Hello, and welcome to The Valens Company's 2022 Investor Day. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Everett Knight, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development and Capital Markets at The Valens Company. Everett, please go ahead. Thank you, operator. Good morning, and welcome to The Valens Company's 2022 Investor Day. A replay of this conference call will be archived on the investor relations section of the Valens website at thevalenscompany.com/investors. Before we begin, please let me remind you that during the course of this conference call, Valens management may make statements including with respect to management expectations or estimates of future performance. All such statements, other than statements of historical fact, constitute forward-looking information or forward-looking statements within the meaning of the applicable security laws and are based on expectations, estimates, and projections as of the date hereof. Specific forward-looking statements include, without limitation, all disclosures regarding future results of operations, economic conditions, and anticipated courses of action. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from expectation. For more information on the company's risks and uncertainties related to forward-looking statements, please refer to our latest annual information form and our latest management discussion and analysis, otherwise known as MD&A, each as filed with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities at sedar.com and the U.S. securities regulatory authorities at edgar.com or The Valens Company's website at thevalenscompany.com. These risks described in the annual information form, which may cause actual financial results, performance, or achievements of The Valens Company to be materially different from estimated future results, performance, or achievements expressed by forward-looking information or forward-looking statements are hereby incorporated by reference herein. Although these forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and reasonable assumptions based on current available information to management as of the date hereof, we cannot be certain that the actual results will be consistent with the forward-looking statements in the future. We caution you not to place undue reliance upon such forward-looking statements. For any reconciliation of non-GAAP measures, measured and discussed, please consult our latest MD&A filed on SEDAR in Canada and EDGAR in the United States, as applicable. Now, without further ado, we're gonna jump in to the Investor Day. We're gonna start the Investor Day off today with a video before we enter into the formal format, which will start now. For those of you that are just dialed in, I encourage you now to go to the link so you can see the live video that will launch shortly. Thanks everyone. We had a few technical difficulties at the end with the video, but don't you worry, these videos will be up on the website, and you'll see them many times. What it speaks to is the automation and all the effort that we put in 2021 going into 2022. Now, throughout this pre-presentation, we're gonna talk about that and where we're going. First, I'd like to hand it off to Tyler Robson, CEO of Valens, who will start the formal part of this presentation. Thank you. Perfect. Thanks, Everett. First of all, I wanna thank everybody for taking the time to spend some time with us and the Valens story. Gonna jump right into the management team. Obviously, you all know who I am, Jeff and Everett. Obviously, Chantel's been here for a number of years as well. What I am excited to do is have you guys spend more time with Sunil and Adam. Obviously, they bring a tremendous amount of experience from their respective fields, so I'm excited for you guys to have a better opportunity and understanding of who they are and why they're so impactful. One thing you won't notice about this investor deck or the videos though, is the passion behind the scenes and the corporate culture we've built, where we truly do plan on moving mountains in the cannabis space, and we're coming for the number one spot. Obviously, we've only been a branded player for a number of months now, but the transformation is complete. We are no longer a toll processor. We're a brand portfolio with the best-in-class platform to continue to dominate that, whether it's in beverages, edibles, concentrates, even flower and pre-roll. As we move through this slide deck, you'll see why we plan on being so dominant in adult rec, not only in Canada, but over-the-counter in the US as well. Throughout the deck, you're gonna see long-term market opportunity, a 2021 review and recap, and 2022 business plan, the keys to success. Then we're gonna round out with a final summary, closing remarks, and a Q&A session. Before I go any further into the slide, I obviously wanna thank investors and employees for their contributions to the success Valens has had to date. Obviously, we know it's been an extremely tough year in the capital market supply chain, but there are a ton of wins that we have recognized, which you'll see throughout this opportunity of I would say, the deck/conversation we have, especially in the Q&A. As we continue to roll through our provincial listing platform, you're quickly seeing our brands grow. We've successfully deployed the fewer, bigger, better strategy, not only in adult rec, as we cull SKUs and really get behind velocity, you'll also see in our B2B partners. What you're really seeing is fewer, bigger, better. As well as when you take that fewer, bigger, better strategy into the operational efficiencies we've had, we've now commissioned K2, Pommies, and we're really set up for the next generation of product development. As we go through the deck, the key objectives for 2022 for Valens is be a top five player in vapes, edibles, beverages. We think we have the innovation and product portfolio to do that. The second one we'll really look to dominate is the flower product and a top 10 player. We've seen tremendous success from the Versus portfolio of SKUs, BC God Bud being one of the top SKUs in the country, and we believe we're gonna continue to push that. Another big key focus for us is gross margin improvement and positive EBITDA by Q4. Rounding out kind of our opportunities for 2022, further entry into the U.S. via distribution in an asset-light way. Really kind of getting behind the story for 2022 and then moving into 2023, we're seeing a minimum revenue for 2023 projected at CAD 225 million, and Adjusted EBITDA margins of greater than 10%. Again, just to reiterate, we've officially brought toll processing to an end and really diversified our core offering brand portfolio. When you see the brands on this page, Citizen Stash, Verse, the new Vacay, and then the new Versus, we really kind of round out the three-tiered offering, and then Contraband coming in over the top with our premium core offering. We're proud of everything we've built, and I think as we move through this deck, you'll see why. Again, I do wanna acknowledge that it has been a tough year for investors in the capital market segment, but the core business is stronger than ever, and you'll see why. Last but definitely not least, before I turn it over to Everett, I really wanna look at the opportunity in Canada first. When you look at the segment of this space, I think there's a ton of low-hanging fruit left to be had with a lot of white space. I also see some companies struggling to meet their financial needs. When we look at the fewer, bigger, better strategy, sorry, we had strategically moved on some from some of those relationships, and we're gonna see more opportunity in white space. As some companies fall by the wayside and some notable names in the space, we estimate that there's about 20%-25% market share up for grabs, which we are best in class positioned to grow. When you really look at our portfolio, obviously we maneuver in an asset-light way in cultivation, but we're the largest purchaser of biomass, and we have different levers we can pull at any point in time. When you look at the contract grow we've now set up, we have the most diverse and flexible platform, and it's gonna be a key to success for 2022. One thing too that no one realizes is we're not actually tied to any specific genetic. We don't have any crop failure risks, so it's an asset-light model that we can completely take advantage of. There's two other ones I'll touch on kinda rounding out my section. IP and innovation. When you really look at the technology we've built, I really don't believe anyone else can touch us, and I'll leave it up to you guys to figure out who some of our B2B partners are throughout this document. But I think you'll see some big names and some big opportunities for us and why everyone's coming to us for the B2B needs. We're obviously backfilling strategically with strategic relationships on the B2B partners, but we're really putting our brand portfolio first. The last one we're really doing a good job of is opening distribution, not only domestically, but North America. When you look at what a lot of our white label opportunities and agreements with top retailers in Canada, we can really start pushing the pace of our adult rec market share, which I truly believe will be one of the largest growers in market share in Canada in 2022. Everett, please take it away. Thanks, Tyler. Throughout this presentation, what we'll go through is those KPIs you saw on Tyler's slide, we're gonna reinforce them throughout this presentation. What I'm gonna start off with is a high level overview of the markets and where we sit today. I'm gonna go into a 2021 recap and then pass it over to Chantel on operations. Now starting off, I wanted a snapshot of where we are today. From a fundamental standpoint, The Valens Company was the fastest year-over-year grower with provincial retail sales. This shows the shifts that Tyler talked to brands and how important it is, and Adam will really drive this home in his part. To demonstrate further that success, as Tyler mentioned, the biomass sourcing and those contract growers, and the ability of our platform with the largest purchasing of biomass in Canada to drive cost, we actually now have the number two dried flowers SKU in December 2021 in Canada, in Alberta, B.C., and Ontario. We do not grow cannabis today. I think that shows the success of the operations and the network we've achieved. three, we are the number one revenue generating company per dollar invested. We take ROI very, very seriously to investors, and we see a lot of new investors on the line today. This is also live streaming on Benzinga. This is something that you should know, and if you take one thing away, it's really this slide. Then lastly, in the fundamentals, this is a long-term market opportunity. I'll go through this in more detail, but we are just in the second inning of a massive multi-billion-dollar market. Now, from a capital market standpoint, we're down 37% in 2021, and we've seen further declines in cannabis stocks in 2022. Now, what I will say is that we're frustrated with this, and we believe it does not value us properly today. The company has not changed from three months ago, and we're really focusing on those fundamentals. Speaking to those fundamentals is from a growth stock, for the next three metrics, my background is in small cap portfolio management, and I don't see the growth and these multiples, at a value price close to tangible book very often. Just to go through these, analysts are targeting 1x EV to revenue for this year's earnings and 108% growth in this year in our revenue. This is what we're focused on today. If you look at the overall valuation, our tangible book value is CAD two. Our actual book value is CAD four, but we're almost trading there today. If you're a new investor, I think the risk/reward scenario today in this volatility of the market is a great opportunity that as a management team, we believe in. This is a long-term growth industry, and this is what I wanted to take away. Everyone focuses on, you know, what's the next month? What's Canada doing in the next month of sales? What's the U.S. doing? Let's take a step back. We're entering the second inning of a long-term growth industry, one of the best in our lifetime, and this is what we wanna take advantage of. I just wanted to bring it back for the global aspect. Going into the next slide is the Canadian and U.S. marketplaces. You know, Canada grew from CAD 2.6 billion in 2020 to CAD 3.9 billion in 2021. Analysts expect this to be over CAD 5 billion in 2022. Where we're going is the illicit and legal market today is estimated around CAD 10 billion. All we're doing, and the unique thing about cannabis as a growth opportunity, is when do you already have a defined consumer that's in the black market? All we're doing is legalizing that, and that's the opportunity we have. You see that here, and then you also see it below in the U.S. marketplace. You see that just from a state standpoint, but each state is now legalizing it, and eventually, we believe it'll be federally legal, and we'll talk about our strategy in the U.S. further in the presentation. Now, this is one of my favorite slides. If you look at the cannabis industry, it is, when you include the black market, a top four consumer industry today. All we're doing is the legal market in the U.S., right? Which has actually grown from $17 billion, and then adding the illegal market, and that's an $82 billion industry. If you look at where we're going, all we're doing is legalizing that, and that's the opportunity, and you see some of these massive industries. That is where cannabis is today, and that's what we're gonna legalize in the legal market, and that's what we're focused on. Now, to further hit this point home, what I've done is I've actually taken the largest companies in each sector and put them over top. In the legal cannabis today, the largest company is $7 billion. Well, in the soft drinks market, it's $285 billion. These are hundreds of billions of dollars of companies. The unique thing about those companies is they have brands. You ask us why we went to brands. Well, these top companies all have brands, and Adam will talk about that further in the presentation. Now, this is the frustration that Tyler said at the very beginning. We suffer alongside you in the stock price in the marketplace as we are heavy shareholders ourselves. You know, it's only a consolation prize that we've outperformed half of our peer group during this time period, and this has continued into 2022, right? What we're focused on right now is our heads down, as Tyler mentioned, on the fundamentals of the company, because that's what's in our control, right? That's what you're gonna see throughout this presentation. You know, further what I've mentioned in the first slide, this is the summary of it. My only point here is you guys have seen our multiples compared to U.S. MSOs and LPs. What you haven't seen is if you're a small-cap growth investor looking to allocate capital, this is one of the best growth industries. I'm sorry, you can't find multiples anywhere with these growth rates in any other industry, whether it's any growth industry. That's what I wanted to reinforce with this slide today. Now, institutional ownership. Today, from an institutional standpoint, if you look at the Canadian non-U.S. listed LPs, institutional ownership was around 5.9%. We over-indexed in that before we went on Nasdaq. Why did we go on Nasdaq? It wasn't for a day return, it wasn't for a month return, it was for a multiyear journey to get more institutional investors. That's important to note. Look at our U.S. listed Canadian peers that have been there for longer, they have a higher institutional ownership. That's the reason we went there. When you compare it to the rest of the marketplace, why haven't we got the institutional investors of these other industries yet? It's because 98% of all the capital is estimated not to be able to invest in cannabis today. The biggest portion is able to invest in cannabis on the Nasdaq. That is why we went there, and that is the journey we're on as we gain more and more institutions going over to legal market. This isn't a day journey. This is a long-term. We have a very focused capital market strategy to get new investors in. You know, to end off kind of the summary slides, I have a few more slides here. I get asked a lot on why invest in Canada, right? Canada behind the scenes has been a bellwether, even over some of the biggest U.S. states. Yes, we'll have new states come online that will grow, but Canada is the only market that's federally legal today. What I see in the Canadian marketplace is you have a lot of money invested in IP, and for us, it's innovation. That's the true differentiator comparatively to U.S. MSOs. I've toured over 200 facilities, a lot of them in the U.S., and that is something that people don't appreciate enough is the IP the Canadian market has, and particularly we have. Tyler mentioned this, that we expect prices to decline going into 2022 in the biomass front, which sets us up perfectly as it is an input cost. Because of that, you're gonna see bankruptcies. Tyler mentioned 20%-25% of kind of that market share is up for grabs in the next 18 months. We believe that. What we're positioning on is to be the beneficiary of that. When you look at the strategic categories that Adam will walk through and the price points we're in, I think that you'll see the insight of actually forecasting that this is coming. You know, ending off on these slides, if you're a new investor to Valens, why invest in Valens today? We have four main competitive advantage. We have one of the most innovative manufacturing platforms, and that's the reason we've been the best for provincial sales. Two, we do not cultivate today, which we think is a benefit, especially going into this year. Then three is the innovation machine and products. four is our U.S. CBD brand, which we believe is just starting to take off. Now, going into 2021. 2021, as a management team, we set out to achieve five different key milestones. We've now set out our new KPIs for the year that you guys can rank us on. Despite the market, we actually achieved all five of our KPIs, and we're a much different company entering 2022 than we were in 2021. We are on Nasdaq. We have a global footprint. We have now entered the U.S. market with Green Roads, a CBD acquisition. We are a branded company, and we fully commissioned. The hard work for our operations is now over. That's what we're gonna talk about. For this next slide, it really shows where we are in the value chain. We started with extraction. We're probably not gonna mention that anymore, as we're now a manufacturing and branded company. What we've done is, over the last two years, move up that value chain, and you see the most recent one is in branded products on the right-hand side. We believe why are we in this? We believe because it's the most competitive position to be in the Canadian market to drive value. I wanted to mention B2B because a lot of people a year ago or two years ago knew us as a B2B player. When we talk about the foresight we're seeing now with the bankruptcies going into 2022, that is the reason we moved away from small and mid-tier B2B customers, because we saw this coming. That's the reason we've gone and transitioned the B2B segment to the larger tier players or, more accurately, more consistent players. We'll work with you if you're more consistent. This is an important point because this is something that we saw coming, we moved quickly, and now that transition, as of Q1, we believe will be complete with those bigger players. From a provincial sales standpoint, you have not seen a faster company get listings, and this is because of the innovation that Tyler talked about. Just to clear this up, from an efficiency standpoint, you look at that listings to SKU ratio on that bottom hand. Our listings to SKU ratio really hasn't grown very much, but our listings has. What we're generating is more efficiencies from a product standpoint for each province going forward, and that's an important to note in this one. Now, Tyler mentioned this, but there has been no faster growing company for provincial sales than Valens year-over-year. Even when you look quarter-over-quarter, from November to January 2022, we've had the fastest growing quarter-over-quarter sales, provincial sales growth from 40%. We showed you the provincial sales previously, and now you're actually seeing the sales come through. Those listings have come through with sales, and it is following through. On this next slide, this is actually January data live on the OCS depletions. What you're showing is that we now not only are 8th, which is much higher than we were even months prior, we're now 8th overall, but we're also growing the fastest in January. Keep in mind, this growth, we only launched Contraband and Versus new product into the OCS in the last two weeks. Look at that as a bit of a even more forward indicator in the future. On my last slide, I'm just gonna recap the acquisitions, right? Overall, we had a busy acquisitive 2021 that's gonna set us up for 2022. My main point here is that we're no longer gonna be talking about these acquisitions. These are a part of Valens. Green Roads is at the heart of our U.S. CBD strategy. Citizen Stash, our most recent acquisition, is gonna be a core flower, and we're gonna leverage that genetics hub and contract grower to further give us a competitive advantage. We have seen early issues around BC floods, but we've largely mitigated that overall, but we did see early issues with the flood for that overall asset base. The asset is fine, and we have accelerated integration because of it to our Kelowna facility that Chantale and Sunil will both talk more about later in the presentation. Verse to Versus is a strategic brand portfolio, and then LYF Food Technologies is key to our edible strategy. That the new thing in this slide is edibles is expected to drive 12%-15% of provincial sales and B2B sales in 2022. It's a key part. It's been very successful growth, especially in recent six months. Now with that, I'm gonna turn it over to Chantel. Thanks. Perfect. Thank you so much, Everett. Thank you everybody for being here with us today. I joined Valens, just as a quick introduction, joined Valens early 2018. Had the absolute pleasure of guiding our team from an operations standpoint from the toll processing business into essentially the branded products business, and very excited here to share with you guys what we have accomplished over the last year. First off, I just wanna start in recapping all of the wins that we had in 2021. December 2020, we actually had our K2 facility become licensed through Health Canada. What that did is allowed us to start off strong in 2021 with not only the space that we needed to support the growing business, but also a dedicated footprint for the manufacturing of branded products. We started off by launching flower pre-roll and topical SKUs as our new innovation verticals in 2021. We quickly installed pre-roll manufacturing equipment, with the now current capacity to produce roughly 8.5 million units annually, while we also worked in redundancy in our equipment and variability of equipment manufacturers in order to help mitigate any of the risks with vendor support, especially during the pandemic. Based on the highly automated nature of these machines, we felt that this was a sound strategy in order to ensure that we would be able to run consistently to hit our production targets. In addition, we installed our NitroTin packaging line with the capacity to produce three-quarters of a million units on the 3.5-gram premium flower offering. We also doubled our vapes manufacturing capacity in 2021 in order to deliver our branded product strategy and support the live resin SKU launches, which will expand in the retail markets in 2022. On the Pommies side, we fully commissioned that facility with now the ability to produce over 8 million beverages per year on a single shift, utilizing both PET and cans in a variety of different packaging platforms. We also introduced a canning line to manufacture both tall and slim cans, which have become very popular in the alc bev space. We also successfully commissioned both our carbonation and our deaeration lines, which allows us to offer carbonated PET beverages, and we also have Canadian exclusivity on our molds for child-resistant PET carbonated caps. At our LYF edibles facility, we installed our automated gummy depositing line and also made way for our automated packaging line, one of those which is now completely commissioned and the other line which is set to be commissioned by the end of February. That being said, although we had some wins, we also had some operational constraints. COVID continued to introduce supply chain complications for our procurement team, as well as an increase in absenteeism across all of our facilities. The good news is, we saw this as an opportunity. The variability that the absenteeism created from a labor standpoint forced us to rightfully focus on efficiencies in both our upstream and downstream processes. With three years of manufacturing data under our belt, we crunched our numbers, and we were actually able to revise some of our testing methods and models to maintain best-in-class quality risk profile that Valens is known for, while also better contributing to margin. We also spent a lot of time streamlining our quality procedures, and we implemented a brand new QMS system, which is a quality management system, to better align with branded product release. In addition, we've placed a lot of focus on supporting processes in 2021 to help support the innovation that we have coming up in 2022. We wanted to make sure that we could essentially streamline and launch products to market faster than our competitors. From equipment commissioning all the way through to new process development, the operations team continues to learn from the best practices and in some cases, hard learning from previous years in order to drive strong margin contribution right out of the gate. From an innovation standpoint, we are nearly tripling the amount of new items that we are innovating and focusing on in 2022. In January of 2021, we had three primary focuses. The first being full spectrum and distillate vape pens, the second being PET non-carbonated beverages using our SōRSE emulsion technology, and also fine-tuning hydrocarbon solvent and solventless extraction. Moving now into January 2022, our primary focuses are going to be on further developing new SKUs and formulations in the food, beverage, and skincare transdermal space to increase competitive advantage in these areas. More importantly, we wanna make sure that we are preparing ourselves for delivery in these three categories in support of the future transition of CPG brands into the cannabis sector. We're also driving innovation on new flower SKU entries, utilizing the capabilities of our contract grow partners and also capitalizing on our buying power as one of Canada's largest purchasers of biomass. Our innovation teams are also busy perfecting the isolation of rare cannabinoids for use across multiple platforms and further optimizing the manufacture of additional delivery platforms utilizing the hydrocarbon extraction systems that we have in-house, which still delivers one of the strongest margin profiles in our branded products library today. Of course, with increased innovation comes increased SKUs, and with increased SKUs comes increased volumes. We prepared this slide essentially just to show you, on a broad notes basis, the increased volume that has gone through our facilities from January 2021 to January 2022. On the number of pallets shipped and number of work orders, we've essentially seen a threefold increase across the course of 12 months. Unfortunately, we've also seen a threefold increase on international lead times as well as trucking costs. In terms of sea freight, not only have the bottlenecks in the ports caused havoc for us, but the cost of shipping across seas has also increased sixfold. That being said, we've still been able to maintain modest growth in our production numbers, thanks to the gradual introduction of automation across many of our processes. The two main challenges that really have been brought on from the pandemic have been both staffing and supply chain related. First, we've had to navigate absenteeism across all of our sites, forcing us to utilize temp labor staff across multiple facilities. The good news is from an operations standpoint, we actually seen this as an opportunity to build relationships with these agencies, giving us a dependable partner to support us in bridging any labor gaps while we continue to commission automated equipment for each of our sites. Second, we've certainly had to navigate numerous supply chain issues across key suppliers, including both increased production lead times and decreased reliability on delivery windows. Now that we have brands in market with proven sell-through rate, from an operations standpoint, our supply chain team's focusing on efficiencies and standardization across all of our processes for our branded SKUs, including streamlining components like our packaging materials, our raw materials, and also all of our increased buying power that we have to decrease component costs. Supply chain and staffing challenges aside, I just wanna make note that we have actually been able to increase our OTIF rates over the course of the last 12 months. Moving into 2021, we essentially had less than an 80% OTIF rate, which is about standard for the cannabis space. Moving into 2022, we now have over a 95% OTIF rate with our top three provinces, which continues to help strengthen our relationships with the provinces as a trusted supplier. In addition, we were also able to take advantage of cost savings from our integration activities, developing a company-wide master plan, replenishment plan across all operating locations to help reduce our cost of raw materials and consumables, all of which will continue to contribute to our margin growth in 2022. The ops team is entering 2022 focused on mechanization while also systemizing and standardizing our processes across our facilities. Luckily, from an operations standpoint, we are set up with one of the strongest asset bases in the industry, and we're right sized to deliver on our 2022 objectives, with room for capacity expansion with the introduction of additional production shifts. In Q1, we're gonna continue to focus on best-in-class distillate and hydrocarbon extraction systems. The new distillation system allows us to get more out of less for a fraction of the time, which reduces both the required manpower and the biomass input costs through increased extraction efficiencies. Our team also continues to carve out a really strong foothold in the hydrocarbon concentrate space, allowing us to utilize our proprietary downstream refinement and curing techniques to deliver consistent products and delivery platforms that other LPs have not yet been able to perfect. On Q2, our focus is going to continue being on low-cost manufacturing and continued rollout of automation to deliver the best-in-class products in a cost-effective manner. We're also introducing automation on a lot of our downstream processes such as labeling, excise stamping, and packaging, allowing us to stay flexible and nimble to deliver on the commercialization plan while also reducing the amount of finished goods and inventory that we will need to store at any given time, allowing us to preserve both cash and space while maintaining a strong ATP platform to deliver on the sales plan. Lightly automated systems are gonna continue to deliver margin growth for us, while also freeing up valuable human resources to work on innovation and recipe formulation to keep us ahead of the competition and make us a partner of choice in the B2B and future CPG space. Finally, our focus on the Pommies facility is going to be to perfect our formulations using our tried and tested emulsion technology across multiple packaging platforms to prepare us for the deregulation of CBD in the Canadian retail market. This will ensure we have the test results and the stability data for future SKUs such as sport recovery drinks in hand to ensure that CPG clients have the confidence to choose Valens as a trusted operational partner. As you can see, much like we did four years ago when we invested in the extraction technology ahead of the industry, the Valens team has diversified our capabilities and built an asset platform that is going to deliver in confidence on the future needs of the CPG sector. Based on established retail markets south of the border, we believe that skincare, transdermal, food, and beverage will likely be the most popular and most naturally brand-aligned platforms for all of the CPG companies to actually enter the cannabis space. With that, rest assured, if and when the Canadian regulatory market deschedules CBD, our operations team and our facilities will be ready to deliver. With that, it's an absolute pleasure to hand it over to our Chief Commercial Officer, Mr. Adam Shea. Thanks very much, Chantel, and thank you everyone for joining today. I'm gonna talk a little bit about where we're headed in 2022 and beyond, and it's an exciting moment for our organization as we really pivot, as Tyler mentioned at the outset of this call, to a consumer-focused company, which will be rooted in brands and consumer-driven priorities. For 2022, our business plan is very specific, and we feel very confident about our ability to achieve it. When we look at our recreational environment in the provincial landscape across the country, our goals are very clear. We wanna become a top five player in vapes, edibles, and beverages. We feel confident we've got the emerging portfolio and the steam behind that, as Chantale just went through the operational capabilities, to be exceptionally impactful and achieve that as we come through 2022 and onward. We've talked about the agility of our platform when it comes to the flower products that we currently make and the fact that we don't cultivate, and that that really is a competitive advantage for us. We're excited about the brands that we're about to go through when it comes to flower products, and we're quite confident that our plan will see us close the year as a top 10 player in one of the most competitive segments, that being flower. Our provincial plan and customer plan hits on multiple facets as we look towards the short, midterm, and long view of the year. Our recreational team has got a very, very intentional way that we'll go about deploying this. I'll speak to a little bit that in a moment. As mentioned earlier on, the B2B business is certainly not gone, but it's going to be a very intentional way that we move forward with B2B partners. I'm excited to talk about that in a little bit more detail in the coming pages. Fewer, bigger, better will remain at the top of the list when it comes to B2B partnerships. At a glance, our 2022 business plan, we've been very specific about where we're gonna focus. It's gonna be in flower, pre-rolls, vapes, concentrates, edibles, and beverages. We're also going to meaningfully play across all three tiers that the consumer spends in, being value, a core or accessible premium tier, as well as a premium tier. By the end of 2022, Valens will have listings across all of these major segments and price points. We're going to be rooted in a strategy that's centered around four major brands, and I'm gonna talk about those in a minute, and the role that they'll play in our portfolio. We're quite confident that these brands are gonna hit against a whole host of consumer need states, will be insight driven, and very specific in how we partner with key retailers across the country to bring the brands to life. This page gives you a snapshot of our emerging portfolio. The four brands that'll be the most meaningful part of the Valens business in Canada are Versus, Citizen Stash, Contraband, and Vacay. I'll just give you a quick flavor of what these brands are about. Versus is really about offering the best possible quality at an extraordinarily accessible price point. Our aspiration is very clear with Versus. It's to be the number one value brand across all the segments that we intend the product to play in, and we're confident we've got the plan to do that. One of the exciting things that Everett talked about was the acquisition of Citizen Stash. Citizen Stash is an exciting new part of our portfolio. You'll see more and more from us related to Citizen Stash in three ways. One, the platform that we have at Valens and the contract growth structure that Tyler referenced is gonna allow us to make this an even more accessible product to more consumers by being able to have a price point that is far more permissible without compromising any of the quality, the genetics, and the consistency that people expect and have come to know from Citizen Stash. We're going to innovate, and you'll see products later in the year beyond flower and pre-roll. Specifically, keep an eye out for things in vapes and concentrates. Everett mentioned earlier on one of our new launches and new brands, Contraband. Contraband's an exciting new endeavor for us. It's really simple. Contraband's about offering premium quality cannabis wrapped up in an urban music, fashion, street art lifestyle that will focus on pre-rolls, flower. You'll see non-discreet vapes and you'll see concentrates. Expect some really exciting banger type strains to come from Contraband. Finally Vacay. Vacay, a brand that has always been a part of the LYF portfolio. You'll see this reinvigorated in a whole new way across the Valens plan in 2022 and beyond. It'll be specifically focused on edibles and beverages. You'll see some distinction from Vacay, when you compare it to Versus in edibles and beverages. You'll see us be far more focused on product complexity and indulgence, and they're a very, very meaningful portfolio that'll be rolling out on Vacay. Keep an eye out for that. This page just gives you a quick glance at some of the products that you'll see come into the marketplace over the, over the next several months. The pipeline is full. The innovation is going to be very, very robust, and I'm excited to talk about these products more and more as we progress through the year. Our partnership across key retailers and distribution is an exceptionally important part of our plan. You'll see here on this map just a snapshot of some of the key retail partnerships that we have across the country. I'm proud of the work that our teams have done in collaboration with these partners and many others to create a very strong distribution apparatus for The Valens Company, focused specifically on the regulated trade activities and budtender education that drives product awareness. We've currently got exposure to roughly 80% of the Canadian market, and we're actively working on a solution for the remaining portion. There's some exciting things we have coming in the months ahead related to Quebec, so stay tuned for more in the coming months related to Quebec. Then finally, just to make sure to touch on the B2B business, which we've commented on a few times already. A few key things to leave you with when it comes to this part of our business. We'll be working with five of the top seven largest LPs in the Canadian marketplace. This is important to us for five specific reasons. It helps us create a predictable, repeatable business. It lessens the complexity and touch points that exist across our apparatus in our operational work. It allows us to have more predictable margins and allows us to have a longer term runway of the way we build and innovate with our B2B partners. The final part that I'll touch on is around the idea of where our products go when it comes to consumer goods integration longer term. We've referenced, you know, the potential of OTC CBD sales being more accessible across Canada. We are spending a lot of time on this strategy in the background, both from a product capability standpoint that Chantale referenced, as well as from a brand standpoint. We're excited about this becoming a platform that we can use in Canada, and we've got great runway already in our U.S. business via the Green Roads brand. I'll say a couple things on this. We've already started to work with a few large CPG companies to test and explore various products and CBD implementation, and we look forward to talking about this more. An exciting new part of the business that we hope will evolve sooner than later in Canada. With that, I'll pass it to Quinn Shiskin, our Director of Product Innovation. Perfect. Thanks, Adam. Well, it is a pleasure being here in front of you all again and getting to discuss another year of completed milestones and execution of continual improvement on all our systems. This really was strictly driven by innovation that was designed against our commercial strategy with detailed project management scopes to execute against. In this past year, the link has been ever stronger between our commercial business teams, our PMO division, plant operations, and the completion of these projects Chantale highlighted. I really wanted to further connect the successes in these plant operations and highlight our expert dedicated teams and show you a slide into our product innovation roadmap and the pipeline of our new dominating rec brands. As you see here, Valens has the secret recipe and that secret sauce to become an innovation machine. I wanted to take this one layer a little bit deeper from what Chantel was discussing in operations and Adam's commercial strategy and give an update how we put these into brands. As you see here on the left side, we've been very strategic building and commissioning extensive manufacturing assets. These have always been backed by proven technology and winning IP. We all know we have the best and the largest extraction platform in Canada, which is fueled by the low-cost buying power, and we can get pretty much any strain we ever wanted at a low risk engagement. This foundation really has given us the ability to, and made us the perfect and tailored active input to support our CPG manufacturing assets into these new fully automated solutions and production facilities. As you saw in that LYF video, you briefly saw LYF had some major upgrades. To touch on these a little bit deeper, we're producing around 70,000 pieces of gummies per shift. Now with that new custom design inline blending apparatus and gelatin and pectin melting skid that was paired with a fully automated processing and filler line, this has increased our capacity to over 400,000 pieces per shift. At LYF, with this increased demand on the front end, we used to do a lot of hand packaging, but we knew the final pack code is your real throughput and your capacity of your operations. We went into extensive pilot production and brought our teams together in research, and they're custom designed a fully automated packaging line and really optimized it to our internal processes. This was manufactured and engineered over in Italy, and it was delivered to us over the Christmas break. Like Chantel said, it's being commissioned and fully operational in the next couple of months here. This Ferrari was humming at over 3,700 packages an hour when I was there on Friday. The need for 12+ employees hand packaging operation is no more. We've streamlined it down to having only two operators and having a massive volume of finished packaged goods. As we continue down this list quickly again. Pommies is, as we know, fully operational. We finally got our license, and now we're actively filling at a 100+ units per hour or per minute in our PET bottles, 355, and slim cans. This is really showing the execution in our brand strategy and fulfilling our B2B partner POs. Chantel briefly touched on, again, we have three dedicated, independent, fully automated pre-roll systems. These systems are unique because it gives our brands leverage when we go into the provincial board new listing discussions. Provincial boards need brands who can support SKUs to complete provincial distribution and really put our brands and products on shelf in every store. That is not easy to accomplish, and the market requires different sizes. We delivered on commercializing and installing three different systems. We can have 0.35 dog walkers, the 0.5-gram, and a 1-gram smoker's choice. We have all these systems dialed in, and the process is locked in. This has really aggressively allowed us to climb the sales charts and begin to own that market share with scalability, quality product, and being that low-cost leader in this pre-roll segment. One more touch on this one, the NitroTin, why this is an important line. Now that we have consumer-facing brands, we all know packaged flower pulls huge numbers in consumer sales. We decide to innovate, commission an automated premium flower packaging system, which uniquely injects nitrogen to remove the oxygen from the container right before we seal it up into the tin. This gives the consumer the best flower possible by retaining the terpenes, that freshness, the integrity of the premium flower that will be coming out through our brand, Contraband. Also this is unique because the packaging we designed is fully compliant, but also fully recyclable, which is a common ask from provincial boards, our retail partners, and all consumers to minimize that packaging waste at retail or sale level. Well, we cannot have this list of highly integrated and automated machinery. If you don't have the professionals behind it in place to commercialize these consumer-facing products. At Valens, we have tier one CPG talent in marketing, innovation, operations, and supply chain. We have dedicated teams in each one of these high-capacity facilities to ensure they run seamlessly. As you saw briefly on Chantale's slide, Kelowna operations went from 220 work orders and 90 pallets shipped in January 2021 to over 850 work orders and 290 pallets shipped in January 2022. Those are real numbers, and this is proving the operational successes and execution that we can accomplish. This is no easy feat, and Chantelle and our team has been planning for this, and we've put experts in place to manage this increased demand. Like, look at operations in Kelowna. Martin Becker, this guy came to us with 14 years of experience running operation in Natural Factors, which is one of North America's largest manufacturer of natural health products. Trust me, Martin knows what it takes to be on time and in full. As you quickly go down here, again, Pommies. Well, Nick and Lindsay Sutcliffe, they've been making beverages for 20+ years, and ciders, and other liquids. They have proven to be elite in the creation, the formulation, and they know how to get product in and out of the facility efficiently. That is what it takes in beverages. Let's touch on LYF. Well, no better team of confectionery and food specialists. Madam, Danny Mazub, and the other team members there have been producing goods for 25 years in the non-active world for confectionery orders and other baked goods for Costco and Walmarts and other big CPG distributors. Now that we have these dedicated facilities all within the Valens family, we have these professionals in the food space and pharma all entwined with the Valens OGs, who have the deepest passion for the plant to create these legacy mirroring products in quality and trends. Now that we all come together to create and brainstorm all these beautiful products and these great innovative products, and this is really how Valens has become an innovation powerhouse and a well-oiled machine in product development. As you can see, we are not learning. We've been building this with a CPG mindset, and we have the infrastructure, the people, and now the brands to showcase our hard work to market. Next slide, please. Well, I really went into quite a bit of detail on the new front end of innovation. This slide has a ton of information, as you can see. This is not gibberish. This is our 2022 targeted innovation product release strategy. As Adam was discussing, we have brands positioned to round up all consumers and give them a product to enjoy from Valens, whatever their budget is or whatever their preferred consumption method is, we have something for you. This roadmap is big. There's a lot of products in here. The team came together, and this took a massive effort to build and formulate and create all these new rec brands from concept, but now giving a complete rounded offering that's easy for our consumers and retailers to understand and drive us to become category leaders on day one. Just to go across this list here and highlight a few products in this roadmap because we seriously have some massive winners in here. Let's look at Versus. This is gonna be the next summer bang, the Super Lemon Haze 28 gram. This has recently launched in the OCS, and we really expect to see similar success like our first SKU in the market, BC God Bud, as you heard, reached tops of the charts in December. We all believe value doesn't mean poor quality. We hunted the market. Tyler and I went many places looking for this material, and we found the optimal bud to work in these SKUs. Once we found it, we executed on a supply contract, so we can continue to deliver this consumer favorite sativa across the country. Just quickly going through value. As you can see, 1-gram vape, high potency, low cost leaders under the Versus brand. Those will be a winner. Going across further. Edibles, the Mother Puckers. These are gonna be nice, sour soft chews, 10-milligram doses in a strawberry, peach, and apple. These are gonna be fantastic. Kinda new to market with that sour opportunity. These are gonna be big hits too. We've recently launched these out of the Pommies facility. These are the new Versus seltzers. Key lime, mango, black cherry. These new beverages are in a 355 ml can with a low caloric intake, low sugar content with just the perfect amount of flavor and a 10-milligram active dose of SōRSE technology, which will pack a punch, but deliver true value on a milligram basis at the market-penetrating price and a low-cost leader. Already we've seen some fantastic reviews, got some meh-to-awesome feedback since we launched this in retailers in OCS. This really proves again the infrastructure at Pommies is ready to take over top positions at this category. Highlighting some Citizen Stash here. This really has been one of my favorite brands to innovate and work with. We got to create some amazing line extensions, like you see the 14-gram offering of their top-selling strains, 3.5-14, with a nice slope to have added value for our consumers. We continue down through. We did new innovation in a MAC 1, a high potency, high terpene multi-pack infused pre-roll, also a 1-gram full-spectrum vape. We really look forward to continue building within this premium flower operational brand with delivering new strains and genetics through our Phenohunt initiative to really find us always the highest potency, the latest strains, and the unique buds to commercialize within Citizen Stash. The goal is to stand out in the sea of sameness and continue to build a rounded family of products to capture more consumer awareness. Like Adam said, Contraband is really focused on delivering that ultra-premium cannabis and high-value, high-margin products. It'd be great to see the recent comments. We'd launched the Candyland strain into the OCS a few weeks back, and it's been amazing reviews and success. We look to continue that through genetics from the Citizen Stash portfolio of Flapjacks and Platinum Cookies and Oreoz that were developed at the Citizen facility in Phenohunt to have the perfect bud size, the terpene profile, and a high-potency THC. We wanna deliver premium flower, premium vapes, and concentrate and value and give it to all the consumers, the Citizen Stash. Really looking forward to having brands in Contraband, ultra-premium, the brands for Citizen Stash, give them what people want, good quality cannabis and effective line extension products. When I look at initiatives and innovation initiatives, I always look how we can turn premium flower into higher value products and categories. As you see here, Valens went all in to grab market share in our platform to use a strong position in this new infused pre-roll category. We have a product in the value segment under Versus. It's a 1-gram pre-roll with infused 90% THC distillate. Consumers buy on high-potency products, and this product will deliver that. We have a MAC 1 infused pre-roll multi-pack. Check the box, multi-pack infused. Citizen Stash will deliver on that. You go into our premium category, Contraband, and this is the Big Willy series, a great product that consumers are gonna learn to love and grow within. This product starts off with premium cannabis and infused with live resin. Live resin is from fresh frozen flower. Meaning at harvest, we immediately froze it to capture all the volatile terpenes, and then we extracted it with our hydrocarbon platform to retain as many terpenes as possible and mix it in with premium flower. There really is no other experience like it. It's smooth, clean burning, and consumers will learn to love this. On this slide here, this data here in this new category is very appealing to Valens, and we're very well-positioned to gain significant market share and traction in the Canadian market. When you look at the recent California sales data, infused pre-rolls have represented 46% of all pre-roll sales in 2021. That's nearly 100% year-to-year growth in this category. While in Canada, the pre-roll market is currently sitting around CAD 80 million of monthly sales, according to the Hifyre data. We all know that we act very similar, and we react very similar to our friends down south of the border. This was no surprise to us at Valens that pre-rolls, infused pre-rolls are moving at this fast of an upward trajectory. We've been preparing ourselves and have the lowest cost resin ready with the highest quality extract and low cost to be able to infuse into our fully automated produced low-cost pre-rolls. While doing my math, having two of the largest platforms in the country in extraction and pre-roll manufacturing, plus the brand outlets to offer value, premium core, and ultra-premium products, I truly believe this will allow us to grab consumers at all buying levels in this newly innovative pre-roll, infused pre-roll category. Next slide, please. Well, we've all seen this slide here before. This is the SōRSE technology. We've been pounding the pavement for many years saying this is the best emulsion technology on the market, and we're proving why not all emulsion technology are created equal. In the recent months, we've seen consumers education really getting to understand product delivery mechanisms and their knowledge base to really advance. Now they're looking for repeatable experiences that have low sensory impact. That means no cannabis taste and no cannabis smell. They're also looking for technology and onset and deceleration offset-based products. You've seen products, quick and rapid, and all types of products come out, but none are personally as good and have the attributes of what SōRSE truly delivers, 3.0 efficacy. You can see on this chart here at the top on right-hand side, that is a failed emulsion. These happen in market today. This is when the sedimentation or the active compounds fall out of solution and gather at the top or the bottom of the aqueous environment or the beverage. This does not happen to SōRSE. SōRSE has multi-year stability data, meaning when you formulate a beverage, it can sit for a year or two, and when you open it, your first sip will be the same as your last sip. This gives the consumers control of their dosing, but also trust in the product and allow them to have a repeatable experience every time. When we analyze the other categories, like the dried flower and pre-rolls and vapes, you really experience the onset of the THC almost immediately. How can you compete with traditional edibles and beverages when you have an hour or two when you have to wait to feel the effect of that product? That is not a recreational experience, and it's very hard to have a social experience at a barbecue or a friend's house or having dinner. That just doesn't make sense to us. The SōRSE technology really changes that and allows consumers to enjoy that social atmosphere and consume products at their own pace. Slowly start, increase your volume, just like an alcohol-based beverage, where you have one beer, a glass of wine, and you feel it in minutes. That's what the SōRSE technology delivers. Efficacy, trust, repeatable, quick onset, and I believe our IP sets the stage for CPG for de-risk entry into the CBD and THC markets. We all know SōRSE was special. Over four years ago. We acquired it and been working with this technology ever since, developing new innovative products in THC and CBD. We love seeing consumers develop their knowledge and look for good technology in their edibles and beverages because nobody wants to have film on your teeth or a bitter taste in your mouth when consuming a natural health product or a recreational vice. All these processes and technologies really sets us up like a traditional CPG company with foundations in IP and manufacturing and brand support all across functional activities. This is also a plus on our other side of the business, B2B. Our top-tier licensed producers in our fewer, bigger, better model have access now to new products and new innovation they thought were unimaginable and unattainable before. Now I've personally got to work with multiple top five licensed producers on new gummy projects, chocolates, candies, concentrates, vapes, pre-rolls. This is really proving again why Valens is an innovation machine that not only make Valens brands top charts for many categories, but also will allow our strategic LP partners to grow within our platform and deliver supplemental revenue through our offerings and low-cost production practices. Valens has been building this foundation for many, many years, extraction, manufacturing, and now well-positioned brands. I was listening to a podcast last night, and Jeff Bezos had an interview after Amazon went from $116 to $6 overnight in that dot-com reckoning. He said, "The stock is not the company, and the company is not the stock." I say that because 2021 was an incredible year of growth at Valens, and I hope I gave some clarity on Valens has built the strongest CPG platform and backed it with an innovation go-to-market product strategy to win in this recreational space. We prepared and positioned ourselves perfectly for the boom of this OTC CBD market when this regulation change occurs. I wanna thank you all for tuning in today, and I wanna pass it to you, Jeff Fallows, our President, to continue on our commercial plans. Great. Thanks, Quinn. When we look at the opportunity for CBD in the U.S., it continues to be very compelling. While growth moderated between 2021 and 2022, with the market facing COVID closures and other logistical challenges, two key advantages have arisen for Valens. Number one, a number of the smaller, less sophisticated players have started to leave or are being forced out, and we're starting to see the early signs of a market transition from what was a crowded, undefined market of approximately 3,500 companies to a smaller set of more disciplined competitors. With approximately 2,000 competitors today, there's still much more thinning to come, but the progress is encouraging. Number two, consumers are getting more educated, and demand is shifting to the larger, more established brands like Green Roads. In short, quality, consistency, and innovation are starting to break through the cloud of misinformation and promotion that was the hallmark of an industry in the early stages of its development. Finally, with Green Roads' cGMP manufacturing capabilities, strict testing and quality requirements, and greater regulatory clarity on the horizon, timing has never been better for Valens to push its CBD-based health and wellness strategy into the U.S. market and to take an outsized share of what is forecasted to be a $14.8 billion market by 2026. When we look at the market, the Green Roads brand continues to perform well with very little investment over the last two years as the company dealt with COVID and went through a protracted sale process. Retailers and consumers continue to know and trust the Green Roads brand. More importantly, it continues to have strong ability to convert both awareness and consideration to purchase. Lastly, Green Roads has one of the highest sales per retailer where the brand is sold. Or said another way, it's a good thing for retailers to have on the shelf. As we look to 2022, all of these factors provide a very exciting base for us as we look to invest heavily in the brand to help it reach its full potential and capture market share. We have been busy since acquiring the Green Roads brand in June of 2021, and our U.S. team is focused on six key initiatives in preparation for what we believe will be a breakout year in 2022. Firstly, we wanted to differentiate and maximize the strength of the Green Roads brand. To this end, the U.S. team developed a solutions-based approach to selling that simplifies the consumer buy decision and allows us to interact with them every day. More specifically, it takes away the complexity associated with dosing and format, and simply allows the consumer to judge how they feel or what health benefit they're looking for. More on that in the coming slides. Secondly, we did a distribution channel review and alignment. The market has shifted and so has where consumers look for CBD-based health and wellness products. We needed to make sure we had the right products at the right price point in the right channel. Third, we did a full portfolio review and rationalization. A simplified portfolio with greater focus on targeted areas and solutions which brought new formats and pricing strategies designed specifically for each channel. Fourth, we have an enhanced online infrastructure. We believe Green Roads now has one of the most prolific online infrastructures in the CBD space. Number five, team support and build-out. Key positions and experience were identified to support the already strong team at Green Roads to drive the go-forward strategy. Lastly, leveraging cross-platform collaboration to drive value. Cross-border relationships have been introduced to drive new B2B business, while operational and supplier challenges were solved to manage target volumes. On January 18th, we were very excited to launch our first ever brand campaign called Own the Day. This campaign was based on many months of work by our U.S. team and introduced our new solutions-based strategy to the market. As discussed on the previous page, solution selling strips away the complexity surrounding CBD purchase and lays out a clear pathway for the consumer on how to best utilize Green Roads products. Products that have been custom formulated by our in-house team and include a number of other well-known ingredients which provide a holistic solution to the targeted consumer needs. As you can see on this slide, we have focused on six key areas where we believe Green Roads products can add the most value. If you're looking for sleep, increased clarity and sharpness, stress relief, relaxation, or pain management products, we believe you can do more than just get through the day. We believe you can own it, and we've set up the Green Roads portfolio to help you get there. Ultimately, this approach represents more than just a brand campaign. It's the core of our health and wellness strategy in the U.S. and sets the objectives and focus of our U.S. business that will guide all of our channel, product, format, and pricing decisions going forward. Our U.S. business has three pathways to market: retail, online, and B2B. There are a few key things to note on this slide. Firstly, each path offers real opportunity for growth in 2022. That said, and as you will see on the next few pages, the drivers of that growth will be different in each channel and considerable care must and will be taken to ensure we are driving the efficiencies and coordination required to ensure we are realizing the synergies of this three-prong approach. Secondly, you will notice that we expect the online business to realize outsized growth compared to our retail business. After several years of investment and planning, our online infrastructure is now ready to be the primary driver of growth. Thirdly, the Own the Day brand campaign will set a consistent tone across both our retail and online businesses, but product forms and offerings will allow enough differentiation and opportunity for our retail partners to ensure we continue to drive value for them as they remain a critical piece of our strategy. Lastly, there is real opportunity to leverage our existing relationships and build out a compelling white label or B2B business that will improve our asset utilization, support margins, and potentially make some material revenue contributions in 2022. Also provided on this slide is a high-level breakdown of the product forms we believe will drive our revenues in 2022. You will note that the continued regulatory change has the potential to fundamentally change this breakdown and create material demand for Green Roads products, particularly as food and mass and chain pharmacies get more comfortable with ingestibles such as gummies and other products. When we look at the retail business and the best pathway to grow our revenues in the brick-and-mortar world, the first step was to take a critical look at all of our selling channels and ensure we were targeting the right channels to best position our solutions. The game has changed in the CBD market in the U.S. There was a time when all you had to do was say CBD, and you were able to secure a sale. Now you need a tight message with full alignment between your products, formats, and pricing strategies. You wouldn't look to sell a $200 bottle of CBD oil in the convenience channel, for example. Consumers there are more focused on smaller format offerings at a much lower price point. The second step was to capitalize on existing relationships. We currently sell through over 7,000 doors, and as many more of our previous customers awake from the COVID hibernation, we have been very pleased with their receptivity to re-engaging with Green Roads, and more importantly, in many cases, expanding our relationship based on our new solutions-based offering. Lastly, we identified and targeted new channels and relationships best positioned to expand Green Roads' presence in the market and to benefit from the product offering we have available. Over on the right side of the slide, you will see a few of the channels we are approaching. Sorry, a few of the channels we utilize and how we are approaching them. To highlight independent pharmacies, for example, we have had much success, and that channel is ideally suited for the product form that we have available at Green Roads. Our intent there is to defend our currently strong position and grow the revenues there. By contrast, our offerings in the food and mass are the early stage. We have some small inroads into various food retail outlets like Publix, but our objective for 2022 is to take that existing presence and expand it greatly. Behind and in coordination with our brand campaign, we put the finishing touches on what we believe is the most sophisticated online strategies in the CBD space. There are many tools available in the online world, and they all need to be coordinated. Search, affiliates, email, social, and programmatic bidding need to all work together for one simple purpose, to drive consumers to our website and secure a sale. You can imagine that the best way to reach consumers will vary depending on how much they know about CBD, how much they know about Green Roads, and what stage of the buy decision they are at. This will also vary over time. What attracts target interest in the morning may not be the same thing that works at night. Not only do you need to know that this situation can exist in the online world, you also need to know how to adapt to it. At the same time, you must maintain a consistent brand presence each time you interact with existing or potential customers online. With this in mind, our U.S. team has built up an incredible technical and brand infrastructure that was launched in January in coordination with the Own the Day campaign, which is already seeing strong results in its first few weeks since launch. For example, Facebook and Instagram have reached more than 13 million users and achieved more than 40 million impressions. Our organic web sessions are up by more than 15%, and the conversion rate in our website is also growing. Quite impressive given the limited amount of time this program has been in market. With that, I'll now pass it over to Sunil. Sunil? Thanks, Jeff. By way of introduction, my name is Sunil Gandhi, and I joined Valens as a CFO in May 2021. I'm very excited to be a part of this team and also have the opportunity to share the details of what you can expect to see at Valens in 2022 and beyond. To get started, I wanted to illustrate the impact of the transformed business model on our revenue profile. As we start 2022, our revenue is largely anticipated to be driven by our own brands in both Canada and the U.S. As highlighted earlier in the material, we have an exciting stable of Valens own brands, combined with some strategic partner brands such as A1 and LivRelief, which are leading brands in their respective segments. Combined, we anticipate provincial sales to contribute between 40% and 50% of overall revenues. In addition, the Green Roads business is expected to generate between 25% and 35% of revenue, leading to approximately three-quarters of our revenue in 2022 being generated from company-owned branded products. For Green Roads, it should also be noted that this exciting CBD brand in the U.S. also has the platform to grow significantly in international markets. Now moving over to the right side of the page, B2B. It is a smaller percentage of revenues versus our historical base, but it is still a very meaningful contribution to our overall revenue picture as we focus. This is comprised of our labs business, where we provide testing services to third-party LPs, as well as the financial benefits associated with the Pommies brand, the alcohol beverage cider Pommies brand, which has been manufactured at a third-party co-packer since acquisition. Now that we have discussed how our revenue profile has been transformed, I'd like to share some details about how we intend to drive synergy and optimize our cost structure across the business in 2022. The initiatives behind the grow and optimize phase of our strategy are well underway, as we have already identified and are in process of implementing CAD 10 million in annual cost efficiencies through a combination of operational process improvements, reductions in manufacturing sourcing costs, and organizational realignment and realization of M&A strategy synergies. Furthermore, we are targeting an additional CAD 10 million in annual cost savings as well as another CAD 5 million-CAD 10 million in cash flow through a combination of tighter working capital management and the monetization of surplus or non-strategic assets. As we capture the first wave of cost efficiencies in the Valens business, we'd like to share the three core areas as the source of these savings. Number one, organizational realignment and M&A synergies expected to contribute between CAD 2 million and CAD 4 million. This really comes from the elimination of overlap management or back-office support functions, as well as the centralization of certain activities to Kelowna. The second area is through optimization of sourcing of our input costs, which is expected to drive an additional CAD 3 million-CAD 4 million in annual savings through leveraging our increased buying power as a fully integrated and consolidated business. Thirdly, the impact of automation and process improvement efforts is expected to contribute an additional CAD 3 million-CAD 4 million. This essentially serves to drive down labor costs while also increasing overall throughput. Overall, we are expecting the impact of the first CAD 10 million in cost efficiencies to be reflected as approximately a 60/40 split between the COGS and SG&A lines of our P&L. This summary demonstrates the progress made by Valens as it relates to integrating all of our previous acquisitions. On average, our goal is to fully integrate a business over the course of a 12-24 month period. Pommies is complete, Life is almost complete, while Verse and Citizen Stash are progressing at a very rapid pace. Green Roads is also progressing in line with expectations, understanding that the platform and location of the Green Roads business result in a more standalone approach for the business model versus our other acquisitions in Canada. The key point here is that the best is yet to come. We are on track to realize the benefits of these acquisitions from both a revenue and cost synergy perspective in 2022. Now, as previously mentioned, we are anticipating to drive significant cost efficiencies by leveraging our buying power across our input costs. This strategy is most apparent in how we manage the sourcing of biomass, which is the Valens Company's most significant input cost. As we drive towards a CPG or branded business model in 2022, we are evolving to a demand-driven supply chain as it relates to sourcing biomass from a diversified network of growers. This is expected to have two key impacts. One, the centralization of purchasing activities as part of our integration process is expected to increase the company's buying power. Secondly, balancing the approach between longer-term contract growing arrangements with low-cost producers and opportunistic spot buying will be designed to ensure consistency of supply at predictable prices. The third area that we discussed around cost efficiencies will be through leveraging an enhanced level of automation and process improvement across the business. This is expected to drive a positive impact as follows. One, reduce labor costs through less reliance on manual labor. Secondly, increased production throughput, ultimately allowing Valens to drive higher revenue over the existing cost base. Third, higher OTIF rates, which is a key customer service metric with the provincial distributors and retailers. Higher production speeds and increased consistency is expected to reduce missed sales opportunities and maximize the value of our strong distribution footprint. Last, but definitely not least, the optimization of inventory levels, which will improve the overall efficiency of our operating facilities as well as lead to improvements in working capital management. Now, if I could turn to where the Valens Company expects to see improvement in working capital management. The first area is in our accounts receivable balances. Our expectation is that our accounts receivable balances as a percentage of revenue will gradually decline over the course of the year as the revenue stream continues to tilt towards the retail and D2C channels versus the legacy B2B channel. Inventory is also another area where improvement is expected. Our current balances have been elevated as the company was required to build inventory for new product launches such as Versus and the Contraband products and the entrance into the flower segment. Over the course of 2022, we anticipate our inventory balances normalizing with a target of around 90 days on hand by the end of the year. This chart illustrates our rates of capital expenditure over the last few years. What you can clearly see is that there was a lot of heavy lifting from 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. The great news is that the big lifting and the heavy spending is behind us as we are now focused on automation. This will ultimately help to improve our capital burn rates towards our capital positive picture that we envision happening. The key takeaway from this business plan is that we have a clearly defined and executable pathway to profitability and positive cash flow. Our expectation is that we will achieve positive EBITDA by Q4 2022 through strong revenue growth and margin expansion. In addition, the key ingredients are also in place for Valens to reduce the current level of cash burn on track towards positive cash flow. This is based on the following elements. Improved profitability, improvements in working capital management, and reduced capital expenditures. With that, I'd like to turn it back over to Jeff. Thanks, Sunil Gandhi. As we near the end of our presentation, we need to take the conversation back to our ability to generate shareholder value. While the Canadian cannabis sector rolled over in 2021 and our share price has not been immune to this challenge, we have not taken our eyes off the ball and believe the strategic moves we made last year and the business plan we have outlined here today will drive outsized shareholder value in the long term. At the risk of being a bit repetitive, the four key areas we discussed today are, number one, investing in strategically important and high-return assets. From a revenue per dollar invested perspective, we at Valens continue to outperform our peers. Number two, Adam and Quinn talked about their strategies for driving revenue growth through industry-leading products and innovation. Three, entry into the flower market with both flower and pre-roll SKUs has greatly increased our total addressable market and provided real opportunity for outsize growth. Lastly, as discussed by Chantale, increased operational outputs and efficiencies through higher asset utilization and automation are expected to drive real value into 2022. While we in the cannabis sector have not been immune to the age-old adage that a rising tide rises all ships, and conversely, a receding tide lowers them, Valens continues to trade at a significant discount to our industry peers. When we took a critical look at ourselves against those peers, there were several key areas that stood out and which, as we've already discussed, we are starting to address, including things like entering the flower space to increase our TAM and launching a portfolio of brands. Still, there is more work for us to do, and we've highlighted a few of the key areas. Firstly, increasing our exposure to the much larger U.S. market. We put this into three separate buckets and are investigating strategies for each. Firstly, supporting and growing our U.S. CBD business and our Green Roads brand with investment and our acquisitions in strategic areas such as gummy and other manufacturing. Two, expansion into other CPG opportunities that will better position our North American cannabis offering as regulatory changes and federal legalization occur, such as beverage and other opportunities. And three, launching a U.S. THC strategy in full compliance with our Nasdaq and TSX listing obligations. The second factor to highlight is our acceleration down a pathway to profitability. As you have seen with our integration initiatives announced last week, we are taking an aggressive approach to our cost structure and processes to ensure we maximize the opportunity we saw in the four acquisitions we did last year. Positive EBITDA is in our sights, and we are laser focused on getting there. We developed this slide not as a way to provide guidance on our trading multiple, but rather as a way to articulate the stepping stones in closing the value gap, the valuation gap with our peers. When we look at the steps to get there, the first to focus on is fundamentals. The Canadian market is experiencing a storm of change, and as discussed by both Tyler and Everett, we expect up to 25% of market share to be up for grabs in 2022. As our strategy begins to distance ourselves from those that will not survive in the market, we believe our multiple will expand. Secondly, revenue. Almost universally, higher growth companies trade at higher multiples. As such, as we demonstrate the growth we've been targeting with the repositioning of our business and recent acquisitions, and the pathway to that growth becomes more visible and credible, we believe there will be margin expansion. We have also come out and said we believe revenue of a minimum of CAD 225 million and an EBITDA margin of greater than 10% are achievable in 2023. This sets a bar for our shareholders to judge us against as we progress through the coming quarters. Positive EBITDA, it's time for profitability, and those that deliver will rise and deserve higher multiples. Lastly, the U.S. As we've discussed on the previous slide, we have our eyes wide open towards U.S. opportunities and will not be shy about pushing into that market. Lastly, on the slide you'll note the arrow for scale and liquidity. This is really a self-fulfilling prophecy. As we deliver on our business objectives and drive a higher multiple, both our scale and our liquidity are also expected to increase. This momentum will drive additional momentum as scale begets scale and liquidity begets liquidity. We anticipate that this reality will offer a strong undertone against our business objectives in the market. With that, I'll turn the call back over to our CEO, Tyler Robson. Tyler? Perfect. Thanks, Jeff. We've now reached the point for Q&A, so I'll turn it over to the operator for Q&A. Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question today, please press star one from your telephone keypad, and a confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. We do have our first question coming from the line of Andrew Partheniou with Stifel Nicolaus. Please proceed with your questions. Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking the questions and thanks for the detailed presentation. Maybe the first question here, you know, you gave really good information and breakdown on the impressive listings that you've won. You know, you've launched Versus and Contraband just recently. Could you give us a sense of, you know, what's your facility utilization looking like now, and what was it previously? How many SKUs were launched recently or in the last quarter or two, and how many are left to be launched to fully capitalize on your listing wins? So a couple of questions on that. Absolutely. Thanks for that. I'm gonna actually pass that one to Chantel Popoff to answer. Thank you very much for the question. In terms of capacity utilization, we are near capacity on our pre-roll lines. However, we have a lot of capacity still on the edibles and beverage lines. Both of those facilities are running on a single shift currently, so ability to add double shift as well as 24/7 production capabilities. In terms of SKU count, one year ago, actually, I can just give you even growth projections. One year ago, we were essentially looking at 190 SKUs. We are currently producing essentially 300 SKUs plus, looking to have approximately 450 SKUs, and that's full SKU breakdown, so one SKU per province, by the time we are completing 2022. Because of excise stamping from a production and operations standpoint, we treat every province and every provincial listing as an independent SKU. Andrew, it's just Everett here. That is noted on the SKU numbers on the slide. Those are just individual products across provinces. Those are the same. It's just that was per province, Chantale said. Perfect. Thank you for that. You know, there was a comment during the presentation discussing the potential deregulation of CBD. I know Health Canada was undergoing a review that I think might have started in late last year. Just wondering if you had any visibility on that, what your thoughts are surrounding that, or when we could know more. Yeah. Thanks for the question. I'll kick that one to Everett. Obviously, you guys, we're working this through as an industry like the Cannabis Council of Canada. We sit on that as well as others. It's a lobbying effort, but if you wanna compete with the U.S., it's obviously a way that everyone knows we need to go. I think this is not tomorrow, and we're working through this. We'll give updates throughout the years. This is probably more of a 2023 initiative transparently to the market. I think the excitement, as we know, always lays the groundwork this year. I think the meetings that are ongoing and obviously what we're pushing from that standpoint is happening live. From my perspective, it's not if it happens, it's when, right? I think this is the journey we're on. Thanks for that. Maybe just on the 2022 business plan, Sunil. You know, you outlined very detailed you know, your plans and how you're planning to get there with even cadence here. I'm just wondering on the assumptions that you're making here. Could you give us a little bit more color on those assumptions that you're making? In particular, are you making any assumptions on when shipping costs are expected to normalize that I think maybe Chantale discussed earlier on in the presentation and essentially elevated costs due to COVID. Thanks for the question. Yeah, obviously when we're forecasting our results out, we are basing it off a degree of assumptions. When it comes to things like the normalization of the supply chain, we would anticipate and hope that would normalize by the second half of the fiscal year. That would be where our assumptions are based on. Thanks very much for that. I'll get back in the queue. Thanks. Our next question is on the line of Frederico Gomes with ATB Capital Markets. Please proceed with your questions. Good afternoon, guys. Thank you for taking my questions. Just on Green Roads and the U.S. CBD market, you know, very fragmented still. I'm just curious on what are your expectations for that segment in terms of pricing and margins? You know, obviously margins there are much higher than Canada right now, but what are you seeing in terms of pricing going forward? Thank you. Yeah. As we're realigning the portfolio down there and as we chatted about putting the right products into the right channels, obviously there's different formats that are gonna be used to achieve those different price points. We're not seeing any material impact on margins in the short term. You know, we continue to think with the quality and the consistency and the brand presence that Green Roads has, that we're gonna be able to continue to command strong price points in the market. Obviously that's something we keep in mind, and we wanna make sure that our products are competitively positioned and priced appropriately to make sure that we're driving the volumes we anticipate. Okay. Thank you. In terms of your brand, you know, you mentioned you plan on bringing new brands to market, and according to your slides, you're also competing pretty much in all segments of the market, all categories. I'm just curious, how does that impact your B2B strategy, you know, considering that you're effectively, you know, competing with some of your clients for some of those market segments? Thank you. Yeah. It's a great question. You know, we're excited to keep working with specific B2B partners that see the value in the capabilities that we can help them bring their strategies to life. You know, it works really well because it's not actually, in our view, sort of a direct competitive landscape. It's us helping our partners execute their strategy, and then we execute our own strategy. We think it works quite well. It's Everett Knight there. I think to add to it too is the speed to market that we bring is really a complement to both players, right? A lot of players take a year to launch a product, we can launch it in three months, it helps them, and it's a win-win. Obviously, each of us is targeting different brands in the marketplace. I think it's a complement to that platform. Okay. Thank you, Everett. Maybe just one last question for me. Your sales mix, you know, coming from your CAD 275 million sales guidance in 2023, you know, how much of that is coming from Green Roads, you know, B2B, B2C in Canada, and is there anything coming from international sales outside of Canada and the U.S.? Thank you. Sure, it's Everett here. I'll start. I think it's gonna be a similar mix that you see to 2022. I think you're gonna see a little bit better forecasting near the end of the year. We have some initiatives, especially on the U.S. side, that could make it a much larger percentage going into 2023 from a growth standpoint. Federico, I'd say we'll give you more guidance as the year, but I'd say the good base is the projections we have for 2022, and with obviously some growth in U.S. and international. Okay. Appreciate it. Thanks, Everett. I'll hop back to you. The next question comes from the line of Gerald Pascarelli with Cowen. Please proceed with your question. Hi, team. Thank you very much for taking the questions, and thanks for the detailed presentation. I'd like to just start with Green Roads. I think one of the slides, it had mix going from 35% e-com to 60% e-com. Presumably, that's going to come with inherent gross margin and positive mix benefits. But I was just hoping that you could take a moment to talk about what's happening at the retail landscape. You know, some of the other CBD companies have not, even though they're facing favorable comps, performance within retail hasn't been what it's been in traditional consumer CPG. Just trying to get some color on what you're seeing at the retail level specifically, are you seeing improvements? Have you seen anything in California in particular, given that it seems like a pretty big distribution white space opportunity for the industry, given the passage of AB 45? Thank you. Yeah. Great. Thanks. As we said in sort of the presentation remarks, you know, what we're seeing from a retail level as we start to reapproach some of our existing relationships with our solution-based approach has been quite positive to the receptivity. Also, in terms of sort of the demand profile, again, early days, but we're starting to see more demand start to get driven from those efforts. Clearly, there has been a change, right? As we noted, for example, you know, early days saw a lot of CBD going through the smoke and vape channel, for example, right? As the market has matured and consumers have got more educated on what CBD is and how it should be used, you know, that their channel of choice for CBD products, you know, obviously migrates to more of the independent pharmacies, et cetera. But what we're seeing in the smoke and vape one is looking for the new product forms, the new opportunities, the latest and greatest, and with the innovation pipeline and the in-house expertise we have at Green Roads, you know, we're gonna be bringing some pretty exciting products to market there as well. From a performance perspective, we're initially encouraged by what we're seeing, especially as the market wakes up down there. As far as we see, you know, the retail opportunity is quite a viable one for Green Roads and our product portfolio. Yeah. Just to kinda add on that, I think it's really doubling down on the channel strategy. Doing less things, but doing the things you're really focused on better than everyone else. When you look at the grocery channel or the independent pharmacy channel, what you're gonna see out of the Green Roads team is a much more strategic approach to channel strategy. The one thing I'll comment now is we won't be everything for everybody, but what you'll see is a very methodical, well-thought-out plan to get into our channel strategy, which will unfold over 2022. Got it. Super helpful. Thank you. Going back to one of your other revenue drivers, your B2B manufacturing partnerships. Obviously, you've done a good job with rationalizing to go to higher quality operators. Is the five out of seven the right number as we look at 2022 and beyond? Or is that an area of your business that you will continue to look to grow, you know, over time, understanding that you are obviously pivoting to more of a finished goods business model? Yeah. Absolutely. When you look at the number, I don't know if five is accurate. I think five is the right number for today when we looked at optimizing our portfolio and infrastructure. As we continue to optimize and automate, I think we'll open more capacity. I do intend that number to go up in strategic verticals, whether it is, again, beverage, we might have some more vape. There's a few strategic relationships will bring, but not only from LPs outside of the space. I'll throw it over to Adam to add on. Yeah. It's a great question. I mean, I don't think there's a magic number necessarily. I think it'll come down to where we can add value for a B2B partner and where they can, you know, potentially fill a capacity opening that we might have or help us drive just utilization generally across some of the verticals Tyler referenced. I think we will be specific about not, you know, doing all segments necessarily for all partners. I think, you know, we'll be nimble about what makes sense at a given time. You know, for us, it makes a lot of sense to focus on things like beverage and edibles, so we're excited about those categories for sure. Got it. Thank you very much. Just last one from me, and apologies if I missed this. I know you had a slide on CapEx, but in light of your cost initiatives, the CAD 10 million that you're targeting for 2022, are there any investments that are going to be required to generate these efficiencies that we should be mindful of? Again, if you mentioned something, apologies if I had missed it, on the CapEx slide. Thanks for the question. This is Sunil speaking. First thing, just a point of clarity. We have identified CAD 10 million and we're targeting an additional CAD 10 million. It's a full target of CAD 20 million in cost efficiencies. As it relates to expenditures required to deliver upon that, they're already in play. In some cases they've already been executed. In other cases they are still coming on board. Where you can see that though is when you look at that CapEx slide back on the presentation, it's still a far less significant amount of investment relative to obviously the real heavy lifting, which was commissioning both the K2 facilities and the Pommies facility. It's a fraction of what it would've been in the prior years. Understood. Thank you very much for the color, and I will hop back into the queue. Thank you. The next question is from the line of Shaan Mir with Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your questions. Hi, good afternoon, and thank you for taking my questions. The first one's just based off some of the data platforms that we subscribe to. It seems as though the beverage category as a whole is seeing a bit of a tapering in its growth. Just wanted to see what anecdotes you could provide on this segment, given that it's likely to become a larger focus area with the onboarding of the Pommies facility. Maybe if you could talk to some of the positive developments or catalysts you'd be looking for from a regulatory perspective or otherwise to really drive the penetration in that segment. It's Adam here. Thanks for the question. You know, we're feeling very bullish about beverage. I think, you know, there's multi-pronged way that we're looking at it. You know, I think when consumers are getting into the category, we definitely view beverage as a way that's permissible for people to get into the category, especially if they are entering the recreational category in Canada. In the U.S., we think that there's opportunity to expand and have beverage play a meaningful role within our CBD strategy. You know, we talked generally about our optimism for OTC availability of CBD in Canada, and that's another area that really we think will be meaningful for beverage. You know, the idea of being able to go into, you know, a convenience store in Canada and find a, you know, recovery lineup of CBD beverages or something functional like that, if and when it's allowed, we think could be quite meaningful. You know, for us, beverage will definitely be a key focus area, and we think the long-term growth is quite meaningful. Yeah, just to kind of bolt onto that, I don't think anyone's done beverage well, and I think that's one of the biggest things we need to pay attention to. When you look at low caloric intake, rapid onset, rapid offset, even the resealable can that we have in Canada, we think there's a ton of low-hanging fruit that other companies in beverage haven't been able to deliver on. I think even in the current infrastructure, you will see Valens win beverages. Thank you for the color there. Just pivoting a bit for my second question. This relates more to the cost minimization strategy or the CAD 10 million or CAD 20 million of costs that are planned to be stripped out over the year. I was just wondering if you could detail the portfolio rationalization component of that a bit more. I know that you mentioned that you're gonna push further into edibles, transdermals, and other form factors of that nature. But could you help to detail, I mean, some of the categories that you expect to be most impacted by the rationalization process? If that otherwise, what categories you think will see a bit of a thinning? Thanks. Yeah, no, great question. It's Adam here again. We'll probably be more selective in certain categories. You know, we didn't talk a lot about oils today. We didn't talk a lot about topicals outside of referencing our key partner brand in LivRelief. I think, you know, we'll be selective probably in those areas. As we work with the provincial boards to bring on new innovation, it naturally comes with, you know, a full category mindset to say, "Look, there's obviously some things that are probably less efficient in our portfolio." We'll constantly be doing an assessment of the efficiency of individual items. That generally will have as kind of an ongoing way to manage the portfolio. I don't think there'll be a sudden stop of, "Hey, we're not gonna make XYZ anymore." I think other than us being, you know, very purposeful about, like I said, we didn't talk about oils or topicals at, in any great length. Hopefully that gives some color. Thank you. That's it for my questions. I'll pass it along. Thank you. Next question is coming from the line of Neal Gilmer with Haywood Securities. Please proceed with your questions. Yeah, good afternoon or morning, depending on where you are. Thanks for the detailed presentation. Maybe on the guidance that you guys talked about, the, you know, greater than 10% EBITDA margins for 2023, is that assuming CAD 20 million of the synergies or that's assuming the 10 that you've already identified and the, you know, the other 10 that you're targeting, could provide further margin expansion opportunities? Yeah, that would absolutely be assuming the realization of the full CAD 20 million by the end of this fiscal year on an annual- Of the full 20. Okay. Then on one of the slides there, you sort of had this chart of, I guess it was revenue growth, and I think it was gross margin growth and therefore translating EBITDA growth, a fairly sort of steady but modest growth over the course of 2022. These synergies that you're you know expecting to accomplish this year, would we see you know sort of a jump up on the gross margin line into 2023? I guess really what I'm trying to get at or better understand is you know as you get to that full optimization rate, do you have some sort of mindset as to what range of gross margins would look like in that state? Sure. I mean, I think the realization of the optimization will fully materialize by Q4, right? That will become the new run rate or the benchmark for 2023. We expect to see a steady climb in our gross margin levels over the course of the fiscal year, this year, as we continue to generate more and more of that optimization plan. In terms of guidance on gross margins, you know, typically, I think we're definitely looking at more than half of our benefit of the realization of optimization to go through the COGS line. If you take our current rate and then generate over 60% of the savings on that, you could probably start to get a framework for how to model out 2023. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I saw that, what you walked through there on one of those slides. Okay, that's the questions for me. Thanks, guys. Next question is coming from the line of John Chu with Desjardins. Please proceed with your question. Hi, good afternoon. My first question is just on trying to understand the balance between contract growing and using your leverage of buying the biomass on the open market. I'm just trying to understand, especially with you saying prices are still trending downward, how do you balance between contract growing where the margin's probably gonna be a bit fixed and lower versus the buying in the open market where prices are still going down and where presumably the margins are going to be better for you there? Maybe just give me an outline of how you see that playing out in 2022. Yeah, I'm not gonna go into too much detail because that's kind of the magic behind the scenes, and that's why I think we're so competitive. I would say the best way to look at it is when you really play in the premium segment with strain specific, that's mostly gonna be contracted out coming down to the core offering, which will be a mix of spot buys and limited time offerings as well as contract growth. When you really get into the value segment and/or extraction, all of those will be on spot transactions where again, we can offer attractive payment terms and undercut everybody else and again, play quarters. When you look at the price we're paying for biomass and the consistency with how oversaturated the market is for value cannabis, we can be completely lucrative on that opportunity. It's a mix depending on the core offering that we're going after with premium all contracted out and value spot transactions. John, just maybe to add on that, we view it as more of a pathway, right? You start with the contraction we're forecasting into this year. Obviously, spot purchases would benefit us. Now, what you're doing is I think at the end of the year, you see more contract growth as you go into 2023. This is gonna be a constant theme for us evaluating the market. We have literally the best data because we're the largest purchaser of biomass. This is a nimble time period. Some of the contract growth that we put into place, especially with Citizen Stash growing previously from CAD 3.25 to 3.50, we're bringing that much lower, and that comes on in the back half of the year and others. I think we're already starting that process through. Okay, great. There was an interesting chart in terms of just all the various different form factors and Valens looking to play in each of the pricing tiers, premium, core, and value. From my perspective, there seems to be distinct pricing tiers on the flower side. I'm wondering to what extent has there been distinct pricing tiers on really the other form factors. For example, beverages or even on the edibles. Is there really that distinction building where you're seeing that just because the markets are still pretty underdeveloped. I'm just wondering, is that really a big focus right now, or is that kind of more a grandiose plan looking to attack all three pricing tiers for some of the smaller product categories. John, it's Adam. Great question, and you're absolutely right. I mean, there's definitely a much more defined price range when it comes to dried flower, when you look at, you know, value, core, and premium as consumer price segments. It's less defined, at least in our view right now, it's less defined across some of the other form factors. What I'd say is that we believe though is that you can, we can still generate a very clear, you know, consumer pattern of purchase though, based on the pricing strategy of specific products. I'll give you an example. With beverages, there's definitely a consumer that would be willing and interested to have a more full-flavored, complex beverage potentially, whether it be sessionable at low dose or higher dose, THC. That consumer, you know, we know that they're willing to pay a little bit more. There's also gonna be that heavier rec consumer in beverage that wants that high THC, and they're gonna want it at a really accessible price. We believe, you know, that is a distinctive way to look at the pricing. A little bit less defined in non-flower categories, but it definitely still exists. There's still a very clear consumer pattern of purchase dependent upon the price of the form factor. Okay, great. Maybe one last quick question. I think Sunil talked about the significant drop in the CapEx, but Jeff talked about investing significantly into Green Roads in the U.S. Maybe Jeff, can you just talk about what kind of significant increase in spending we might see? I'm assuming it's advertising promotion and then expanding the reach, I guess. Like, is there a quantifiable number in terms of seeing a significant jump in that kind of spending in 2022? Yeah, thanks. In all the spending that we're talking about, the significant spending was the investment in the brand and the marketing strategies. Obviously, the U.S. market is completely different than the Canadian market in terms of the approach you're allowed to take in reaching the consumer. You know, while we're not giving guidance on specifically the amount for competitive reasons, John, and the amount of money that we'll be putting to work from investing in the brand portfolio, what I can say is it's absolutely gonna represent the vast majority of our marketing and advertising spend in 2022. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Our next question is from the line of Doug Meyer with RBC Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question. Thank you. First question has to do with those infused pre-rolls. I thought that was an interesting slide, and it appears to be a fairly significant opportunity. Could you talk about how you expect that market to develop over the next, say, three years in Canada? And given your capabilities, you know, what's the potential share that you could have relative to your competitors in that market? Yeah, Doug, thanks for the question. Obviously, infused pre-rolls is a huge market segment, and it's really just starting to gain momentum. If you look at the market share opportunities itself, it has a meaningful role. Obviously, you see the basic pre-roll start to come off, and the infused pre-roll really starting to gain momentum. I'm not gonna give specific market share targets yet because we're not sure exactly how it plays out. What I will say is Valens is best positioned in Canada to take advantage of that opportunity. When you look at infused pre-roll, we can infuse it with live resin or anything in the hydrocarbon portfolio, distillate and winterized or even hash. So when you look at the form factors we can offer, no one else can compete with us at the optionality. depending on how Canadian consumption trends, we'll be able to take advantage of it. I don't think we're gonna give specifics on market share. Adam, I don't know if you wanna add on. Yeah. The only thing I would add on to is this has been received with a lot of energy from provincial partners. This is definitely gonna be a very meaningful piece of new innovation that we're excited about. Doug, it's Everett here. We're happy to provide kind of more progress on it. We've obviously been as transparent as we could with investors given the full playbook, but we wanna keep some stuff close to the chest, so we'll be giving more hints on this as you go out on what's the infusion, when it's coming to market. I think you see the plan. I think the timing we wanna leave as a bit of surprise. Okay. Just as it relates to these types of products, are there some technical manufacturing know-how that could prevent other companies from coming to market? Or, is this sort of going to be also a wide open space for your competitors? That's a really great question, Doug. The one thing that essentially puts us, you know, apart from any other LP in terms of innovation is the know-how and the intelligence and the onboard experience that our team has. Although there's no necessary equipment that can hold people back from entering, you know, similar categories or having similar competitive SKUs, it's actually figuring out how to use that equipment with cannabis. The one thing that we've noticed, you know, over the past three years is that cannabis really has its own set of challenges, its own set of idiosyncrasies that a lot of LPs simply can't figure out. Based on just years of experience under our belts, we're able to take the equipment and tweak the equipment or tweak those manufacturing processes in order to deliver some of these innovative SKUs. In addition to that, we also have invested in equipment that we can essentially use across multiple platforms. In addition to just having the know-how, we also essentially have the CapEx already in place in a lot of instances, and then also the ability to essentially drive the cost down just based on efficient processes that we've been able to, you know, just essentially perfect, I guess, in previous uses. Prime example, you know, that I can give you is milling, for example, with pre-rolls. Most people don't realize that milling cannabis is very different than milling other similar items in the industry, like lavender or other botanicals. We've nailed down the milling process whereby if we want to mill a wetter pre-roll or a more moist pre-roll, versus a drier pre-roll, depending on what the consumer is looking for and what our product portfolio states, we have already the specifications and the product fundamentals to be able to do that on the processing side. Okay, perfect. My last question just has to do with your SKUs. Now, it's really interesting how you've gone from 75 last year to 219 in Q4 and now at 255. Can you tell me what% the market share your SKUs represented the market, and how that would compare to revenue market share and how you may expect those two things to change through 2022? Yeah, great. To be clear, I believe you're talking about listings as opposed to SKUs. Sorry. Yeah, that's okay. I just wanted to be clear. From a listing perspective, I'd say right now from a revenue market share to a listing perspective, because we have so many new listings and because we're in the ramp-up stage of those listings, I'd say that we'd have a greater percentage of the listings and the growth in listings, a portion to us, than we would in revenue today. Obviously, we like to point out to investors and to the market that for us, that's a leading indicator. The first step is to get the listings which we'd over-gravitate towards right now. As the year goes on, we expect that to gravitate to revenue. Overall, we'd expect our listing profile and our revenue profile to roughly align. Excellent. Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Freeman with Raymond James. Please proceed with your questions. Hi there, team. Thank you very much for this presentation and for taking some of my questions. First one's gonna be on M&A. We saw a very acquisitive 2021. Thinking about this year ahead, wondering how you view prospects for M&A, both in Canada and the U.S., and especially in light of the fact that, you know, one U.S. acquisition last year is looking to generate, you know, 25%-35% of 2022's revenue. Sort of a follow-on to that is, maybe related, looking at your Quebec strategy. Thank you. Sure. Well, I'll take the first part, and maybe then I'll pass it over to Adam to handle the Quebec part. In the short term, you know, we're 100% laser focused on driving synergies, and the business plan that you saw in front of you. We do not see any immediate need for additional M&A, given our capabilities and our portfolio today. Obviously, I mentioned as we look down to the U.S. market in terms of opportunities and investments, obviously, as that regulatory landscape changes and things move, we wanna make sure that we're up to speed on what the market opportunities are. We wanna be very, very clear with investors and very, very clear with the market. There's lots of low-hanging fruit for us to bring to the table to drive revenue and EBITDA performance with our existing portfolio that does not include M&A. It's Adam. I'll take the Quebec question. This has been an interesting one because I think every LP who's dealing with the provinces knows that it's obviously a little bit more unique, you know, getting into the Quebec marketplace. We've made a lot of good strides with the SQDC, and we've been actively engaged with them throughout the course of the entire 2021 fiscal. What our plan is moving forward will be to have a strategic partner in Quebec who will work with us on a collaborative strategy with the SQDC. What I would say at this stage is that we've got a very clear plan developed. We've got a very specific brand that we are developing and a very specific portfolio that we would be working on. The strategy is a collaborative partnership with a partner based in Québec, and we're excited about bringing a portfolio to the SQDC and being able to extend our reach into that province, hopefully in the near future. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. That's really helpful. Next question's on new product development. On your 32nd slide today, you talked about access to rare cannabinoids. I'm curious, one, where are you sourcing these rare cannabinoids from, and where do you see placing them in products? Then related, what feedback in the market have you seen that you know signals to you that there is consumer demand for some of these rare cannabinoids? Thanks. Yeah. I wanna be very clear on that. We're not sourcing them, we're making them. We have the ability to extract them from biomass that very few people in the world have the ability to do. I don't know if that answers the question. We're not sourcing any of them. Yeah. That's helpful. Now, where do you expect these rare cannabinoids to land among your products? Yeah. I think depending on the specific cannabis, they're all gonna play a very different role. When you look at CBN for sleep, you look at CBG for anti-inflammatory, other purposes, I do expect them to play a meaningful role in what I'll call 3.0 cannabis. In time, once it continues to be more competitive and more consolidated, consumers are gonna look for products that stand out. When you have the ability to not only extract, but compound formulate, those in Canada and the U.S., I do expect them to play a meaningful role in our portfolio over time. Michael, it's Everett here. As you and I have discussed, it's an education process and research, right? You're seeing in the U.S., if you look at California and you Google their top gummy sales velocity SKUs, you see CBN, you see CBG, right? That's a market that's kind of the roadmap that we used in slides here to show. It's now the education process in Canada. Is it a big part of the market share? No, today. Our job as a management team is to look for the future. Right now we think it's more cost-effective to make it internally through biomass than to source it through biosynthesis. It's an area that we're always evaluating in the future. All right. Thanks very much. That's all for me today. Thank you. At this time, I'll hand the floor back to management for further remarks. Thank you. We're gonna do a short, retail Q&A, so I'll pass it to Everett. Thanks, Tyler, and thank you for everyone listening. I know this has been a long call, but this is important. We wanna have transparency for all investors, so we gave the opportunity for everyone to send questions into our IR email address. We're gonna go through a few, and we'll try to get through as many as we can. The first one. Thank you to Adam for this question. He asks, "When a public company acquires a private company, that creates a liquidity event for shareholders of that private company that was acquired. Stock issued to that company, Valens has acquired. Where is the insider lockups? How do you think about it? How long? To what degree do you think the selling in the market today is the explanation for some of the pressure? I'm gonna hand this one over to Jeff. Great. Thanks, Everett. Good question, Adam. When we go to transactions, we're always looking for ways to align the interests of shareholders so that, you know, what's good for us is also good for the other shareholders who will be becoming new Valens shareholders. What that typically means is locking up the shareholders over various periods of time, quite typically over a two-year period, where we release some of the shares, you know, either on a quarterly basis or on a yearly basis to make sure that there's not sort of a mad rush to the extent that some of the selling shareholders wanna get a quick exit. That there's not a mad rush, and the normal liquidity trading of our shares is able to absorb any selling that comes. We strive to do that on every transaction. You know, if we look at recent selling, obviously it's challenging to parse out, you know, what was driving the selling. Again, as we saw, the sector itself had rolled over and no one was immune from that pain. You know, I do expect that there was some selling shareholders. Obviously, we had both private and public transactions that transpired in 2021, so we were not able to lock up all shareholders, you know, after these transactions. That said, we believe that we offer a compelling value opportunity for all of the acquisitions and the shareholders that we've brought on board to The Valens Company in 2021. We'd hope that they're gonna stick around because we believe the real value is yet to come. Thanks, Jeff Fallows. This next question comes from Sarah. She asks, "Why did you pursue a CAD 40 million debt financing?" Jeff Fallows, I'll pass this back to you. Yeah. Great. Thanks for the question, Sarah. Obviously, we were quite clear last year that the original debt package that we had in place, which was appropriate at a given point in time for our business plan, became no longer appropriate. Faced with the objective of refinancing that debt package, and in the context of the public markets, which quite frankly was not anywhere close to what we believe was fundamental value of our shares, it meant that we needed to pursue non-dilutive types of financing. When we were investigating opportunities in the market, obviously we found this provider of debt for us who was offering a very, very compelling non-dilutive form of financing, and allowed us to raise funds that we believe would fund our 2022 business plan. In the context of that in an uncertain equity market, you know, we believed it was best for our shareholders to lock up that opportunity. I think if you compare what we were able to bring in against any other debt packages that were done in the market on an all-in cost, and flexible basis, we did quite well for our shareholders and continue to be quite happy with that debt package. Thanks, Jeff. This next question is from Mitch. He asks, "Can you talk about your 2022 capital market strategy? How will you increase visibility and liquidity of the stock?" Thank you for the question, Mitch. I'll answer this one. Right now when you look at the Nasdaq listing we pursue, we see a lot of opportunity where it increases the universe of that. Now the question is, how do you reach that universe? There was over 800 IPOs on the Nasdaq last year. Our job now is to differentiate. What we're investing in is an institutional network to try to get the story out. It's just like if you look at kind of even this call, us live streaming on Benzinga for retail traders, we've significantly increased. This is a lot larger of a universe of an audience than we've ever had listen to our calls before. We're gonna do that, as well as we're gonna look for more U.S. analyst coverage. I think that it's beneficial for everyone, get the story out there, especially as we execute and see growth through the KPIs. We believe there's a lot of upside. As well as I think that from a retail standpoint, you know, even you know areas like Robinhood could not invest in us previously, right? I think there's a lot of opportunities to get through that. Transparently, it's taken a little bit longer, even with some of our current U.S. coverage getting it over to their retail segment. You have to go through compliance issues, et cetera. We're now a lot of the way through that, and I think that all it has is taken a lot more time than we expected, but I think we have a good pathway forward into 2022. Next question, we have from David. He said, "What is the plan to grow the footprint in the U.S. and prepare for U.S. legalization? Is there any timeline on this?" Jeff, I'll pass it back to you. Yeah, thanks. Thanks, David, for the question. You know, as we talked about in the presentation remarks, we really view the opportunity in the U.S., you know, in three separate buckets. Obviously, first is in investing into the Green Roads brand and the Green Roads opportunity to ensure that we're maximizing the value that we're seeing there. Obviously, as I've noted in the presentation, we think that's considerable, and so that will get our primary attention. Secondly, and it's no secret of our objectives to work closer in the CPG world, which potentially may include other product forms, which upon federal legalization may provide us with a broader portfolio and opportunity to get into the market. We'll be reviewing those kind of opportunities as well. Thirdly, obviously, U.S. THC opportunities, we are, you know, hyper-focused on our listing requirements, having just moved to the Nasdaq and the TSX. Obviously there's some other strategies that have been deployed in the market to make sure that shareholders can have visibility on THC opportunity in their shares. You know, we are obviously well apprised of those structures and opportunities, and are, you know, ourselves working through a number of strategies just to ensure that no matter which way the market goes and the timeline it goes that way, our shareholders will benefit. Because as we look longer term out into the market, what we're really building here is a North American cannabis platform. You can rest assured that we're putting in place the pieces to make sure that we deliver that to our shareholders. Thanks, Jeff. This next question's from Lauren. I'm gonna touch on the second half of your question, as it was already asked by an analyst on the first part, Lauren. "What is the deadlines for submissions for each new product with provinces? For example, if a July call in OCS is going live in January, help us forecast it out. Everything seems two quarters away. What is the flight path here?" I think it's a great question, and maybe not on specifics, but Adam, if you wanna walk us through kind of the overall thoughts on provincial listings to revenue. Absolutely. Thanks, Lauren, for the question. You know, every province has a different way they manage the listings. I mean, typically, it's 16-20 weeks from first to final submission to launch date. The call windows are usually four weeks apart, and there's typically four product calls per year for provinces that do use sort of that structured system. Hopefully that gives a bit of understanding there. Thanks again for your question. Thanks, Adam. Now kind of going towards the end here for timing. This question's from Eliza. Eliza asked, "Does Valens have any risk process or policy in place to mitigate the potential impact of EBITDA generation if the flower were to increase? How successful could Valens and the cannabis industry be in passing on increased costs to the consumer?" Thanks, Eliza. I'm gonna turn this over to Jeff. Sure. Thanks, Eliza, for that question. As we talked about in the presentation today, we believe our two-prong approach, be it contract grow, as well as spot purchases, really provides us, you know, the best protection in an uncertain environment to the extent that there was, you know, unexpected increase in costs. Obviously, in that context, our contract growth relationships would add additional value in that situation. As we look at the overall context of the market, and we also look at the quantum of supply and growers in the market, you know, we feel pretty comfortable in the scenario we suggested, which is that, you know, there's the vast majority of the pressure on input pricing at this point in time is downward. Again, we feel very comfortable that we're gonna be able to deliver the performance and the margin outline that we've articulated for 2023. Thanks, Jeff. For the final question for time, it's from Warren. "Can you explain in more detail your OTC CBD strategy and how you acquire new relationships to eventually land CPG companies?" Adam, I'll pass this one over to you. Great. Thanks, Warren, for the question. It's a detailed question, but here's how I'll just lay it out quickly. You know, large CPG companies are looking for some specific things in a cannabis partner. I'd say there's three things that they're looking for stability, capabilities, and shared vision. You know, on the first one, stability, we're very financially stable. We have a wealth of knowledge across our employee base, both in cannabis and in consumer goods. And we've got a winning portfolio of products and capabilities. So I think on stability, we measure up well for large consumer goods companies. Capabilities, I mean, we've talked about it at length today. We have arguably the broadest array of manufacturing capabilities of any LP in the industry. Our production and innovation flexibility positions us, you know, very well to partner with consumer goods companies. Finally, you know, around shared vision, I think that's exactly what we're working through in some of the early testing we're doing with folks right now, right? Which is, where is there an opportunity for us to collaborate on products? Some of that might not come to fruition for you know, for a longer horizon, but when we're able to go OTC in Canada with CBD, we'll definitely be ready with both our own portfolio as well as partner portfolios of large consumer companies. I hope that helps. Thanks very much for the question. Thanks, Adam. That is the last question I'll take from the retail side. I know that's only a fraction of what was out there, so if you didn't get your question answered, we're happy to follow up and get on the line after. We obviously appreciate your time and support. This call is really to increase transparency. In a volatile market like this, we wanted to lay out the business plan. We try to lay out as much as we can, even some little competitive with keeping some kind of close to our chest. We appreciate all the support from all stakeholders currently. We obviously have 4x audience than we usually do. Appreciate all the new listeners that are interested. We're happy to follow up if you have any questions, or anything else. Maybe what I'll do is I'll go to Tyler to end the call. Yeah. Obviously, guys, I appreciate the time, and I know we've gone way over. With that, I'll ask the operator to close the call. Thank you. This will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. We thank you for your participation.