Benson Hill, Inc.

Good morning. Thank you for attending Benson Hill Third Quarter 2022 Earnings Call. My name is Glen and I'll be your moderator. All lines are on mute for the presentation portion of the call, with an opportunity for questions and answers at the end. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. I would now like to pass the conference over to your host, Ruben Mir, Senior Director, Investor Relations with Benson Hill. Ruben, please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. We appreciate you joining us to review our third quarter financial results and outlook. With me today are Matt Crisp, Benson Hill's chief executive officer, and Dean Freeman, our chief financial officer. Earlier this morning, we filed our earnings release in form 8K. These documents, as well as an investor presentation we will reference during the prepared remarks, are available on the investor section of the Benson Hill website. We filed the universal shelf S3 registration statement that includes a $100 million at-the-market equity facility subject to SEC effectiveness, which we will discuss later in this presentation. Separately, we also took a housekeeping step and filed a consolidating S3 that simply combined previous S1 registration statements we had on file. Comments today from management will contain forward-looking statements, including Benson Hill's expectations of future financial and business performance, industry outlook, as well as current guidance about 2022 annual results, our plans and goals for 2023, and our 2025 financial targets. Forward-looking statements are inherently subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions and are not guarantees of performance. We caution you to consider the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Such factors include those referenced in the cautionary note included in our Form 10-K and 10-Q filings, press release, investor presentation, and other filings with the SEC. Also during this presentation, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation to GAAP is available on our earnings release and presentation. Our earnings presentation begins with an overview of what Matt and Dean will discuss today related to our financial results, the outlook for the remainder of the year, liquidity, and activities underway for 2023. I will now turn the call over to Matt.

Thanks, Ruben, and good morning, everyone. Our third quarter results continue to build on the momentum we've seen throughout the year, driven by favorable market conditions for both proprietary and non-proprietary ingredient products. Proprietary revenues in our ingredient segment increased 300% to $26 million on a year-over-year basis, representing a doubling of proprietary revenues generated in the second quarter. This is consistent with our expectations for increased shipments in the second half of 2022 from last year's crop. We are off to a solid start in the fourth quarter and maintain our guidance to end the year with proprietary revenues in the range of 70 to $80 million. We believe demand for our proprietary soy portfolio remains highly underpinned by the need for more nutritious affordable and accessible plant based foods. Which today is exacerbated by intensifying food inflation supply chain challenges and the growing food driven health crisis. We are able to serve multiple markets, including alternative meat and dairy products, meat extension, bakery and snacks, as well as edible oils and aquaculture. Even during these challenging times, we continue to see strong interest in our products from customers and partners, due to the numerous value propositions that the combination of our technological and business model innovations can offer. Our proprietary products are domestically sourced and grown by us farmers traceable across the supply chain. Often grown with regenerative agriculture practices and are designed to be more nutrient dense less processed better tasting and significantly more sustainably produced than many competing products. Furthermore, because we are growing ingredients made better from the beginning, our products also have the ability to be produced with fewer processing steps for similar or less cost than competing products. Based on what we know today, we believe the current market dynamics will remain tailwinds for the ongoing growth and commercial success of our proprietary soy portfolio. Our annual planning process is well underway. I will review key activities that will inform our outlook and then take a moment to reflect on the one year anniversary of Benson Hill becoming a public company. While the US soy planting began later than usual this season, the harvest of our proprietary 2022 crop is more than 90% complete across our farmer partners. This is in line with national averages and our expectations. Each year we test protein levels in the field prior to harvest to provide us visibility into the performance of the crop. Our sampling activities are on track and are also nearly complete, and we are delivering against the enhanced and world leading protein content levels we expected. Furthermore, crop yields have been strong and validated our planning expectations. Together, these results set us up well to deliver on another high growth year of results in 2023. Last quarter, we shared with you the significance of the strategic partnership with ADM to commercialize Benson Hill's ultra high protein soy ingredients for the human nutrition market in North America. This first of its kind collaboration represents a new frontier in food innovation. Starting with a better seed means both companies can align with consumer demands through bespoke ingredients in fast growing protein markets for human food. By enabling a vertically integrated approach, we can also offer new revenue opportunities for farmers who want to be a part of this novel seed to fork approach. With the foundation of the relationship between Benson Hill and ADM now in place, we are actively collaborating to scale multiple new and innovative product categories, while also unlocking capacity with existing products, all of which are powered by Benson Hill genetics. We are excited about the opportunity to collaborate with ADM's farmer base, ingredient manufacturing, and sales organizations. We are now coordinating with ADM to process a portion of our 2022 ultra high protein soy crop with plans for more significant volumes from the 2023 crop. A joint farmer partner recruitment program for 2023 planting season is underway in the vicinity of ADM's Decatur, Illinois facility. We also launched 2023 farmer partner programs to support our Creston, Iowa and Seymour, Indiana facilities. Broadly speaking, awareness of Benson Hill and our program has increased among the grower community with an emphasis across the I States. Current farmer requests for acre contract proposals have already exceeded all total contract acres in 2022. And to date, existing Benson Hill farmer partners have pledged to increase their acreage commitments on average by well over 25%. Last month marked the one-year anniversary of Benson Hill becoming a public company. Since announcing the path to the public markets in May of 2021, we've announced six quarters of results meeting or exceeding our financial and operational targets over that time. We've increased financial guidance several times since the publication of our outlook in early 2021. We've achieved several key strategic and commercial milestones and we've significantly enhanced the capabilities of the crop os platform and, in particular, our digital twin technology to further accelerate and deepen our innovative product development pipeline. All of these accomplishments validate our strategy and fortify the foundation for continued growth and overall demonstrate execution today beyond our expectations. We are grateful for the support of our farmer partners customers and commercial partners team members and investors. Many of you share our vision to advance the food system and have collaborated with us to ensure we are advancing the business. And not only delivering on the growth targets that we've outlined but positioning Benson hill to further leverage the natural genetic diversity of plants to achieve our mission to drive the pace of innovation and food. We are optimistic that 2023 will be a year to further advance our strategic and financial objectives anchored by our technology, powered by data, and enabled through an integrated approach across the agri-food value chain, connecting the farmer with the consumer. While it's early in our planning cycle, four of the goals that we have for 2023 are, one, increase contract closed-loop acres by at least 50%, As well as add substantial acres for ADM in both cases, leveraging our closed loop and crop OS where our industry leading data sets are enabling us to optimize management practices by variety for protein and yield. Collectively, our goal is to more than double the acreage footprint in the field next year. Increased proprietary ingredient revenue by at least 50%, driven by continued strong traction in the aquaculture, edible oils, and protein ingredient markets. The unique carbon and water reduction advantages of our ultra-high protein soy meal has drawn considerable interest across multiple target markets, and in particular aquaculture, which has the potential to be an attractive growth market for us next year. Three. Further expand gross margin by shifting to more proprietary ingredient production, realizing product mix improvements within the proprietary portfolio, and realizing efficiency gains in operating logistics and across our supply chain. And four, we plan to share some exciting advancements in the innovation pipeline at our 2023 Investor Day, which we will host at our St. Louis headquarters on March 29th. I will now turn the call over to Dean for his perspective about our third quarter performance and upward revisions to our 2022 guidance. He will also cover the steps we have taken that are intended to fully fund the business, which we believe will further enable us to execute our strategy and achieve positive EBITDA and positive free cash flow in 2025.