Benson Hill, Inc.

Good morning. Thank you for attending Benson Hill's second quarter 2023 earnings call. My name is Chach 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 want to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. I want to pass the conference to your host, Ruben Meyer, Senior Director of Investor Relations with Benson Hill. Ruben, please go ahead.

Thank you and good morning. We appreciate you joining us to review our second quarter 2023 financial results and outlook. As a reminder, Benson Hill will host a virtual annual shareholder meeting on August 11th at 11 a.m. Eastern time. With me today are Deanie Elsner, Benson Hill's interim chief executive officer, and Dean Freeman, our chief financial officer. Earlier this morning, we filed our earnings release in Form 8-K. These documents and an 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, and 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 materially cause results to differ 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, and other filings with the SEC. Also during this presentation, we will discuss specific non-GAAP financial measures, a reconciliation of the GAAP is available, and our earnings release and presentation. I will now turn the call over to Dini.

Thanks, Ruben, and good morning, everyone. It's a privilege to be with you today. As most of you know, I transitioned from my role on the Benson Hill board to also serving as interim CEO almost two months ago. During this time, I've worked with the team to dig into the company's capabilities, challenges, and unique opportunities as we work to disrupt an entrenched industry with innovative breakthrough technology. This is happening during a time when we face more challenging global market conditions. I want to take this opportunity to highlight three key observations and the actions we're taking. The first point I want to highlight, the Benson Hill team is driven to deliver. As you've seen for consecutive quarters since going public, we are reporting another quarter of solid results. And as Dean will discuss in a few minutes, we remain committed to achieving our full year 2023 guidance. Benson Hill has attracted multidisciplinary experts from every vertical across the agri-food value chain with enormous commitment, knowledge, versatility, and conviction. The differentiating aspect that makes this team so compelling is how they uniquely leverage the intersection of data science, plant science, and food science to address challenges and opportunities in today's commodity system. The Benson Hill team is experienced, smart, and agile, and they're committed to the mission. That leads me to my second point, the Benson Hill competitive advantage. Our cross-disciplinary mindset from seed to farm to ingredients to food and feed formulation permeates all assets and capabilities of the company. It reveals opportunities for innovation that have not been contemplated before, and we have not yet come close to fully tapping our potential. This approach is the Benson Hill competitive advantage which is a powerful enabler for our business and our partners. At our core, Benson Hill is a food technology company with an advanced plant breeding platform to innovate advantage ingredients for specific food and feed and markets. We apply our technology at every stage of the value chain, harnessing the speed of data, science, and AI to rethink how we make ingredients, as we say, better from the beginning. Our crop OS engine and our system for product development have been honed to accelerate innovation. We have established a robust competitive moat, including our industry-leading high-protein germplasm, multidimensional strategic data layers, and intellectual property, which gives us an enduring first-mover advantage. We have a wave of game-changing next-generation products that will take our proprietary portfolio and to a new level of value-added solutions in the next two to three years. These products are already advanced enough to be largely de-risked in our R&D pipeline and should position us to increase our share in existing markets as well as enable us to enter new markets. But as impactful as these advancements are, they represent what I consider an introductory approach to the value we can create And this leads me to the last and I think the most critical observation I want to highlight, the opportunity to explore a broad range of strategic alternatives to leverage the full power of our CropOS platform to create cost efficiencies within Benson Hill. Our growth playbook has consistently highlighted the importance of partnerships and licensing agreements to shift the scope and use of our assets and scale our proprietary ingredients. Our partnership with ADM is a good example of this. By leveraging ADM's manufacturing capacity and commercial network to scale the use of our ultra-high protein soy varieties, we are working to forge an exciting new frontier of ingredient innovation for the North American food market. Yet, this represents just one partnership model in one market and leverages only a portion of our capabilities. We established our closed-loop business model to translate the power of our seed technology into tangible ingredients that demonstrate the nutrition, sustainability, and efficiency benefits through our CropOS platform. Since going public, we have primed the market by establishing multiple food and aquaculture feed customers who recognize our value as a food system innovator. The next step in our evolution will include more robust partnership models to leverage the full power of our platform, pipeline, capabilities, and intellectual property in existing markets, as well as in new large market adjacencies. Two areas of particular interest are the large acre livestock feed and international markets. The feed efficiency and sustainability benefit of high-protein, low-antinutrient soybeans can potentially transform segments of the livestock feed industry. This market represents the vast majority of soybean acres globally, but has had little innovation on output traits such as nutrient density. We have products in our portfolio today and products in our pipeline being integrated with the Enlist herbicide tolerance trait that leverages perhaps the most extensive data library in the industry focused on soy enrichment. These products can set a new standard of expectation for livestock feed markets. Similarly, our portfolio and pipeline attributes offer unique advantages for diverse international markets, whether sustainability opportunities in Europe, meat extension opportunities in Latin America, or greater nutrition security to meet the explosive population growth in India, Asia, and Africa. We believe partnerships that penetrate these and other markets at scale can bring unique advantages to every vertical of the agri-food value chain. I'm encouraged by discussions with different organizations interested in exploring alternative models that maximize synergies of our assets and capabilities with their products and processes as a strategic lever of value creation for their businesses. For example, Our plant and food scientists and animal nutritionists work directly with end market food and feed formulators to look around the corner to develop future seed to ingredient attributes that can create novel value in their portfolio. Second, our manufacturing facilities are well positioned to produce high value ingredients and can easily traverse pilot and commercial scale to effectively validate our technology while increasing speed to market. And finally, the licensing of our platform enables technologies and product development processes to advance other crops beyond soy and yellow pea. We believe there will be excellent value creation and cost optimization opportunities for our company by exploring alternative models. This step in our evolution comes at a critical time given the increased volatility in the agri-food markets. As we have said several times, We are not immune to the pressures caused by food inflation, logistics costs, macroeconomic conditions, and competition from other ingredient providers. Earlier this year, we shared that persistent high soy commodity prices required us to pay higher than expected farmer premiums to secure acres for the 2023 proprietary crop. This led to our decision to focus on profitability with our highest margin products. We are now assessing an emerging industry-wide supply and demand imbalance caused by an increased supply of soy-based ingredients and specialty oils from international competitors. This is causing downward pricing pressure, and we're assessing a possible impact on our proprietary products in 2024. At Benson Hill, we've always approached challenges and opportunities boldly and proactively. Our response to these market conditions is the same. We will control what we can control. As part of that, building on the actions already underway, we are taking steps to further reduce operating expenses by an additional $10 million annually in 2024. In addition, we are taking proactive steps today from a position of proven performance and solid financial standing to create the most value for our shareholders and best positioning the business to capture what we believe are the enormous opportunities that lie ahead. Specifically, the board has retained Lazard to explore a broad range of strategic alternatives. We're going into this process with an open mind, and everything will be on the table, including joint venture opportunities, partnerships with strategic and financial investors, and licensing opportunities. I can assure you that I will continue to leverage my experience adapting and evolving different businesses to identify the most effective ways to build total value behind our technology platform and innovation pipeline as we unlock the company's full potential and focus on shareholder value. Having sat in the CPG customer seat for many years, I clearly understand the advantages Benson Hill can create for different end markets. I'm excited about the opportunities in front of us and our ability to successfully navigate a more challenging market landscape while continuing to meet our strategic objectives. I look forward to sharing more with you as we progress. I will now turn the call over to Dean for an update on our liquidity improvement plan, second quarter results, and the outlook for the year. Dean?