 Huge, huge, huge, huge news. Prince Khaled bin Al-Waleed has joined Eat Well Group as a strategic advisor. Big breaking news, Eat Well Group. Put on your watch list, put on your radar. Prince Khaled bin Al-Waleed has joined Eat Well Group as a strategic advisor. Hi, how's everybody doing today? I'm your host Rich from Have A Rich TV Live and our very special guest, Mark Anid, the president of Eat Well Investment Group. How are you doing today, Mark? Good, fantastic, delighted to be here. I'm super excited to learn more about your company and let's get right into it. So Eat Well Investment Group is an investment company primarily focused on high growth companies in the agribusiness, food tech, plant-based and ESG, environmental, social and governance sectors. Can you tell us a little bit more about your company and maybe a little bit about your previous experience? Yeah, absolutely. So Rich, I'm a 20-year consumer products executive. I started at what I joke was the original plant-based foods business, the Quaker Oats Company. Oh, wow. So I've worked at big plant-based foods businesses before it was a term, big iconic brands like Gatorade. I had the last eight years in nutrition, sports nutrition, dairy-based nutrition and then plant-based nutrition where I'd been an executive manager for a few years. What we're doing at Eat Well is a once-in-a-career, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Plant-based foods in some ways is just new because we've discovered either the science or the technology, which is still a bit of a head ringer when you say technology and plants, but the multiple benefits to the environment, to the planet and certainly to investors and economically-based theses. But the bottom line is we found a bit of a gap in the market. So our management team literally has, I counted up recently, well over a hundred years of experience in architecting plant-based companies, driving consumer products, commercial financing, literally building plants that were for plants and even global business development. And what we're doing at Eat Well is we're solving the biggest gap we see right now in the market, that's vertical integration. So what we're doing is building a seed-to-market platform. It is by design right out the gate. Today, if you're an investor as an audience, look at the plant-based space, which is exciting and which is still in the first inning for baseball fans. What you see is some folks are excellent at the commercial end. They've got products or retail outlets. Others are upstream. They've maybe got an agribusiness that they're focused on or some are in the middle with food tech. We, because of our experience in the sector, believe it or not, we were in the sector for well over a decade before plant-based food was a term. We were original investors in some big names that you would now know today. And when we were investing, we put in about $75 million into various different investments. Five, six, seven years ago, that was an obscene amount of money. And nobody believes the valuation beyond may have had $100 or $200 million. Everybody knows where it is today. Well, now the sector has multiple billions of investment, but we have not seen what we think we're gonna help the market do, which is by design, vertical integration from seed to market. So what we've done, and I'll be happy to dig into some more of the details is we've made an acquisition upstream, so closer to the farm, and we've made an acquisition or investment downstream. It's food tech leading into consumer products. And we have an acquisition thesis that will build that out. And with that in mind, we're already today a very real business with very real revenue, practical, healthy gross margins. And we're just delighted. We just executed our name change to E-Well Investment Group in the last couple of weeks, and already our stocks responding and the market response has been outstanding. Wow, congratulations on all your success so far. And we've been a huge fan here at Rich TV Live with Plant-Based Foods. We love new technology here at Rich TV Live. We love breakthrough technology. We love cutting-edge technology. So let's talk about it. Why are Plant-Based Foods an important part of modern society, and why should investors pay attention to the plant-based food market right now? Yeah, this is a bit remarkable to actually realize, I said to you earlier, this is a once in a lifetime, once in a career opportunity. There are multiple vectors all coming together. I have young kids, they love to play with Rubik's cubes. I can't stay in Rubik's cubes because I feel dumber than my kids. You are actually seeing multiple things line up. And a plant-based food, it's not just is there technology that's better? Are there health and wellness trends that are better? But there's public policy at regional levels across the globe. We're talking to school districts about how to get kids healthier. And certainly we talk about the economic value. So what does that mean? We three Ps, we try to keep it simple. People, planet and profits. Five, six, seven years ago, Rich, maybe even two years ago, the word vegan was a bad word. Today, vegan means option and everybody loves optionality. Look, we all grew up being told to have lots of colors on the plate and eat healthy diets. But now that we've learned more about gut microbiome, to talk about technology, to talk about brain health, overall inflammation and physiological systems, people are opting into plant-based foods simply as part of a flexitarian model who knew we needed a fancy name like flexitarian to eat some more grains like our parents told us. But people are taking permission to get healthier with plant-based foods. That's number one, every business is a function of how many people buy and how often they buy whatever you've got. So the addressable market, we joke, is everybody with a body. That's the addressable market for what we're doing. The second piece is on an environmental basis, listen, sustainability isn't new, but what's newer is the science and the balance in things like traditional meat production that creates some methane we want to balance out. And that means that plant-based foods help manage nitrogen and carbon in the air. They mineralize the soil. They create health into the ground and that's on a sustainability basis. That's here to stay, that's not going anywhere. And what's remarkable is we have a part of our model deep into seed genetics. So we're learning more of what God built into the ground from the beginning is the genetics approach to make seeds more environmentally sustainable and help with better foods. And the last bit, of course, we spoke about is the economic profile. If you just think in the simplest terms, and that's because Rich, you know this as well as I do. Every three to four weeks, there's another new report that says the numbers are even bigger. Absolutely. Global digit, massive secular trend cagers up to the next 20 years, but it is real. Listen, none of us knew what probiotics was 20 years ago when we started to see commercials of those yogurts. Now everyone asks each other, what's your probiotic? That's what we're going to be talking about in 20 years from today. So Bloomberg came out with a piece last month and they said 10% of the world's global protein market is going to be plant-based. Wow. That's $160 billion. That's $160 billion today. Plant-based foods is about 12 billion. Listen, you don't need a PhD in econometrics to say this is a trend here to stay. In the last bit, I might say why people should care is this is a multiple occasion deal. So it's not just for dinner. It's for snacking. It's drinks on the go. It's how you think about pet food. It's how you think about other opportunities with whole crop utilization. And that's part of the ESG piece I think you mentioned earlier. Last bit, I would wrap this up, Wynrich. The reason to care is you can do good for your body. You can do good for the environment. You can do good economically and you can do good for the world. Whether it's the Middle East or what's going on in Haiti or even in the US with the floods, nutrition security is really well facilitated by plant-based foods. There's a lot we can do and we're starting right now. I love it. Plant-based foods is such an exciting sector and we all eat. We have to eat for fuel. So why not do plant-based? Why not bring plant-based into your diet? I totally agree with you. This is going to be one of the biggest sectors in the world moving forward and EatWell investment group is all over it. So let's ask you another question here. So EatWell has acquired several industry leading companies in recent months. Can you tell us a little bit more about these acquisitions and how they have shaped the business? Absolutely. Brilliant question. Listen, when you start with plant-based foods, you've got to look at supply. Like I said to you, this is one of those spaces, everybody's got an idea. My mom's sending me ideas. Everybody's got an idea and there's lots of retail demand. In fact, we can't even shake a stick at how much demand there is. So the number one problem to solve is scale supply. So as we think about our model rich, we are scale supply led by food tech with commercial agility. Scale supply led by food tech with commercial agility. So our big acquisition and investment was in Bell pulses, the crown jewel of the prairies, four decade legacy of ag tech. Again, I'm matching technology with plants. It's a beautiful thing in how we process pulses. Pulsas are things like peas, lentils, fava beans, great protein properties, great mixability properties. And that business is a very strong business with healthy gross margins, over 40% gross margins distributed in over 35 countries. It is likely that if you've had a plant-based food item in the last 60 days, there could have been some Bell pulses ingredients that made it into your end food item. So with Bell, we have some proprietary technology process patents and assets or plant assets that process these feed stocks. Rich, a couple of the things that I would underline for you with Bell. Number one, we are feed stock agnostic. So you heard me say commercial agility gang, we build agility throughout the model. We're disciplined, we don't wanna be hyper agile because that's when you lose focus. But with Bell, we are feed stock agnostic within pulses. So when the next food tech comes down the stream from our friends in seed genetics, better texture, better flavor, better protein properties, better environmental properties, we can plug those into our machine, it's plug and play and go. That's number one. Number two, we are having a great start to our relationship with the team and the senior managers of that company, family guys who started this business 40 years ago, they are some of the pioneers in Pulsas development. They have significant tier one relationships with further downstream processors, as well as big CPGs they're staying with the business and they're helping us grow this business exponentially and we will do that globally. So how it's shaped our thinking I would finish with is you protect the technology, you protect the genetics and the feed stock piece of it, and then you protect the relationship with the farmers and the people who steward that ground. So we have relationship with literally well over 3000 farmers and that number of balloons in season and out of season. The second piece of the business, and again I'll come to agility is our food technology platform. That's Sipensia, it's Dr. Gino Bertone. Before I forget it, let me nod to Tony and Francis Godet, those are the leaders of Bell Pulse and guys I'd love to have you meet, they're just salt of the earth and great operators. Dr. Bertone leads Sipensia, he has more than two dozen patents to his name, he is a PhD in food, R&D science, he was the inventor of the twisted Cheeto. And he said, listen, I know I can do better for kids and I know that I could do better for the world with plant-based technology. So he spent years and several million developing proprietary food tech, leveraging high protein pulses to make a vegan Cheeto. That vegan Cheeto is gonna be rolling out to the market by the end of this year, we're actually doing a pilot with Federated Co-op, we'll also be developing some e-commerce and strategic brick and mortar relationships over the next six to 12 months, we're very excited about. And why I tell you that about Dr. Bertone's technology, it's practical and real today. We love what our friends in the industry are doing with food tech, but it will take three to four to five years to monetize, we're monetizing today. Dr. Bertone, I should also tell you is one of the leading extrusion experts in North America, if not globally. In fact, he and I wanna call with someone in Italy just today talking about next level partnerships and product pipeline. Rich, why that matters? Here's why it matters. Like I told you, ideas in this space are everywhere, but you have to have the discipline to know when to make it and how to make it. Otherwise it's a piece of paper. So we have ideas with formulas, with manufacturing strategy and literally knowing how the end products nutritional shape up with high protein, things like pastas, crackers, snacks, jerkeys and other. I really shouldn't let everything out of the bag just today as we're getting to know each other. But that's the second piece of our acquisitions and investments to date. I can tell you that we have a deep pipeline of opportunities we'd like to come back and talk to you about within 90 days, Rich. And that's the team's watching they're getting to work on it right now, but we will continue building that end to end seed to market vertical platform with acquisitions that round out the chain. Wow, that's exciting. I love Cheetos. The Twisted Cheetos are one of the best inventions ever. So to make that plant-based, I could actually eat Cheetos and not feel guilty. I think that's great. So I love what you guys are doing. Now, when, you know, we talked to hundreds of companies and we've noticed that whenever there's a hot sector, the sectors get flooded with competition. So let's talk about it. What differentiates Eatwell from other plant-based companies? This is a great question. Listen, we've said at least two, if not three things so far. Number one, we are vertically integrated by design. We're not solving problems later. Like I said, with our other friends in the industry who are downstream, big brand names, when you read their annual reports, they are talking about their risk to supply. They're talking about quality supply, price protection and volume. That's not a problem that we anticipate. What I mean by that is we've built that in from the very beginning. We're designed for seed to market vertical integration. That's a big differentiator. There are not a lot of folks who can say that right now. The second thing I would tell you is our management team. So I told you about the leaders of the subsidiaries between myself and our key partners on our board. We literally have over 120 years of experience. What does that mean for your investors and ourselves? We're real people. We know what the mistakes are. We know because we made them five years ago. We know what it looks like when you overextend yourself. We know what it looks like when you don't protect gross margins from the start. We know what it looks like when you over innovate and you can't resource accordingly. It's a drain on cash. It's a drain on relationships customer by customer. So our management team is a big reason for belief and a big differentiator. Now listen, Rich, what I love about this is this is an industry of friends who have a huge tide raising all the boats. Today, plant-based foods is 12 billion. It's 12 billion. I mentioned to you a number before, depending which way you cut it, we're gonna go at least to 160 billion. That means we want to see the growth across our partners and our friends in the industry because they're our customers. Because we know who they are when it comes to developing food tech or manufacturing assets or seed genetics. Okay, so I told you about, we're built in vertical integration by design. We have a great management team. The other piece for your investors and audience to hear, which we pride ourselves in, real money, real profit, real revenue now. We are projecting around $60 million Canadian today. That's for this year with about a 40% gross margin. We're an EBITDA positive business. Of course, we'll be investing some of that EBITDA for long-term growth. But those are all real. Those are real differentiator. The last bit I would tell you is we have, again, a built-in agility because we've been around the block. We've been doing this for a long time. We know how to nurture and grow young brands. We know how to commercialize and value add with consumer products. And we literally have people coming to us at a public sectoral level. I just, there's just news I want to tell you, but it's not quite ready yet. Where we have folks who are coming to us with grants and investments to help further develop our asset base. And we also will have an advisory board that's second to none. So that news is coming soon. That's impressive. Eatwell is gearing up to launch its plant-based protein curls in the booming vegan snack market in the coming months. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? And are there any other products coming down the pipeline this year? Sure. Boy, I'd love to tell you about everything, but we have to manage our appetite. Like I said, we've learned some things the hard way. So the vegan Cheeto, which has up to four times the amount of protein as any other Cheeto in the market today, is going to be launching by the end of the year in the federated co-op stores. It's roughly around 200 stores in Western Canada for our US and global friends who don't know it yet. That's a critical excitement. And they're already talking to us about further expansion throughout the chain. Why that's important is we are scaling the business today, but we'll also learn to get real-time feedback. What I would tell you, Rich, and this is old consumer products language. It's one thing to have the absence of negatives. It's less fat or less salt. It is actually another to have the presence of positives. So that's what we bring to the table. It's a high protein, highly functional snack that'll be rolling out in federated later this year. And we will also be developing our e-commerce platform. That's actually happening real-time. So we'll be able to share with you when we're live in an e-commerce platform. You've got to be digitally led today, just like we are today right now. Yes. When we're live online. And we know where the shopper is. That was happening before COVID. COVID certainly kicked it up a notch. So that's the key focus over the next six to nine months. And those items are also in discussion with some tier one food CPG companies. The agility I said to in your model, and this is something I want to share with your audience because we know they are invested and they are interested. We build agility commercially. We will have our own brand. We will also partner with tier one CPGs. Between just Gino and myself, we have nearly 50 years of CPG networks. So all the name brands that everyone's following are looking for innovation like ours. And we will partner selectively with folks to have white label or private label opportunities in addition to ours. More news will be coming to that by the end of the year as well. So that's how we think about the next six months of opportunities with these vegan Cheetos. Listen, that twisted Cheeto did about $200 million of revenue in its first year. That's an amazing free-to-lay infrastructure for you. But we're building infrastructure and we have great ambitions for snacking alone. In fact, it was, I think, FMI partnered with Nestle on a study that said salty snacks. And it's important, salty snacks, vegan salty snacks are gonna ramp to 20 billion in revenue by the next decade. You haven't heard a lot about vegan salty snacks yet. You've heard about it in the low sugar, low carbs like smart sweets which had a significant edge in the TPG. Now we see the next wave coming with salty snacks. Products after that, I gave you a couple of nuggets earlier in the broadcast, but I wanna tell you is anything on the go, anything where we see there's still white space and we know where it is because we've been working on these technologies over the last two years. You could say meat analogs on the go consumption and that's young kid as well as up to adult. So there's something for everybody coming in 2022. I love that. I think that's brilliant. Yeah, I can't think of anything on the go that's plant-based, that's healthy. So I think that there's a huge market there that's very smart. Now you've talked a little bit about your team. Can you touch a little bit more on the team that has garnered some leading developers in the food industry, who are your key members and what do they bring to the table? Yeah, so when I think about Dr. Bertone and what he and I have been spending time developing there's an ecosystem approach we have. So literally as I was saying to you we spoke to friends in Italy today who have bespoke custom proprietary technology for extruding certain snack forms. That's a relationship we have that not many others and it's a relationship that goes back 14 years. That's part of our ecosystem approach. We also have in our ecosystem seed geneticists. So I'm flipping back to the upstream part that I told you, we know the feedstocks that are coming. So those are programs that are developing the next pulse and that is partnering with us because we are the bridge. So Rich, part of what's been happening and it's quite transformational in our mission. The upstream friends at the farm have not really known what the other hand is doing at End Retailer and Products. We're bridging that because we've had relationships that have been developed on nearly going on 20 years. So we talked to the seed geneticist teams. We talked to those who are food developers in the culinary world and we tell them where the market's going downstream. How do we make it real? We bring in our team from Bell pulses and we say this is what we need to be thinking about in terms of meal properties, moisture properties, fractionation properties, lots of details that could get a little bit boring if I went too deep. The other piece I would tell you is we've partnered with the Saskatchewan Food Center. So a group that's had over a dozen of the top CPGs in the world, arguably one of the best craftsmen and crafts women of plant-based foods, those are folks we partner with, we can week out to develop the next generation of foods. The other thing I'll tell you Rich is as we bring on board some of these new investments and acquisition partners, we are looking at food tech that materially lowers the cost of inputs, increases efficiency, that's a great margin story for us as investors. It's a great sustainability and efficiency story when we look through other angles. And believe it or not, we're seeing some new technologies that we're partnering with that borrow from different sectors because we know how to talk to entrepreneurs. We're not corporate types, even though we've had those experiences, we are real people who work with real people trying to solve real problems. And the last bit I'd tell you as we share new news in the next few weeks of our advisors, we have advisors who indeed are at a sector and a policy level who are part of our ecosystem. That means we know how to think about nutrition security, how to do it on a global basis and how to move product in ways that help people. Wow, you guys got it all figured out, sounds fantastic. What should investors watch out for from Eat Well in the next several months? Any catalysts or anything that we can look forward to? Sure, well, I wanna risk repeating myself because there are some things worth emphasizing. Number one, you'll see an advisory board that is absolutely world-class because we're bringing our experience with relationships and with food tech and ag tech that really was pioneering. So you're gonna see advisor announcements that should be really meaningful for you in terms of credibility and long-term confidence. Number two, you will hear about more investments and acquisition partnerships that we're gonna be developing over the next six to nine months. Those are real, those are keeping us very busy, but they're incredibly exciting because we know how to look for fundamentals. We know how to look, as I mentioned, into white spaces, sustainable gross margins, technology that we can monetize now and how to think about connecting those across our vertical chain. That's really, really important. The other two things I would tell you that you can look forward to Eat Well Investment Group as we bring on new innovations is that we are gonna be bringing on new feedstocks. That feedstock is important because of what I said earlier, better throughput, better food products, better partnerships. And then the last thing I would offer you that you can continue to look for from our team is big wins, big wins on a commercial basis. Some of those are gonna be really strategic pilot wins. Some are gonna be relationships with name brand CPGs that you know, and some are gonna be simply expanding ourselves globally with partners who are gonna make a difference. There's so many opportunities that I know I could just feel my guys telling me, ease it up, Mark, ease it up. We'll come back to you very soon, Rich, and share more. I'm so impressed, Mark. What opportunities does the company offer to investors, if any, and what is the best way for investors to get in touch with you? We've got investors all over the world in about a hundred countries that watch our show. They're going to want to get in contact with you. What's the best way for them to reach you? Fantastic, eatwellgroup.com. It's that simple, eatwellgroup.com. Go there, you can get information, download our latest investor deck, which I think you'll find is pretty beautiful and pretty smart. We've put a lot of work into it. You'll be able to sign up to our email list and get updates real time. So that's eatwellgroup.com. And what I would tell you that you have as investors now, we are trading at a discount. We're brand new. Now, we feel like we've been doing this for a long time, but we're brand new. So the baby's born, the baby's healthy, the ticker's EWG in Canada, EWGFF in the US. Today, we are trading about three times revenue. Three times revenue is our market cap. If you simply look at publicly available documents, any way you look at our comp set, those trades are 10 to 20 times revenue. So we're trading at a discount today, Rich. And I'd be awfully disappointed if we're not all celebrating the market hearing our news, seeing real revenue, real ideas and real progress, and your investors get to jump in right now, very, very early, not even the first inning. Wow, super excited, super impressive. The president of Eatwell Investment Group, Mark and Neid. Thank you for joining us today, Mark. Thanks so much, Rich. Y'all take care. Always a pleasure. Now, for those of you guys that are watching, I must remind you that Rich TV Live is strictly for information education purposes. Please do your due diligence, do your research before you invest in anything that we talk about or discuss here in Rich TV Live. In saying that, I'm super impressed with everything that Mark has had to say. The revenue run rate is impressive. I believe this is a company that is undervalued, underappreciated, underexposed. If you're not winning, you're not watching, we're bringing the winners and we're bringing them to you first. If you liked the video, smash the like button, comment down below, share the video everywhere, and subscribe. Thank you for watching, everybody. Thank you, Mark, and we'll see you guys soon.