AppHarvest, Inc.

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the App Harvest fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. Now, it is my pleasure to hand the conference over to your host today, Kavi Beccari. Thank you. Please go ahead.

Thank you for joining us on the App Harvest fourth quarter and full year 2021 earnings call. I'm Kaveh Bakhtiari, VP Finance and Investor Relations for App Harvest. Joining me in Kentucky today are several members of the senior management team, including Jonathan Webb, founder and CEO, David Lee, board member and president, Julie Nelson, chief operating officer, and Lauren Eggleton, chief financial officer. A copy of our earnings release and slide presentation is available on our investor website at investors.appharvest.com. On today's call, we will begin with prepared remarks from Jonathan and the rest of the team. Then we'll open the call to questions. Before we start, I'd like to remind you that comments today regarding the company's future business plans, prospects, and financial performance are forward-looking statements that we make pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the securities laws. These statements are made based on management's current knowledge and assumptions about future events, and they involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations. In providing projections and other forward-looking statements, the company disclaims any intent or obligation to update them. For additional information on important factors that could affect these expectations, please see our most recent SEC filings. And now, I'd like to turn the call over to Jonathan.

Thanks, Kaveh. I'm proud of the progress our team made in our first full year of operations and as a public company. From our initial farm in Morehead, Kentucky, we produced over 18 million pounds of tomatoes, achieving over $9 million in net revenue and distributing product to thousands of top grocery stores and restaurants last year. And we expect to more than double that in total company sales in 2022. By the end of this year, we're on track to quadruple our number of farms, opening three new farms in addition to Morehead. We expect these farms to accelerate our sales growth, enable us to be financially self-sufficient, and attract new investment that would allow us to continue to grow our high-tech farm network in Central Appalachia and beyond. We're only in the first inning when it comes to the growth of the controlled environment agriculture industry in the United States, and App Harvest is extremely well positioned to grow within CEA. We're partnered with the top players in the industry, and we see growing demand for our large national customers. These customers are looking to significantly increase their local U.S. supply of fresh fruits and vegetables, especially from at-scale, full-product line providers like AppHarvest, who also operate in a more sustainable way while carrying out a mission that includes supporting good jobs in agriculture. Our plan to meet this growing demand puts nature first, boosted by world-class technology inside a network of high-tech indoor farms. We believe our high-tech farms are advantaged over the long term versus other small-scale approaches, as the benefits of passive solar and rainwater recapture help to make our facilities less natural resource intensive. We recognize that a leading approach must be backed by a world-class operation, and that's why we took the step last week to reduce primarily non-operations headcount and open positions in our corporate office by approximately 50%. We structured the business to better align around farm operations, a process that impacted nearly every department across the company. We expect this action will generate around $16 million in annualized run rate savings for us to reinvest in the business, which David and Lauren will discuss in greater detail. Turning to the fourth quarter, we continue to deliver on our top priority of efficient harvesting at Moorhead while remaining on track with the timeline on our three new farms. We accomplished this while achieving net sales results that were a little better than expected as we finished the year. With a solid performance on shipping premium tomatoes and a slight tailwind from higher tomato pricing, we delivered on the 2021 annual outlook that we shared in August. And we're confident in our ability to achieve the 2022 outlook that we introduced today. To sum up, we're making progress toward our long-term goal of building AppHarvest into one of the most trusted sustainable food companies in the world and into a leading applied technology company serving the global CEA industry with robotics and software solutions. Though we've had some challenges as we have ramped up over our first two growing seasons, we've applied those lessons learned and we remain on track to complete one of the biggest CEA build-outs in the world in 2022. With a steadily improving operation at Moorhead, a more streamlined corporate center, and a more robust operating playbook for three new farms opening this year, our teams are focused on core business improvement and positive operating cash flow generation. And let me be clear, these actions are taken with the intention of enabling us to secure the additional funding needed to keep pursuing our goal to get to 12 farms by the end of 2025. Finally, As one of a handful of traded public benefit corporations that is also B Corp certified, we're spearheading the move to a sustainable future for agriculture with ESG principles as our foundation. I will now ask our President David Lee to give more detail on our year-end results and year ahead. David?