? You've got BellRing, you've got PepsiCo, you've got Nestlé. They're gonna drive it, right? We know how to do it, and we think we can make money doing it. Like, that's a composite of, do we think that the demand is sustainable? Do we think the industry economics favor us, and does it fit with our competencies and our advantages? In terms of the timing, we're probably 18 months out thinking about... I mean, we have a long-term capacity plan, but in terms of sort of real decision points, you know, we're kind of thinking and activating 18 months out. Just to be clear, 18 months out from making a decision or 18 months out to having a line actually? 18 months out from having a line. Meaning right now we're starting to look at, okay, Q, beginning of 25, because we're almost in the middle of 23, believe it or not. If you think about, okay, we need to build a business case, board approval, et cetera, et cetera. Ordering equipment, 12-15 months. We're kind of getting into the zone here of thinking about what's gonna be the growth drivers for 2025 incremental to what we've already got running. That's it. [audio distortion] Develop a plant-based alternative to traditional beverage. What kind of pricing can you drive out of that? Yeah. The question was, when we create innovation, is there more pricing power there? I would say it's probably there's more pricing power there over the long term than the short term. you know, It depends upon if we share formulation with them or not. you know, I think it's part of our overall value equation more than it is a, okay, we make this margin when we develop the formulation and the product. We make this margin if they hand us the formula. I kinda get where you're going on that, which is, hey, is this a margin up opportunity for us? We wouldn't necessarily see it that discreetly. I mean, probably yes is the answer. we wouldn't say, "Okay, our pricing strategy is if we develop the innovation, we charge you this. If you give us the formula, we do this." It's not quite that, not quite that straightforward. [audio distortion] I saw your path to $2 billion has a small sliver for international. What's your thinking there? I assume that doesn't include Canada. Would it include a plant? Just so you can give an input. Yeah. I think the question was, how are we thinking about international? I think there are a couple different ways, Nelson, we've talked about and considered international. Number one is all of our plants are within 200 miles of the border. You know, the Pennsylvania plant, the Minnesota plant, the California plant, and the Texas plant are all within, you know, a relatively short distance from a border. We have seen a significant collapse in the ocean freight rates. In the heart of COVID, it was $20,000 for a 40-foot container. Now $2,000 for a 40-foot container. If you do the math of how many units we can get on a ocean-bound container, it's actually not that significant. I think it was $0.15. Mike, I don't know if you remember the Joe math that was done in calculating that. You know, if you say, okay, there's a $0.15 premium for us to manufacture in the U.S., but our proximate location to soybeans and oats, plus the scale of manufacturing here, can we be cost competitive manufacturing in the U.S. and shipping internationally? Is the size of the price worth it? I would call it a paper exercise right now, Nelson. You know, we're just kinda contemplating that. The second thing is, outside the U.S., the kinda aseptic beverage landscape is dramatically more developed than the U.S. You know, I mean, it is the 98% of all European plant-based milks are shelf-stable. Here, it's, you know, a third, right? Dramatically overdeveloped in almost every market. Asia, South America, Europe, that is the standard format. Now, that obviously means there's big competitors and big manufacturers there. We're not naive to think we're just gonna kinda waltz into those geographies and be successful. You know, certainly the size of the market, it would be imprudent of us to not be looking at how to participate more broadly in that, you know, kinda global landscape.