Rational Ag Lndsberg

My dear ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted that you've joined today's call and I would like to extend a warm welcome to all of you. My name is Nicole Engelhardt and I'm joined today by my colleagues Uldike Wende, Laura Deininger, Stefan Arnold and of course our CFO Jörg Walter. Peter Stadelmann, our CEO, is currently on a well-deserved vacation but sends his best regards. Before we begin, just a few housekeeping notes. All participants will remain muted throughout the call. Following the presentation, we'll move directly into the Q&A session. I will read out the questions that were submitted via email. These will be answered by Jörg and Stefan. Many thanks to those of you who submitted your questions in advance. This helps us provide more focused and hopefully more useful answers. If a question has already been addressed during the presentation or is similar to another, we may not repeat it during the Q&A. Rest assured, we will make sure that all questions are answered before we conclude the call. Please note that this call is being recorded. A YouTube link will be shared with all participants afterwards. We kindly ask that you do not share this link outside your company or organization. With that, I'll hand over to Stefan.

Thank you very much, Nicole, and also welcome from my side. So, my dear ladies and gentlemen, as always, we want to start with some insight into highlights of the past quarter. And today, we are indeed very proud to present you now, for the first time, the results of our long-lasting resource efficiency study performed together with Weihenstephan Triesdorf University and the AXA Insurance Canteen in Cologne in Germany. So as you all know, energy is becoming a more and more relevant cost factor for professional kitchens with the rocketing energy prices of the last years. And also water is becoming more and more expensive, so that saving both of these two resources is really crucial in terms of efficiency for our customers. And also sustainability topics are very important for part of our customers in order to reach their sustainability goals. With our resource-efficient cooking solutions, we support our customers with one of the most challenging issues they are facing these days in a perfect way. And in addition, maybe even more crucial is the lack of qualified personnel for the customers. So by creating a better working environment, we help them to make the chef profession more attractive again due to better working times and ergonomic working. And to sum up the advantages, so the cooking intelligence also enables the customers to hire untrained staff. So here on this slide you can see some data regarding the study and the main goals of the study. And the major goal indeed was to get transparency about the usage of energy and water and then to reveal the savings potentials. And you can imagine that such a project is indeed a huge effort. So it took us in total around three years. We had different participating parties to coordinate. And of course, everything is under time pressure because the canteen should be ready again as soon as possible. In any case, to perform such a study, you need the opportunity of a renovation project to compare the situation before and after the re-engineering of the kitchen with scientific methods. And looking at all these preconditions needed, that's why it lasted around 10 years since the last study that we did with ABB and ETH Zurich at that time. And we are very grateful to AXA and to Weinstephan Christoph University for the outstanding cooperation here. So the study was run by Professor Dr. Michael Greiner, who specializes in system gastronomy and catering. His research includes topics like the impact of Kitchen 4.0. on staff and guests and the development of new food concepts. He's involved in teaching and supervising thesis in areas related to food technology and system gastronomy. So you see, the study was indeed in best hands. So, this means, due to that, As said before, measuring the consumption before and after the renovation was possible in a very structured and scientific way using 93 electricity meters and 28 water meters. And here you see the plan of the old kitchen setup and you see there is a lot of traditional equipment but already some combi ovens including three units of our older generation self-cooking center from 2014. The traditional equipment was including 10 boiling kettles or bread pans, but no iVario or VarioCooking Center. And here, now you see the new setup. And this now includes six iCombis and four iVarios and also a variety of traditional equipment. And to give you even a better insight, let's have a look inside with a short movie.

Modernizing the kitchen to make it more efficient and sustainable. Does it really pay off? How much energy and water could be saved? And what positive changes would this bring to work processes, staff, and guests? These questions were investigated by Rationale and Weinstepfen Christoph University of Applied Sciences. Together, they supported the AXA Germany team in Cologne with their kitchen renovation.