 Karma is real. I'm not prepared to speculate on what happens to our bodies and souls in the afterlife. But in business, there is an endless thread, positive intent and positive deeds. And I'll share with you why I think that's so. I started on as tea out of my house 25 years ago because I was thirsty. I looked at the beverage space and said there's a lot of sweet drinks, a lot of watery drinks, nothing with just a little bit of sweetness. So without any experience, I left my job actually working for Calvert investments and brewed up five thermoses of tea in my kitchen, got an empty Snapple bottle, I paced a label on it and managed to get an appointment with Whole Foods and convinced the buyer to take 15,000 bottles. It was terrifying. I thought of myself as sort of a baby sheep, like so vulnerable, so inexperienced and everything was hard. Distribution was hard, raising money was hard, manufacturing was hard, finding suppliers was hard. It was all challenging. But we managed to get in business and grew first in the natural foods world and became the best selling tea in the natural food sector. And as we grew, continue to deepen our mission. So the first thing we did was make a less sweet drink. But then in 1999, we launched the world's first organic bottled tea. And in 2003, we launched the world's first fair trade certified bottle tea, which meant a portion of every purchase of tea went back to the communities we were sourcing from. And then as you heard in 2011, we sold to Coca-Cola. And the goal in selling to Coca-Cola was to democratize organics, to make healthy organic products available, not just to the wealthy or to the coastal, but to everyone. And in many ways, we succeeded. Our organic kids drink, honest kids, which is still in the market, really helped expand dramatically, access to organic drinks and less sweet drinks. Honest kids, which is still carried in McDonald's and Subway and Wendy's and Chick-fil-A and Arby's. But just being in McDonald's alone in the first year of sales, helped remove over a billion calories from the American diet. It's an exciting stat. So in 2019, at the end of the year, I wrapped up my time at Coca-Cola and I moved on. I thought my work in the beverage world was done. So I launched a new company called Eat the Change with my co-founder, Chef Spike Mendelsen, and the goal was to create planet-friendly foods, foods that are both better for the nutrient dense, but also better for the planet. And unexpectedly, in May, I know the date exactly, May 23rd, 2022, I got a call from the leadership of Coca-Cola who called to tell me that we're going to be discontinuing Honesty. They had run into challenges during the pandemic. The supply chain got disrupted. Honesty, as a result, had not been growing and they were going to winnow down the number of brands they carried and Honesty was a victim of that. Honest Kids was going to continue, but Honesty was going to be discontinued. And for the first week, it was just morning. We were just so sad, not just me, not just my family, but the whole network of people involved in building this brand that we cared so much about. All the former employees. But what struck me most was that also the supply chain was sad. More than just sad, they were economically concerned. I got an email from one of our strongest suppliers from India who said, we enjoyed being on this journey with you. We converted many of our gardens to organic and to fair trade as a result of this demand. And not only is the economic impact real and we're concerned about that, but we're also worried that maybe this whole idea of organic and fair trade is just a failed experiment. And that note, more than any other thing, tatted me into action. And we realized, of course it's sad that Honesty is leaving, but what an amazing business opportunity we've been presented with. And so by June 6th, we decided we're going to go do this. And we had three challenges we had to overcome. So by the way, I never had any kind of non-compete. That wasn't an issue. But we couldn't call it Honesty because Coke still retained that brand. We couldn't use the phrase just a tad sweet because we had trademarked that. And we couldn't sign the label Seth and Barry because Coke also owned the rights to that. So the first step we came up with over the weekend was just iced tea, which perfectly connected because you could also read it as justice and speaks to the fair trade sourcing that is part of our supply chain. The next step was we signed the label Seth Spike and Barry, that was easy. And then instead of just a tad sweet, we went with just sweet enough. And we were in business. We made the decision on June 6th to go and build a brand by September 6th, fully 90 days later, we had sold our first bottle in a restaurant in New York City. By October, we were nationally launched in Sprouts. And by November, nationally launched in New York City, nationally launched in Whole Foods. And what's exciting today is that on it, just iced tea, almost called the honest tea, just iced tea is the top selling brand in the natural foods channel, the top selling brand in Whole Foods. And by the end of the year, we'll have sold over $16 million of tea just in our first year. So. So. But the reason this is so exciting for us is because we can revitalize that supply chain. And I want to give you a sense of how inspiring this can be. Just a very short one minute video. This is a shot when I took the first step in launching the brand was to take my co-founder Spike to the source, to a tea garden. This is just some quick footage shot in the world's largest organic tea garden and it's located in Mozambique. We wanna know. My co-founder, Chef Spike Mendelson and I, visited our newest tea supplier to better understand the impact of fair trade. Oh, sent look. There it is. This is what we... This is worth every single minute of travel. With every pound of tea we buy, a portion of the money is directed to a workers' council which decides how the money will be spent. Being my first time at a tea garden, just the travel out here, the remoteness is just absolutely breathtaking. And of course, the people, you know, the people here that make up the tea gardens that farm the land and take care of it. The natural ecosystem, the incredible balance here, there are no external inputs. Everything for this garden is supported, comes from the gardens, all here. Zambezia Province, where this tea garden is located, is one of the poorest provinces and one of the poorest countries in the world. The average life expectancy is 54 years old and the first project we're gonna work on, we're working on with this community is a pathology clinic. There's cholera, AIDS, malaria, and typhoid in this community and so having a pathology clinic will be an important first step to making sure this community can reach its full potential. As I sort of look at what happened to come back to this idea of karma, why were we able to move so quickly? Well, first of all, 10 former honesty employees now work with just iced tea. That's karma. No one's required to come back, but they all chose to. The supply chain stepped up. They reached out to us. Once they knew we were back in it, they all wanted to be part of this. In fact, as I said, many of them really encouraged us to do that. That's karma. The distribution, at Honest, he worked with the largest independent distributors in New York City and in the DC, Mid-Atlantic area and we've just launched with all of those distributors. That's karma. The idea that the partners we work with have been so supportive, it is all about recognizing what we stand for, what we're trying to do and believing in it. And what's interesting about it is when I left the Beverage Road, I really thought, that's it. There's nothing more to do here. And so I didn't have any agenda in building those relationships. But when you treat people the right way, when you treat partners the right way, they'll be there for you when you need them. And thank you. So, in closing, I can say that the idea that, the idea that somehow organic and fair trade was going to be a failed experiment turned the reincarnation of Honesty from a baby sheep to a lion. And as long as I'm still breathing, I'll be fighting to make sure that the notion of organic and fair trade will always be an important part of what the future of agriculture and food should be and will make it happen in this life or the next.