Casey Laughman, Food Engineering (CL): Obviously there's been a lot of upheaval over this last year, where you went from your foodservice business disappeared, retail has surged, then it sort of bounced back again. And now it's all up in the air again. But how has the market itself changed over the last couple of years? And how much of that change has been driven by consumer demand and growth and things like that, that you would expect to see versus everything that's going on right now?

Danny O’Malley (DO): Well, if we're referring back to a couple of years, we're referring back prior to COVID. And there was, clearly a significant annual increase in plant-based analogs, plant-based as a whole prior to that. And it was increasing in a manner that was difficult even for the producers to keep up with, which was clearly shown by some of the leaders in the industry. And their difficulties just scaling up fast enough to handle the volume of business that was coming in, in both foodservice and retail, and the opportunities, of course, internationally.

But COVID changed everything. I think we all learned quickly that we needed to adapt to something that we had never seen before. And those of us that were integrated into the foodservice market in a very integral way felt a dramatic impact, obviously. Retail was interesting. Foodservice took a dramatic hit overnight. Retail picked up quite a bit of that slack, but then there was a drop-off in retail too.

I think we get a little lost in foodservice too along the way because foodservice is so much larger than just what the average consumer sees. The average consumer sees foodservice as restaurant operations. But there's so much more; the schools, K-12, colleges and universities, corporate accounts, we did a lot of business with Google and Facebook and Yahoo and Uber. And they closed all of their cafeterias, that was business that has disappeared and really has not come back.

CL: When it became clear that this is going to be a long-term thing, and it was going to hit what is a big part of your business, how did you adapt to that? What was sort of the process of saying, "OK, this is what we have to do now to literally survive as a company?"

DO: So we accelerated a process that was already starting for us. We had made our entry into retail in late 2019, November of 2019. And we were just getting our feet wet, I think we're in 600 or 700 retail locations in various parts of the country. So we continue to push on that to build our retail outlet for our products. And then we did a couple of other things, we were planning to get in e-commerce, we pushed that envelope and got in e-commerce perhaps a little bit earlier than we had originally anticipated doing. We've accelerated our goal to go after international business. And we're pursuing that as well. And we've had a lot of really great feedback on the international business basis. And this is the first year we began to sell to a couple of other countries.

But what's probably going to make the biggest impact for us in regards to the overall production of our products is industrial/ingredient-based buying. So we went after companies that are looking to make plant-based meals for retail, basically. And, just like they would need their animal-based proteins, like if they're making a product and they need ground beef or chicken or pork. We are the ingredient supplier that will provide the plant-based beef alternative, chicken alternative, pork alternative. And that is where we're seeing the most promising opportunities to expand our business and grow the way we had initially planned in 2020.

CL: So that would be things such as the frozen meals you buy at the grocery store or something like that?

DO: Right, meals, soups, any kind of thing that would require a plant-based alternative like ours as a substitute for animal-based meats. And there's a lot out there.

If you're making meals, whether they're fresh, or they're frozen or refrigerated, and you're looking at plant-based options to what you're already doing, you're going to look for somebody to provide the alternative protein for you. And we're a company that can do that. And we're really excited about the kind of feedback we've gotten in the companies we're working with right now and creating unique products for them to include in their meals that they're preparing for retail. //