Benson Hill, Inc.

Good morning. Thank you for attending Benson Hill's first quarter 2023 earnings call. My name is Brika and I will 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 Meyer, Senior Director, Investor Relations, Benson Hill. Ruben, please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. We appreciate you joining us to review our first quarter 2023 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 and Form 8K. These documents, as well as our investor presentation, we will reference during the prepared remarks are available in the investor section of the Benson Hill website. 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 our current guidance for 2023. 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 notes included in our Form 10-K, Form 10-Q, press release, and investor presentation, as well as other filings with the SEC. Also, during this presentation, we will be discussing certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation to GAAP is available in our earnings release and presentation. I will now turn the call over to Matt.

Thanks, Ruben, and good morning, everyone. We are off to a solid start in 2023 with financial results in line with expectations and indicative of a strong year ahead for Benson Hill. We are building on the momentum from last year and we are seeing demand for our proprietary soy ingredient products in line with our expectations for a 40 to 50% increase in proprietary revenues. We continue to experience market conditions that support our non-proprietary meal, ingredient and oil sales despite the current softness and underlying commodity crush margins. These market dynamics and our team's unwavering focus on execution give us confidence we can more than double our gross profit for the year. On deck is the 2023 planting season, which is now well underway. Our team has successfully secured final commitments from our farmer partners to grow a proprietary crop on approximately 50% more acres than last year, which we expect to produce a harvest this fall that enables more targeted growth from our ingredient product portfolio with a focus on profitability, as we discussed last quarter. We had the opportunity in March to engage with some of you at our headquarters in St. Louis for Investor Day. The event provided the backdrop to more insights into our strategy and demonstrated our commitment to build a company that can set the pace of innovation and the agri-food system of the future. I would like to reinforce some important takeaways from that event. The demand side for innovations remains intact. To meet nutrition security goals and global climate goals, we need innovation in the plant-based food movement, which has been building for years. We believe the secular trends underlying this broad and diverse market opportunity are durable, and it is continuing to grow and diversify. Innovation that leads to reduced processing, better flavor, and more nutrition per acre can boost the adoption of plant-based foods. And those foods significantly reduce climate impact. That's why we've chosen to bring our innovations to markets in plant-based proteins, aquaculture, and specialty oil, with plans to start and expand into new markets through our product pipeline. What makes our approach to innovation impactful is the multiplier effect we create, which demonstrates the power of using genomics as a lever for change. Through genomic innovation, we can achieve elevated protein levels, enhanced nutrition, better functionality, and other attributes, all of which then get leveraged across crops, across feed and food categories, across different geographies, into multiple ingredient streams, and into multiple food application areas. We plan to further scale the existing proprietary portfolio and introduce next-generation products. Since we unveiled our product pipeline in early 2022, we have advanced several candidates in the pipeline as well as added new ones. We estimate that the serviceable, obtainable market for our pipeline over the next eight to 10 years is approximately $6 billion, primarily in North America. Given the limited acreage footprint of this opportunity, particularly in contrast to the more than 90 million acres of soy and yellow pea in North America, We believe that this is achievable and we expect to service this market opportunity through a combination of our closed loop operations, partnerships, and licensing arrangements. As we look over the next few years, here is what you can expect from Benson Hill. From now until 2025, we plan to scale our highest margin ingredient products to help achieve our stated objective to generate positive adjusted EBITDA and positive free cash flow. Given the current macroeconomic and capital markets environment, we believe prioritizing profitability is the right decision for our shareholders. We are introducing two new proprietary soy varieties for commercial planting this year, with several more expected over the next two years. In fact, by 2025, we plan to more than double our proprietary soy varieties, including a significant expansion of our ultra-high protein soy options for our farmer partners to grow. Enabled by our CropOS technology platform, these varieties have been demonstrated to deliver improved agronomic attributes, including higher yields, which can provide benefits to our farmer network and help reduce the higher premiums we have had to offer under current market conditions. Furthermore, these new commercial varieties will increase our flexibility to plant in different geographies, which will further serve to diversify planting risk, as well as reduce logistics costs. We plan to target a larger share capture in the European aqua market with our ultra high protein plus low oligosaccharide soy meal product, which is less processed, more sustainable, and responsibly sourced from U.S. farmers. AquaFeed represents an exciting growth opportunity that has far exceeded our expectations and expands the market opportunity for our domestic farmer partners. And in the years to come, we expect to introduce our soy ingredient products across multiple categories in the European plant-based food ingredient market. Between 2025 and 2028, we expect to begin scaling our first generation of ultra-high protein yellow pea varieties, initially targeting the pet food market using our already established closed-loop model in North Dakota. We also expect to begin accessing the broader animal feed market with new high-protein soy varieties that are lower in anti-nutrients and also include Corteva's Enlist E3 technology package. This innovation is expected to open an estimated 40 million acre domestic opportunity for the poultry market and allow us to offer more choice for farmers, processors, and meat producers to partner with Benson Hill and realize efficiencies and cost savings in their operations. It's notable that the value proposition for improved soy varieties has already been validated by multiple of the top five poultry producers in North America. The unlock for Benson Hill and our partners to more broadly access this market will be the inclusion of herbicide tolerance, which we will have incorporated across numerous commercial soy varieties in the field starting in 2025. In the near to medium term, Our plans also include the introduction of the industry's first CRISPR-enabled next generation soy varieties with higher protein and improved nutrition profiles. These introductions are anticipated to provide benefits beyond our current non-GMO products, as well as any GMO products currently available on the market. As we look beyond 2028, We are planning to bring to bear the full capabilities of CropOS and Crop Accelerator with several step-level changes and innovation. First, we plan to introduce a dual premium plus soybean that couples our ultra-high protein meal with a lower anti-nutrient profile and our high oleic, low linoleic oil. This is a complex challenge well-suited for our CropOS platform. Our goal is to grow on one acre what it currently takes two acres to produce with our highest value-added ingredient products for customers. Second, we expect to introduce future generations of seed innovation with even higher protein content and higher oil content that offer additional benefits to customers and provide us with more access to markets such as biodiesel. Finally, we expect to continue the progress made today to tackle one of the most complex technical challenges, improving flavor profiles in yellow pea and soybean. If we are successful, this has the potential to further expand our opportunities for yellow pea in the human food market and establish a proprietary soy and yellow pea platform capable of providing expanded novel ingredient options to our customers. we believe what differentiates us is that our focus in these areas is driven by the conversations we are having with customers to see around the corner to what's possible with crop os i will conclude by saying how excited we are about the outlook for this year 2023 is the year of the customer and our operations and commercial teams have a relentless focus on pulling forward our innovations to attack multiple end markets across every segment Our diverse portfolio assures that we are hitting many of the key trends that impact consumers. That's how we are winning, with great technology, best-in-class operations, and strong business execution led by an experienced team of leaders. And it's how we're setting the pace of innovation in food, with ingredients that are better from the beginning for people and for our planet. I will now turn the call over to Dean for his perspective on our first quarter results and outlook.