 Well, thank you. Good afternoon. We're really excited about our talk today, and we're going to talk to you about something we're incredibly passionate about. And that's designing our business model to ensure impact and innovation from farm to cup and looking at every step of how we do business and leaving no rock unturned. I'm Ahmed Raheem. I'm the CEO and co-founder of NewMe Tea. I'd like to share with you a bit about what NewMe stands for. We really stand for celebrating people, planet and pure tea. What does that mean? Obviously celebrating people. We've become, in our short time, just in over 15 years, the largest fair trade organic premium tea company here in North America. We work with over 10,000 fair trade tea farmers across the world, covering every single continent, including Australia even, India, China, Africa, South America. And working with these farmers is obviously a big chore because they're these indigenous farmers in small communities around the world and they need a lot of hands-on attention and working with them on what their needs are, whether it's a school, it's a hospital, it's a road. And we'll get into that more, but being the largest fair trade tea company and celebrating people is something we take really seriously at NewMe, something that we work diligently on, not just while we're there but while we're here and working with people on the ground and certifying parties. The other big attribute of NewMe is celebrating planet. All of our products are certified organic. We're committed to preserving the planet and leaving it better than when we came to it. And not only is it just about organics but it's also about sustainable packaging. As we know, packaging is one of our biggest Achilles heels. So much goes to landfill. So we don't follow the trends of those see-through tea bags or we don't put cello wrap on our tea boxes. We don't do the small things that really add up over time to preserve the planet and reduce what goes in the landfills. And the last thing we do is celebrating pure tea. We're by far the most premium tea on the market. We only use real ingredients. Anything on the side of the box, you can read the ingredient. You know what it is. You won't see natural flavorings or oils or any type of other artificial flavorings other than the actual herb or tea. So a little bit about the company. My sister and I started NewMe Tea about 15 years ago. We always give thanks to our mom. And this is a picture of Rima and I when we were in Baghdad, Iraq, that's where we were both born. So coming from Iraq, it forced us to think a little differently. Being raised in America and Europe, we have to think outside the box. Not only from our background and the oppression our country's been through but just in general as artists. My sister and I went into this business thinking, what if? Always asking questions. How do we really create a brand? How do we create a legacy? How do we do something that's different and that really has a lot of values? So celebrating people, planet and obviously the sustainable measures were just one step in that direction. And the other thing that really mattered to us was innovation. How do we become innovative? There's a lot of tea brands on the market. When we came out, there was nothing out there in premium quality. There was nobody that cared about values. So we wanted to be innovative and really bring out products that were unique to the country. Our first product that we brought out was this dry desert lime. This lime is native to Iraq. It's our drink of hospitality just like you have green tea in China, Coca-Cola in the US. We in Iraq, we have this dry desert lime and it's called Numian Arabic. It's our namesake, it's one of our staples in our line. When we talk about innovation and impact on the supply chain level, it's really driven by direct relationships and fostering those strong relationships and having hands-on engagement at the farm level with your suppliers. A number of brands in the industry and a number of firms do not do that. We think that's really been the new me difference is having this direct hands-on relationships. For the lime, we began importing the lime in 1999 from Oman. For many years we were working with a number of farmers, about 250 family farmers. Each of them had a tree or two trees in their yard and we were importing this lime. But the coordination wasn't scalable for that. Nor could we achieve organic certification or fair trade certification or other social certifications. So as the business grew, we partnered with partners in Egypt. Our Egyptian partners are the folks who really helped us develop the lime and make it a much more commercial enterprise. In 2010, we helped them become organic certified. In 2011, we facilitated their fair trade certification. The organic certification alone increased their wages by more than 20% just to the premiums on the price. With the fair trade, that increased wages and income by an additional 10%, let alone the fact that other parts of that financing was going directly into their community development. So we were really happy with how we took the new me namesake and took it to the next level. And after the lime, we thought, what else is popular? I used to have tea houses in Europe for many years where I lived for about 10 years and Roeibus was getting popular there in the 90s. So when I moved back to the United States in 1999, I thought, wow, there's no Roeibus in this marketplace. This is one of the most miracle herbs in the world. It's high in antioxidants, contains all kinds of magnesium, zinc, and it's all the way from South Africa. Brian and I had the opportunity to go to South Africa earlier this year to go visit our Roeibus farmers. And this product has done incredibly well for new me. It's one of our original flavors. We're still the number one selling Roeibus in the natural food marketplace. And it's set a theme for us as far as innovation. How do we do things differently? The lime, the Roeibus, and a couple other items we'll talk about have really kept new me ahead of the curve and really allowed us the opportunity to set ourselves differently, not only in the marketplace, but in the minds of the consumer. And that innovation really carried on to the supply chain side. And most people don't know, but the Roeibus industry is dominated by a couple exporters who control about 80% of the market. And with that control, they also control the majority of the farmers in regards to price, quality, quantity, access to market. They even control the Roeibus seedlings. It's a crazy situation. So what we've done since day one is we've partnered with the other 20%, and we've tried to grow that base. And we've worked for more than 16 years with the same small farmers and the same exporters that we did back in 1999 when Aukman first imported the tea to the U.S. And the big thing about the innovation that made this accessible for us was that we needed to share in the same vision as the suppliers, not just in South Africa, but anywhere. And sharing that vision really helped us in South Africa on economic and social development over the years. What we're really excited about is currently we're engaged with a new supply chain project. And this supply chain project is all about reinventing the Roeibus supply chain, the redistribution of wealth to the people who need it most, and how do you empower the farmers to a level where they have control of their own situation again. We're very excited about this, and we started with some upstream financing earlier this year, making sure that farmers are paid immediately for their work, also preventing bottlenecks and capacity issues and allowing them to expand their business. The next thing we're going to be working on is a program called Fair Labor Practices. We'll look at every step of the Roeibus supply chain, and we'll be focusing on employee benefits, focusing on facility upgrades, and looking at guarantee purchases before we even harvest the product. So we're really excited about that. And many years past about six, seven years ago, we thought, what's next? What are we going to do that really becomes innovative. Puerh tea was a tea I've been drinking for over 20 years. It's a tea that's fermented for 90 days. It's put in big piles, and in that process of fermenting, it turns from green to black, and all these great health benefits and bacterias grow. It's kind of like a composting process to some extent, but it's really the only tea that's fermented. And we got fortunate where Dr. Oz talked about Puerh as this fat-busting tea, because it's supposed to help you with losing weight. It's great for digestion. It has incredible health benefits. So about eight years ago, we were the first to introduce Puerh on a large scale. The top seller here is Emperor as well as our chocolate Puerh. And this, again, separated us in the marketplace, really kept new me front and center in press, and in the eye of the consumer as an innovative brand. And our Puerh partners, they live in the mountains in Yunnan, China, in these autonomous villages right on the Burmese border. And our Puerh tea comes from ancient tea trees, many of which are more than 600 years old. And this area is known as the birthplace of tea. When we first visited these folks on a sourcing trip, about six years ago, no, probably by eight years ago, you gave me about eight years ago, we immediately recognized that this had great potential for one, innovative product, and two, social impact. So we partnered with the local people there, and we've been working on a number of projects ever since. We've been traveling there multiple times a year for several years now, and I have to say it's perhaps my favorite place in the entire world. But when we first started partnering with them, step one was to help them become organic certified. We hired organic consultants. And we got them certified under a wild harvest certification. We've been paying for their organic certification ever since. And step two was to implement our fair labor practices, the things we're just getting started in South Africa. This is our flagship partner for fair labor practices, which is NUMI's own proprietary program for driving social sustainability in the supply chain. And fair labor practices is fundamentally a continuous improvement program that looks at the labor conditions, it looks at the work conditions, direct trade, and sustainable agriculture. Over the years of these partners, we've invested more than $10,000, not just more than $10,000, probably closer to $50,000, tens of thousands of dollars on the number of different projects that we're working on with them. And we've seen tremendous impact through our audits and through our processes with them. First of all, we were able to rebuild their factory. We were able to provide increased wages. We provided occupational health and safety training. And we also were able to do a number of other benefits that have really driven advancement in their community year over year. And hearing Brian, I just think of all the trips we've taken all around the world and all the travels and the villages we've been in and all these indigenous communities. And one of the pleasures of this is we get to try and find unique herbs and teas that aren't exposed here to this marketplace in the U.S. and the Western world. And on a travels over to Indonesia and Asia, turmeric kept popping up. Why isn't this turmeric anywhere here? It's like this huge ginger. I mean, in the big chains in Asia, they sell 100 counts of just turmeric and teabags. And so a couple years ago, I went to the team and I said, hey, why don't we do turmeric? You know, this isn't hot. This isn't hot yet in America. We had just come off of doing the savory tea we launched four years ago, dried vegetables and spices. That didn't do so great, but you know, we love to try new things. So just a year ago, we launched this line of turmeric. It's done incredibly well. Ginger, it's quite popular all over the world. And now with these four new flavors we just introduced, they've really had incredible success in the natural food and now even in the grocery channel. And Brian, speak a bit about that. We just happened to be in Madagascar about four months ago, one of the poorest countries I've ever seen in the world. And as Akman mentioned, our turmeric supply comes from a farmer cooperative in Madagascar. And they live among about 15 villages along the river. And one of the interesting things is they actually transport the turmeric and the other spices they produce out of the region via canoe. It's pretty crazy to see the different steps that it takes in the supply chain to get this product to the whole food store shelf. It's unbelievable. But when we first met them in 2013, we realized that they had just obtained their organic certification. But we wanted to figure out a way to take the partnership to a higher level. So we started working with them and there was already fair trade operations in Madagascar from some vanilla projects. So we partnered with them and we helped them become fair trade certified. We contributed thousands of dollars to the whole process, not only for the certifications, but for equipment and for training and a number of other things to get their whole farm and the community up to speed. And in 2014, about mid-2014, I'm happy to say that they earned their fair trade certification. And we were able to buy all the fair trade turmeric they produced that year, back into their community for development projects. And when we were there a few months ago, it was almost like a celebration on the side of the river. It was unbelievable. And we spent a lot of time talking about the great success we've had so far on where the relationship can go. And that's where we got a lot of new ideas on what's next and what can we do next. I'm going to let Aukman talk to you a little bit about that. Yeah, and you know, I think from my sister and I, 15 years ago, always asking, what if, you know, for us, it's not enough just to be organic. It's not enough to package it in the most sustainable packaging. We always like to think outside of the box and we always like to ask everyone what if. And about a year ago, actually before we went to turmeric and Madagascar, we wanted to do something bigger and grander than some of our values. And we came up with this idea of, you know, without clean water, how do you have good tea? And there's over 700 million people without access to clean, safe drinking water. So we put together an idea called and we were in Madagascar. You know, we asked the people and we always asked the farmers when we bring them together, what are your biggest needs? Is it school? Is it hospital? Is it roads? There, they're drinking water out of the river. They're boiling it and it's their sickness. They're getting a lot of illnesses there. So it was perfect for us to really pilot our Together for Hope program with them. We'll be drilling over the next few months several wells that'll take care of thousands of farmers and families there. The Together for Hope campaign is something that we want to continue on with a lot of our farming communities. Next steps is India where Assam and Darjeeling grows in the northeast. We're looking at South America where some of our other products grow. But for us, it all boils down to what can we do? How can we drive a difference? What can we do in the local community and learning from these people about what's been done? So we always ask everyone, what if and what can we all do together Thank you so much for having us today. Thank you.