Marimed Inc

Good morning, my name is Audra and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Merrimet, Inc. Second Quarter 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press star one again. I will now turn the line over to Jake Dean, Director of Research and Development. Please go ahead.

Hello and good morning, everyone. I'm Jake Dean, Director of Research and Development at Merida. I'm very proud of the contributions my team has made in supporting the growth of our company. We work hard to identify new and innovative product opportunities and make sure all of our products are consistent, delicious, and meet our very high standards for quality. I'm honored to kick off today's 2025 second quarter earnings call. Joining the call today are John Levine, our Chief Executive Officer, Mario Pino, our Chief Financial Officer, and Ryan Crandall, our Chief Commercial Officer. This call will be archived in our investor relations website and contains forward-looking statements. Actual events or results may differ materially from these forward-looking statements and are subject to various risks and uncertainties. A discussion of some of these risks is in the risk factors section of our 10-K and 10-Qs available on our website. Any forward-looking statements reflect management's expectations as of today, and we assume no obligation to update them unless required by law. Additionally, we will refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures which are reconciled in our earnings release. I will now turn the call over to John for his second quarter and overview.

Thank you, Jake. You and your R&D team are the drivers of the innovation that sets our product apart and are contributing to achieving our goal of becoming a leading cannabis CPG company. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us for today's earnings call. We reported last night during the second quarter we achieved growth and expansion across our business. Our wholesale and retail revenues increased sequentially. We achieved substantial increase in EBITDA. We were cash flow positive and we continued to maintain a healthy balance sheet. Our team was relentless in their commitment to our vision, and we can't thank them enough for their hard work and dedication. To be clear, there still is a lot of near-term uncertainty in our industry. Pricing pressures, market saturation, and the lack of federal reform still pose a challenge that we will continue to navigate. Our expand the brand strategy is working at the same time that more customers are choosing cannabis. Consumer sentiment for legalization has never been higher, and industry sales continue to increase nationally while alcohol and tobacco sales continue to decline. As a reminder, Expand the Brand focuses the company on making our products accessible to as many customers as possible. During the second quarter, we once again grew our wholesale revenues sequentially and year-over-year. Our products, including our premium brands, Betty's Eddies, Nature's Heritage, Bubby's Bakes, Vibations, and Inhouse, have really hit their stride with consumers and continue to maintain a significant share of the market. I was generally pleased with our continued wholesale growth during the quarter. We opened new doors and had particularly strong quarter in Massachusetts. That said, our performance in Missouri has not met our expectations. We're looking at our options in order to improve overall company profitability. Turning to retail, we had one of the best quarters in terms of our sequential growth. A series of pricing and marketing strategies we rolled out late in Q1. work to defend our turf at some stores and grow sales at others. This was also the first full quarter where we were able to report the revenue of our Delaware operations, including sales at our two dispensaries there. Speaking of Delaware, I want to thank our team for being ready to take full advantage of adult use sales when they began last weekend. We made a bet on expansion of the program a long time ago by investing in our facilities, our brands, and our people. We were fully prepared to leverage our leadership position in the state, both retail and wholesale. It was only been a few days, but we are very pleased with the results. Looking ahead, our focus will continue to see squarely on our expand the brand strategy. A North Star is for all our brands to be top sellers in their categories nationally in the next five years. To achieve that goal, we must supplement our organic growth with M&A and licensing to bring our brands to new high-growth states. We took a significant step forward last week with the announcement of our MSA agreement to manage silts cultivation and processing facility in Pennsylvania. That agreement will immediately contribute to our top line and our margin starting September 1st. Pennsylvania is on everyone's radar as the next major state that is likely to add adult use sales. We also entered into a licensing agreement which will enable us to distribute our product in the state. We are hopeful to have as many of our brands approved by the state of Pennsylvania and distributed during the first half of 2026. Also on the licensing front, we announced a deal with a new Maine partner last month that will expand distribution of Betty Vettys to both rec and medical customers. Maine doesn't get much national attention. but it's a huge tourism market. It's also one of the few states that generate similar sales volumes for both adult and medical. We are also talking to partners in other states where we know our brands would succeed. It's no secret that there's a general malaise that engulfed cannabis the past year or two, but I believe it may finally be turning the corner. If you listen to our calls over the years, you know that I've been among the most cautious CEO in predicting federal reform. But I feel like all the chatter we've seen recently is more credible than I've seen before. I'm growing more optimistic about the prospect of rescheduling. Taken together with our second quarter results, the opening of adult use sales in Delaware. our move into Pennsylvania, and the continued growth of our brand. We are on the way to delivering the shareholder value our investors deserve. With that, let me hand it to Ryan.