Jones Soda Co

good afternoon everyone thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Jones sodas financial results for the third quarter ended September 30th 2023 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 and that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provision under the Private Security Legislation Reforms Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements include all statements containing verbs such as aims, anticipates, estimates, expects, beliefs, intents, plans, predicts, will, may, continue, projects, or targets. and negatives of these words and similar words of expression. 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 of risk factors in our most recent filed reports with the SEC. including our annual reports on Form 10K, our quarterly report on Form 10Q, and our current report on Form 8K. In addition, this call includes discussions of certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, the most directly comparable GAAP measures, and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures are available in the earnings release and other documents posted on the company's website under investor relations. This call will be available for telco replay through November 16th starting at 7.30 p.m. ED 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. Now I would like to turn the call over to the president and CEO of Jones Soda, David Knight. You may begin.

Thank you, Renju, and thank you everyone for tuning in today. Since joining the company four months ago, I've been able to fully integrate into the operations and I'm confident in the future of Jones Soda. We have some really exciting stuff in the works that I can't wait to share with you all. Before we get into that, I wanted to briefly recap the quarter. The third quarter was more challenging than anticipated sales velocity, within our most important bottled soda channel grocery has taken longer than expected to rebound. And we did have a few unexpected headwinds in our food service channel. However, the initiatives we've implemented to improve efficiency across our supply chain, coupled with strategic pricing adjustments, allowed us to expand our gross margin by 600 basis points to 32.9%. we are marching closer to our goal of consistently reporting a gross margin of around 35%, while continuing to move closer towards break-even on the bottom line with most of our one-time operational costs to establish the foundation of Mary Jones now behind us. As I discussed last call, my two key areas of focus are delivering great taste and growth. both innovation and marketing. We have really only begun to scratch the surface in both of those categories, and I firmly believe we are setting the stage for some exciting growth opportunities in the coming quarters. I'll dive into a few of these initiatives later on during the call, but I'd first like to pass the call over to Joe to discuss our third quarter financial results in greater detail.

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