22nd Century Group, Inc

Welcome to the 22nd Century Group's Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode, and the floor will be open for questions following management's prepared remarks. As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Mei Kuo, Director of Communications and Investor Relations. Please begin.

Thank you, Jessie. Welcome to the 22nd Century's Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Joining me today are Jim Misch, our Chief Executive Officer, Mike Serker, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and John Granino, our Chief Financial Officer. Earlier today, we issued a press release announcing our results for the third quarter. We'll start today's call with prepared remarks from Jim, Mike, and John before moving into Q&A. During our prepared remarks, we will be referring to slides which are available for viewing in the webcast and posted in the Investors section of our website at XXIICentury.com under the Events subheading. We hope these slides will serve as a framework for management's prepared remarks, reinforce key takeaways, and provide additional transparency and insight into our business, strategy, and objectives. Also, those of you joining by webcast can submit questions through the online interface, which we may include during the Q&A section of today's call, time permitting. Before we begin, some of the statements made today are forward-looking. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated by these statements. Additional information regarding these factors can be found in our annual, quarterly, and other reports filed with the SEC. During this call, we may also discuss non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, which we define as earnings before interest taxes, depreciation, and amortization as adjusted for certain non-cash and non-operating expenses. For more details on these measures, please refer to our press release issued earlier today. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Jim, beginning from slide three.

Thanks, May, and good morning, everyone. Appreciate your time today. You know, this has already been an incredible year of transformation for 22nd century. And we still have two more months to go with key milestones to lock down. Slide three highlights just a few of our more recent accomplishments, all of which drive the company to revenue growth across our three franchises. Starting in tobacco and our primary mission, we are in the final step of MRTP authorization for our VLN reduced nicotine tobacco. And our confidence is at its highest level regarding the outcome and timing following our October 14th meeting with senior staff at FDA. We could not have been more thrilled with that meeting. We are well along the path for the offshore launch of VLN by Q1 2022. We're focused on a few very well-known leading markets in Asia and a test market in Europe where we believe we can launch rapidly. We are also setting up a branch in New Zealand in full support of that country's plans to reduce nicotine and all cigarettes to non-addictive levels. Our supply chain is ready to immediately scale production of our VLN products for launch in the U.S. and offshore. We also brought in another record harvest of our VLN tobacco leaf, and as part of our plans to globalize the VLN business, secured southern hemisphere growing agreements and launched our first grow outside of the U.S. In hemp cannabis, we have harvested our first growth at Needlerock Farm and have offtake commitments for all of the production. We expect to achieve first revenues on sale of the biomass portion in this quarter. We have decided that the portion will be sent to a new type of purification process and potential partner that we are working with to create a new type of high purity distillate, which we then expect to sell in Q1 next year. We're also reading the 2022 lines for planting season and advancing 2023 lines all the while working on additional new disruptive plant lines. As part of our expansion, we have secured global breeding partners for year-round plant line development programs and begun the application process for the USDA organic certification at Needlerock. This will enable us to further establish premium pricing and premium margin. We also expect to initiate IP revenue in the fourth quarter, as we said before, including agreements with Aurora relating to both plant development and licensing of shared and anti-IP for biosynthetic cannabinoids. In a particularly exciting development, we've announced that we are launching a new industry standards effort in partnership with Keygene and NIST, or the National Institute of Standards and Technology, which will establish measurement and purity standards for the entire hemp cannabis industry. This will dramatically improve the entire industry's credibility and more so consumer confidence. Finally, we announced our entry into the global hops market as our third franchise. We are now focused on four highly disruptive technologies in hops to enable us to rapidly disrupt this industry with valuable enhancements to high volume plant lines. We are engaging with multiple hops growers and consumer products partners to develop specific tools to accelerate desired trades in leading hop strains with a target for first revenue within 18 months. I'll come back and detail that a bit later in the discussion. But let me be crystal clear. We remain absolutely dedicated to finalizing MRTP authorization while also building for long-term revenue growth and value creation across multiple franchises and complementary global market opportunities. With that, I'll turn it over to Mike to detail our tobacco activities then I'll come back to discuss our hemp cannabis and hops franchise actions with you. Mike?