Stryve Foods, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the Strive Foods third quarter 2022 earnings call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing star then zero on your telephone keypad. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Sandy Martin, three-part advisors. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and welcome to the Strive Foods Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. With me today are Strive's Chief Executive Officer, Chris Beaver, and Chief Financial Officer, Alex Hawkins. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that part of our discussion today will include forward-looking statements that are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements, by their nature, are uncertain and outside of the company's control. Actual results could differ materially from these expectations. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore, undue reliance should not be placed upon them. We do not undertake to update these forward-looking statements at a later date, and they only refer to today, November 14, 2022. In addition, today's call will include a discussion of non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS. Non-GAAP financial measures should be considered as a supplement to and not substitute for GAAP financial measures. We refer you to the reconciliation of non-GAAP to the nearest GAAP measure included in today's earnings press release for further detail. This call is being webcast and can be accessed through the audio link on the news and events page of the investors section at ir.strive.com. Also, the earnings press release is posted on our website and a copy of the release has been included in the form 8K submitted to the SEC. With that, I would now like to turn the call over to Chris Beaver. Chris?

Thank you, Sandy. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter earnings call. I want to start by addressing our release earlier today and officially welcome Chris Whitehair to Strive's Board of Directors. Chris is a great addition to our board. He brings deep experience and expertise inside consumer packaged goods. He currently serves as Senior Vice President of Supply Chain for Sonopta, and prior to this, he led supply chain teams at ConAgra, Quaker Oats, and General Mills. We are excited to strengthen our board with the addition of Chris. I also want to recognize my Strive teammates for their efforts and commitment to our change agenda since I joined the company in late May. Thank you to that Strive squad. 2002 has been a transitional year. I am pleased with the progress we have made, which can be seen in the improvement in margins, operating expenses, and performance in measured channels. We have improved Q3 gross margins to a respectable 22.4% versus negative gross margins in Q2. And we delivered the best quarter in the company's history in terms of adjusted EBITDA. Our productivity initiatives are underway, just getting started across the organization to further drive positive financial outcomes. While I am pleased with our progress on the cost and margin side, I am more excited about the tremendous growth potential of our brands. To that end, I have been working with our sales and marketing team on demand generation. We are leveraging consumer, shopper, and retailer insights to better focus and prioritize resources against our core portfolio. Together, we have identified several renovation opportunities that we are executing right now. The customer response has been positive, which raises my confidence. These initiatives will help us accelerate our distribution and ensure our brands are more available in the market. In addition, we are developing a robust, market-creative innovation agenda, further supporting our commitment to growth. The fact-based, disciplined approach will ensure that our growth agenda is focused, intentional, and mindful of enterprise resources, including capital planning. We are encouraged by the performance and measure channels where growth is higher than the category and the response to our pricing actions has been more inelastic than our competition. We are executing our pricing strategy and building distribution, driving more availability in the market of our highly differentiated, great tasting, healthier brands to our expanding consumer base. The meat snack category offers a large assortment of options, which can create challenges for shoppers to locate their favorite product and or locate new innovative brands. We, as a newer brand with a differentiated offering, It is crucial that we express the features and benefits in an impactful way, appealing and structured manner. We have gained valuable customer and consumer insights on how we can address what our known barriers are for distribution gains and consumer trial. I have some very exciting developments to share in this area, which I'll discuss in a few moments. As we shared last quarter, we have embarked on a skew rationalization initiative that simplifies and streamlines the portfolio. directing resources away from lower priorities that have less potential to ones that deliver higher value with greater potential. We are progressing, expanding, and now accelerating the execution. We have identified and rationalized over 180 SKUs and are currently working with our customers to collaboratively implement an orderly transition. This action allows the organization to better focus on growing the core while executing on the fundamentals as we strategically innovate and build off a strong foundation. This is our promise to grow quality revenue and prune away product sizes and skews that are either unprofitable or do not contribute enough to support our hurdle rates. I have successfully accomplished similar initiatives multiple times in my career, and while this is not easy, it has proven to be extremely successful. The acceleration of this program will impact revenues in the current year. As those items sell through in December and into Q1, we will experience noise from this process that could impact quarterly revenues in the short term. This right sizing of our offerings was and is necessary. As I shared, we are parallel pathing renovation of our core portfolio while building a funnel of platforms of innovation. It is too early to share the full details. Suffice it to say that we are doubling down on our core products and around a platform of innovation whereby protein snacks utilizing high quality, great tasting, nutritional steak is front and center. Our strategic pricing has to be supported by optimal packaging architecture. As we are sharing our renovated packaging designs with our retail partners, we are receiving positive feedback, adding further promise about our future. I am confident that we will expand distribution, improve velocities, and help consumers locate our brand in more places. I feel it is important to share this example with you because we will drive higher demand and we will deliver a more consistent quality at a lower cost, positively impacting free cash flow. The packaging footprint will be uniform across the portfolio, offering improved retailer shelf presence, better supplier partnerships, and a more efficient and effective manufacturing and transportation environment. This is one example of how we are identifying and prioritizing our agenda. working cross-functionally, executing as one team, delivering both productivity and demand. Recently, we've seen meat prices increase this fall, and as we mentioned in the Q3 call, we previously developed a strategic pricing process, where we routinely evaluate all levers in order to price net of commodities. To date, our elasticities from our previous actions have been moderate. Not dissimilar to the total industry, but at a lower rate than our category that we compete in. We continuously review all pricing levers, adjust and take action in a fact-based manner. This will continue. We have always been a tremendous value for our consumers, and I expect that value will continue to rise in importance with the consumer. We will begin to better market and inform the consumer on the value of our products. They're a direct result of our minimally processed, clean ingredient position that we enjoy. The consumer gets just lean and clean protein. There are no preservatives or fillers. Therefore, we deliver more protein per ounce. Most consumers are not aware of that value that we deliver. Keep in mind, our bag is 2.25 ounces for our largest skews of delicious, thinly sliced steak. which delivers protein equal to approximately six ounces of filet mignon. Think about that. And given that the raw meat portion of consumers' grocery bill has experienced rising prices as well, it presents us with an additional opportunity to inform consumers of the tremendous value we deliver in an extremely convenient manner. This is a complex environment. Our strategies are more sophisticated today than they were a year ago, and we continue to institutionalize our processes and procedures and we will remain agile to compete effectively. Since joining, I have directed our strategic initiatives to focus on sustainable growth with a zero waste mindset in everything we do. As part of our renovation and innovation projects that I spoke about moments ago, we are building a circular economy into everything we do. This circular economy reduces materials use, redesigns materials, products and services to be less resource intensive and recaptures byproduct as a resource to manufacture new materials and products. Much more to share on this, but this is how we are thinking about our productivity agenda. With that, I will turn the call over to Alex to discuss Q3 financial results and liquidity, and then I'll come back to share the progress on key initiatives around growth, productivity, and execution.