Jones Soda Co

Everyone, thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Jones Soda's financial results for the first quarter ended March 31st, 2021. Before we begin, let me remind everyone of the company's safe harbor disclaimer. Certain portions of our comments today will concern future expectations, plans, and prospects of the company that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include all statements containing verbs such as aims, anticipates, estimates, expects, believes, intends, plans, predicts, will, may, continue, projects, or targets, and negatives of these words and similar words or expressions. Forward-looking statements are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated by the forward-looking statements. Factors that could affect our actual results include, among others, those that are discussed under the heading risk factors in our most recently filed reports with the SEC, including our annual report on Form 10-K, our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and our current reports on Form 8-K. In addition, this call includes discussions of certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA. The most directly comparable GAAP measures and reconciliations for non-GAAP measures are available in the earnings release and other documents posted on the company's website under Investor Relations. I would like to remind everyone that this call will be available for replay through May 18, 2022, starting at 7.30 p.m. Eastern Time tonight. A webcast replay will also be available via the link provided in today's press release, as well as on the company's website. Today's call is being recorded. Now I would like to turn the call over to the President and CEO of Jones Soda, Mark Murray.

Yeah, thank you, Jenny, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. I am pleased to say that we had a very strong first quarter to kick off 2022, marking our seventh consecutive quarter of year over year revenue growth. I want to take this time to thank our entire team for their dedication and hard work to help us become a premier craft soda and cannabis company. As we entered the second year of our three-year strategic turnaround plan, we achieved a very strong 58% year-over-year revenue growth for the quarter. We accomplished this while continuing to face rising material and transportation costs due to inflationary pressures. With our well-developed plan in place and an extraordinary effort led by our team, we were still able to mitigate the increasing headwinds and grow our margins by 40 basis points. Although our increase in operating expenses impacted our profitability for the quarter, this planned spending was specifically budgeted to support developing our cannabis business. We firmly believe these investments strengthened the organization and set us up for sustained success going forward. I am very proud of how far this company has come since embarking on our three-year turnaround strategy, and I believe the best is still yet to come. On the call today, I'm going to provide an overview of sales, our upcoming marketing initiatives, an operational outlook on our core business. Additionally, I will provide an update on our cannabis subsidiary, Mary Jones, as well as share some information about the binding LOI we signed in April of this year with Simply Better Brands. We'll then wrap up the call by responding to some questions shareholders have submitted over the last few weeks. Before I dive into those topics, I'd like to hand the call over to Joe to discuss our strong financial results for the quarter.

Joe? Thank you, Mark, and good afternoon, everyone.