Burcon Nutrascience Corporation

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Bercom's Nutrascience Corporation fiscal 2027 first quarter conference call. Joining us today are Kip Underwood, Bercom's chief executive officer, and Alex Varty, the company's intern chief financial officer. Following their presentation, we will open up the call for questions. To join the question queue, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. Thank you, Nikosha.

and good morning, good afternoon, good evening and thank you to all of those who have joined the call today. For today's call, we would like everyone to walk away with three takeaways. The first is there's a convergence of things right now that mean present tremendous opportunity for Bercon. Consumers are seeking more protein. Food companies need innovation to deliver against that consumer need and Burkhart's proven technology enables food companies to deliver against that need. We solve food companies' problems. Second, simply put, we are executing our plan. We are producing and selling day by day, week by week against our expectations. And third, we are investing in our future. We see demand, customer demand coming down the pike and we are going to invest to be ready to meet those future customers' expectations. are safe harbor statement. I mentioned the market, the protein market specifically. You cannot watch television, stream a show, walk through a grocery store right now and not see that protein is everywhere. Not too long ago, protein was niche. Now it is a mainstream consumer sought after benefit. 30 years ago, People who sought after protein were motivated. They were athletes. They were willing to make tradeoffs. Today's consumers will not make that tradeoff. They want higher protein, lower calories with no compromise on the eating experience. They want their protein to be food that they enjoy. That is all further accelerated by not just health reasons, by consumers on GLP-1 weight management medications. They specifically need higher protein and lower calories, and they need to be able to incorporate those foods in their everyday life. It is a great time for a company that delivers protein to food companies as well. We can quantify this growth. Tremendous demand, $17 to $20 million in increment of protein growth. There are supply constraints out there. As demand has increased, supply constraints has gone and surfaced against our potential competition. Tremendous growth, particularly with GLP-1. We are only at the beginning of the growth runway, long-term growth runway for consumers seeking protein and then companies that provide that protein to food companies. Why does this matter for Bercon? I mentioned the convergence. We have consumer-seeking protein. We have food companies who are trying to figure out how they meet that unmet need without taste trade-off. The way companies meet those consumer needs is they need purity. They need purity to put protein in the food product and still deliver the taste expectations everybody wants. They want them to buy that food product once, twice, three, four, five times. Berkhan's unmatched purity that is delivered by our technology platform enables food companies to solve that problem to meet those consumer unmet needs. Specifically, it's not in the platform. It's not across one product. It's across multiple products. We have launched our sunflower protein, our PZSP protein, our FiberPro protein, and our Puritene canola protein. All of these are delivered by our technology platform, and their core feature, their core benefits, is Unmatched Purity, again, which enables food companies to deliver against those consumers' unmet needs. Details of our presentation today. We've talked about the market, what a great opportunity it is. We've talked about why our technology is so relevant in today's market. We need to get to some of the details, right? We'll talk about the highlights from our fiscal 27. We have a sales update, production update. We'll talk about the financing that we released today. Why are we doing it? What does it mean? Summary, and then obviously we will have time for closing remarks and Q&A. First quarter highlights. I mentioned one of the takeaways was execute the plan. This slide is we have executed the plan. So the first piece is customers. We surpass over customers purchasing our ingredients. This is the ultimate validation that we can, in fact, deliver against our promise. We can deliver that unmatched purity that then enables food companies to deliver to their consumers. Every day, every week, we consistently produce more protein, produce more products by shift, by day, by week basis. You've heard me say before, we cannot sell it until we can produce it, and we are producing more every day. We are investing today, right here, right now, to increase our capacity to meet the customer demand we see coming down the pipe from our sales funnel. Again, I've mentioned several times today, simply put, we're executing our plan. With that, I'll turn it over to Alex Varty for our financial highlights. Alex, please take it away.

Thank you, Kip. Bercon's Q1 financial results demonstrate the progress we continue to make on our strategic plan. In the current quarter, we earned revenues of $1.3 million, representing a 54% growth rate quarter over quarter, and an over three-fold increase over the prior do-or-go quarter. More notably, Bercon has posted sequential quarter revenue growth every single period since we launched operations at the Dalesburg facility. Further, as we scaled production and revenue at the Galesburg facility, we have done so while maintaining a focus of our resources and our financial spends on production. This quarter, we generated a 7% decrease in the operating loss quarter over quarter, driven by that revenue growth and supported by our relentless focus of our resources on revenue generation and on production. and today we announced an offering of convertibles to ventures raising gross proceeds up to $8.1 million. In this transaction, we expect significant insider participation, underscoring the belief that insiders have in our forward-looking vision and in our ability to execute on our strategic plan. The convertible debenture financing is expected to allow for investments in growth, through direct investments in labor, in inventory and production capability, in planning future capacity expansions, and increasing efficiency of production. We also intend to use a portion of the proceeds to retire certain debt obligations and for working capital, thereby shoring up our balance sheet and our capital structure. It remains an exciting time for Bercon. Kip does an incredible job of explaining how our operational progress and on the market opportunity and as well as how we can and how we are positioned to capitalize on that opportunity. But there's incredible power in seeing the translation of those operating achievements into the financial results. in particular how we continue to scale the production volume and the revenues every single quarter with our still being significant growth available for us. I'll turn it back to Kip to provide more color on the sales and on production.