Welcome to the Grown Rogue Second Quarter 2025 Earnings Conference Call. Today's call is being recorded. After the prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. As a reminder, during the course of this conference call, Grown Rogue 's management may make forward-looking statements that are based on current expectations and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that may cause actual results to differ materially from expectations. The risks are outlined in the Risk Factors section of the company's filings and disclosure materials. Any forward-looking statements should be considered in light of these factors. Please note that the Safe Harbor, any outlook presented speaks as of today, and Grown Rogue 's management does not undertake any obligation to revise any forward-looking statements in the future. This call will also reference non-IFRS financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA.
These measures do not have any standardized definition under IFRS and may not be comparable to those used by other companies. They are provided as supplemental information to evaluate the company's core operating performance and should be viewed alongside IFRS results. I'll now turn the call over to Obie Strickler, Chief Executive Officer of Grown Rogue . Please go ahead.
All right. Thank you very much, and thanks everyone for taking the time today to join us for our second conference call. Obviously, we picked another good time to kind of, you know, hold the call today, considering the frothiness in the markets the last few days after Trump's recent comments on rescheduling. Obviously, very exciting for the industry. It's good to see kind of some movement as we look toward federal reform. One thing we just want to highlight as a group, and we've said this for a long time, is that, you know, while we embrace that and we're pleased with it, our business is not dependent upon federal reform. It's how we set it up from the very beginning. Again, while we're excited about it, it's not dependent upon it.
I think that's just an important kind of, you know, consideration as people are thinking about how Grown Rogue International Inc. operates. Wanted to start today by kind of talking about our current markets. We've been saying for a very long time that we were built for these competitive landscapes, and we're seeing that right now in pricing is slow in Oregon and Michigan. Now, of course, when we're saying that and hoping that our pricing in these mature markets was more stable, we do find ourselves in a pretty nasty pricing cycle with Oregon and Michigan both down 25% year- over- year. The positive out of these things, pricing is one of those pieces that we don't control. We'll get to some of the controls and how excited we are about some of those KPIs that we continue to deliver.
It does feel like Oregon has stabilized and is starting to recover a little bit, and the same thing for Michigan. It really feels like Michigan, which has kind of gone through one of its, you know, it's gone through a compressionary cycle over the last three or four years. It's kind of come down from its beginning highs, but this is kind of the real first pain point we've seen. It feels like we hit a trough, kind of April, May of this year, and the last couple of months, we've seen some pricing recovery, revenues coming up a little bit. Hoping that we're kind of coming through the bottom of that and looking forward to a kind of recovery cycle.
As painful as it is during these times, I think it's really, really important for people to remember this is when we make our biggest gains as a company. Every single time we've gone through this in Oregon, we're now going through it in Michigan for the first time. This is when the company really leans in, and these habits that we develop and these improvements that we make in terms of the way our business operates last forever. On that front, I honestly couldn't be more excited about just the performance around the things we control. We've seen improvements in almost every category that we track, but particularly highlighted in improved yields and lower production costs. I think it's important to take a minute to think about Grown Rogue has always said that we are a low-cost producer.
I'm just not sure how much people appreciate how efficient we've become on a four-wall basis. I mean, you look at where Michigan landed this quarter, sub -$400 all in on production costs. Oregon was in the mid $400s. I think last quarter, most states were in the mid $400s. It's important to note that our analysis of this is on whole flower only. When you take a true COGS component, if we were including all biomass, again, we don't use biomass because that's not a big portion of our business. I think our indoor production costs are probably somewhere sub -$200. That's just a remarkable feat and something that's going to provide a tremendous amount of resilience as we navigate the way these markets function, both in exciting new markets where pricing is higher as well as the competitive markets.
It's a long-term competitive advantage that we think is going to serve us very well as we continue to expand outward with our business. The New Jersey ramp continues. We're already starting to see pretty strong yield and production numbers. You'll see some of that in the press release. Obviously, we don't have comparables, but pretty excited around just the way those are materializing ahead of our internal schedule where we were wanting to be in the mid 50s, low 60s on a g per sq ft basis, and then in the 1,000 lbs or less cost and definitely hitting all those metrics. Very excited with that. Continue to have strong sell through. Reorder rates are strong as the brand kind of gains traction in that market. As I indicated on our last call, I think it was in May. I guess our last call was our first call.
Our goal was to be at full sell through kind of by the end of Q2, early Q3 for the phase I. It's pretty exciting to feel like we're pretty much there. Very excited to kind of meet that milestone and starting to get kind of full sellthrough of our product. Looking forward to kind of bringing phase II online. The planning and kind of the early construction process to stage the phase II development has begun. Phase II, if you remember correctly, will take us up to 1,200 lbs a month at full construction and full capacity at kind of the optimization of our yield paradigm. We expect phase II to be fully constructed sometime toward the tail end of Q1, early Q2 2026. One other kind of exciting development in Q2 was we launched a new product in Oregon.
Oregon's been kind of become our testing ground for how we go about looking at consumer behaviors, how our customers respond to things. We launched our first infused pre-roll in Oregon. What we like about this product, which was kind of unique to Oregon because of our sungrown component, is all of this is coming out of our sungrown. The margins on this product are fantastic because essentially we're taking, historically, what we would consider waste product, biomass, trim material. We're able to extract an ice hash kind of rosin product, infuse that into our flower, and put an infused pre-roll in the market. Obviously, we got a big distribution team in Oregon, and so kind of sticking that into the suite that we have has been well received by our customers. We're looking forward to continuing to move that product into the system.
A couple of things, outside of pricing, that we could have, should have been better at. We always like to be pretty transparent in areas where we see areas of improvement. We should have been more responsive to the changing customer behavior in Michigan as it relates to strain-specific packaging. It's actually kind of interesting. We were way ahead of this a couple of years ago when we launched a proprietary product in that state that had fantastic reception. We overgrew it a little bit because when you deal with some of these higher-end products, you have to really manage your scarcity component. The consumer behavior in Michigan changed drastically. We've corrected that in Q1. We recently relaunched the strain-specific packaging.
I'll get to some of the new investor decks and things like that we're putting out, but there should be some photography and other video imagery of what we're putting out, which I think people will really like. We wanted to scale this back in. We did an initial package order. I think it sold out in the first week or two. Essentially, we sold what we thought would be a month's worth of inventory in half the time. We reordered more packaging, and we expect to rebuild that portion of our business in Michigan. The other thing, and this is just to my nature, and I've gone back and forth with probably people listening to this call, people on our team, advisors. I will continue, and I am aggressive in my expectations for what our team can achieve. We've talked about tempering that a little bit.
My view on that is it's really hard to temper those things because you want to drive your team and push them to achieve things that are difficult. Obviously, with that, some of those aggressive expectations are just how I'm wired. It's been the mindset that drives how our team delivers things. The ramp in New Jersey has been slower than we expected. Part of that is just natural delays in construction. The market is a little bit more dynamic than we originally thought because we're getting into that. Again, I'm super impressed and very happy with the business metrics and how this is setting the right foundation in this new market for our long-term goals. We don't spend a lot of time worrying about quarter- to- quarter or month- to- month.
We're trying to build a platform that has a much longer timeline for where we want to see the business go long term. The beauty of these things, like this launch in New Jersey, is that some of the learnings we're taking from this all prepare us for the future as we continue to expand. In addition to phase two in Jersey, which I just talked about a little bit, Illinois is under construction. This is kind of new, exciting news. Some of you may or may not have seen this in the press release, but our National Director of Cultivation was recently awarded one of the lottery licenses in Minnesota. Pretty excited about this, especially from all of our work we did with Vireo, so we understand that market a little bit and just the potential that sits there.
The license that he won allows for up to 30,000 sq ft of canopy. We just believe this is another huge kind of organic opportunity for us. It's kind of our growth into new markets. We're getting a little bit of some of the other things we're seeing. Minnesota is going to be a massive market. It's got big upside. We plan on putting significant resources behind this in partnership with our cultivation director. We've been, as you've seen, delivering on this growth, which requires continued investments. Any kind of our team, I would say, for the most part, a little bit of system, but mostly team. We don't like to see the overhead grow, but it's just part of setting ourselves up for success in terms of where we need to be.
Going back to the long-term view Grown Rogue takes, we're not worried about quarter to quarter, month to month. We're thinking about where we need to be in the next two to five years. Some of that comes with these strategic hires. Our focus lately has been on marketing and branding apparatus. We've been investing a little bit more heavily into just making sure that the foundation of low-cost, high-quality product that the consumer wants is being recognized and driven by branding concepts. We're just on the tail end of hiring a construction expert. As we look at phase two in Jersey, we look at Illinois, we look at the new opportunity in Minnesota, someone that can really manage and run that process for us is going to be really important. Obviously, Josh will speaking a little bit.
Bringing on Josh earlier this year, not only to level up our team and just the capability set we have, but Josh has got a unique kind of view and relationship inside of this opportunity around some of the distress and where he sees this industry sitting long term. Coupled with the fact that as we get bigger and as we scale, one of our unique kind of, you know, makes our business, we think, so special is just this flower-forward ops culture, which is the engine of our business. We think it's the engine of the industry. It's going to ensure that as our business gets more complicated, we've got the right talent and support so we can stay focused on the operational side, which really drives the core foundation of who we are.
Outside of Minnesota and some of the organic stuff, we've also been spending a fair amount of time, and I'll let Josh talk about this in much more detail around distress. Outside of the recent kind of changes and the hype we've seen over the last few days, again, that capitulation feels like it's coming a little bit. Pretty excited around some of the things Josh has been working on with the team, some of the opportunities we've seen, and how we think those things might dovetail into the organic process that we've been behind in the past. I'll let Josh talk about that more specifically. Before handing it back to Josh, I wanted to point out that we have a new summary overview deck available on our website.
One of the things we committed to earlier this year was being more transparent, better information, better disclosure, really educating the investor group around how Grown Rogue manages our business. I think you'll find a lot of really helpful information on there. We don't spend a ton on investor relations. We'd rather focus on comprehensive financial disclosures, again, just to help the investment community understand our business. Obviously, realize it was time for a refresh. The business has changed. Some of the information you think is important for you all to understand should be out there and available. I'm sure they'll continue to evolve. Feedback is always welcome and helpful. We take everything we get and look to continue to improve.
I'm pretty excited and pleased with how this new information either captures our business, our plans, our culture, our ethos, who we are and who we are striving to become. With that, I'll turn it over to Josh.
All right. Thanks, Obie. Just to start, I really enjoyed my first six months with the Grown Rogue team and my more formal role. Obviously, go back a little bit farther than that as an investor. Those that know me well know that I've been talking about the imminent need for a major restructuring in our industry, probably for at least the last couple of years. In many ways, the industry was built in a very unnatural fashion for a variety of very explainable reasons, mostly related to the patchwork regulatory environment, brief periods of hype-driven capital availability, folks often confusing profitability in high-priced environments with operating capabilities. What's likely kind of most problematic, at least with where everyone's awareness is, is the expensive senior secured debt and long-term lease liabilities that often didn't accurately contemplate the impacts of price normalization.
Some folks have mistaken me for being bearish on the industry, but I've actually never been more excited about the industry than I am currently. The real fundamentals are finally starting to be what matters most. We're finally seeing real capitulation. Perhaps, as Obie referenced, the recent excitement about rescheduling again allows some companies to kick that can down the road farther, but there are enough financial realities taking root that the distressed opportunity set is target-rich. Based on a lot of varying experiences in the industry, or what I often refer to as my scar tissue, I view the efficient production of quality flower as the economic engine of the industry. This is across the supply chain all the way through retail. It's also been my experience that it's the hardest part of the industry. A flower is the hardest part of the industry to consistently get right.
It's because of this that we see the root cause of a lot of the overall financial distress in the industry tied back to the cost and performance of cultivation facilities. In my opinion, Grown Rogue is one of a handful of players capable of providing long-term solutions. This is a big part of why I'm here. Don't get me wrong. We're still going to see a lot of financial engineering and bankers and desperate executives that try to escape this reality. I'm confident that over the coming 12- 18 months, some of these opportunities will translate into strong capital efficient growth for us. To give some perspective on how we think about capital allocation and returns on capital, for every incremental dollar of invested capital we spend, we target earnings of approximately $0.75 of what we call sustainable EBITDA.
Sustainable isn't a hard and fast definition, but the concept is to look at what we view as mature economics in a given market are likely to be, as opposed to what might be a starting point when we're looking at unsustainably high pricing environments. For instance, in New Jersey, we think this is likely structurally going to stay higher priced than Oregon. We should have very good comfort that it's an excellent business for us at $1,000- $1,200/ lbs and still be an okay business for us if it's $600- $800/lbs . This $0.75 of sustainable EBITDA is an attractive target and means that we'll be selected to the fat pitches. Kind of speaking in generalities, if it works out that we're off and we only earn $0.50 for every invested dollar, we still think this is a big win for shareholders.
I think some of what we're looking at could even be higher than that $0.75 target. Kind of sticking with this simplistic language, for the heavier operational lifts when we're looking at distress, we will skew towards making sure the economic outcomes skew even more positively. An important consideration for thinking about distress is that transactions can be messy and take a while. Please don't set your expectations on instant big deals nor instant substantial cash flow. Should we close something, these deals take work. On this last point of taking work, one of the things that really excites me about the Grown Rogue platform combined with my network is that talent wants to work with us. They see us trying to build an enduring company the right way. It's been gratifying to see my network engage with us, even when it's feeling us out for future employment opportunities.
With that, I'll hand it over to Andrew for a few comments.
Thanks, Josh. As a reminder, consistent with what we've highlighted previously, we do not consolidate our ABCO affiliates' performance into our financials due to IFRS rules. For obvious reasons, we consider it to be a core part of our business and growth plans, which is why we provide our pro forma results in our press release, including ABCO , consistent with how we view the business internally. With that said, we are in the midst of our conversion from IFRS to U.S. GAAP, which will be in effect for the year-end 2025. We do hope to be consolidating ABCO under US GAAP, starting with that report.
Finally, I'll note that although we do spend a lot of time paying attention to cash and cash -on -cash returns, we do not focus on driving near-term cash flow from operations, nor do we think it's a good barometer of a growth company's value creation on a quarterly basis. It's a noisier number in our opinion, even more so in our case when we don't consolidate key assets' performance. Just to be clear, we place significant value in the long-term sustainable generation of cash flow. For us, we want our external disclosure and communications to mirror how we're building the business. With that, I'll hand it back to Obie to wrap up.
Great. Thanks, Josh and Andrew. I think with that, we will open it up to questions. I know everyone's been waiting in to ask, so let's start that process.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question and answer session. Should you have a question over the phone, please press star followed by the one on your telephone keypad. You will hear a prompt that your hand has been raised, and should you wish to cancel your request, please press star followed by the two. If you're using a speaker phone, please lift the handset before pressing any keys. One moment, please, for your first question. Once again, that is star and one to ask a question. One moment, please, for your first question. Your first question comes from the line of Adam August. Please go ahead.
Good afternoon. I'm actually pretty pleased with the results overall. It looks like a pretty good quarter. Andrew's last comment, notwithstanding, I can't help but notice the swing back for the quarter to positive cash from operations, which to me is a big win, although I do recognize what he said. Another comment, the ASP, I mean, my back of the napkin shows that that drove probably a $2 million+ reduction in EBITDA versus if the pricing had remained at last year's Q2 levels. That's pretty massive. To still be showing profitability and cash flow in the face of a $2 million+ headwind is great. I would just also throw it out there, I would love as an investor to get a little bit more time with the results before we get on this call going forward.
It's kind of tough to scramble and pull together any real intelligent thoughts with such a short timeline, even though I know that it's pretty typical to have a short time period. The question, the only real question that I have is I see that the short-term note receivable was pretty flat in Q2 versus Q1. I'm just kind of curious, does that reflect that ABCO is not really accruing any additional debt at this point, or was there some additional accrual but also some payback?
Thanks, Adam. You're going to have to work on your analytical skills so you could get better questions quicker. That's just it. Andrew, do you want to take the question on what you asked around the accrual for what's going on with ABCO in the debt?
No additional principal has been advanced over that period. However, we do continue to accrue interest on all of those notes, and the payback is occurring. There have been some payments made, and it's a bit irregular. There may be quarters moving forward where we make significant progress in pay down of the debt, depending on cash flow and how it gets allocated. We also have consulting fees we charge to ABCO . At times, we may make the decision that we're going to make a payment against those fees versus the debt. The answer is essentially there hasn't been any further advances, but we will start to see that amount decrease as repayments start to occur more heavily over the balance of the year.
Can I give you a little bit of context?
Real quick, Adam. Just a little bit of context. I think that, go ahead, Obie.
No, I was just going to talk about the benefit of that debt. Josh, you go ahead. I'll come in with you. Go ahead.
Yeah. Before that, I was just going to give the context around the, you know, the performance of Jersey itself. It is going to be a little bit lumpy because of how the structure works there in terms of when we take payment, et cetera, and when those receivables get paid down. The performance there, the other piece that'll make it lumpy is we do have an expansion project to fund. I think the dynamic of continuing to invest in New Jersey is still in play, but on a standalone basis, and I think you can see that in the EBITDA performance, the adjusted EBITDA performance this last quarter, like we've seen the ramp. We have a business that on a standalone basis is producing cash flow now, and it's just a matter of the allocations around that. There's been no need to provide incremental funds to that business, for instance.
It's the opposite at this point. It's just a little bit lumpy and not perfectly predictable.
That's true. It's an important thing to reiterate around the way we structured the investment into ABCO , right? We made a $2 million equity contribution. It was in the form of the option that's going to ultimately allow us to get to our 70%. The rest of it was in this form of debt, which we consider a very preferred kind of structure for how we want to enter new markets. It obviously puts us in a very strong position to capture all the early surplus profits that are going to come out of these markets. It's something we plan to replicate as we go forward. We think it's a very advantageous structure, regardless of some of the challenges around how you report it. It's not consolidated. The lumpiness of how we manage the cash and what's available for pull to pay down some of those fees.
We love the structure and think it's a framework for how we want to go forward.
If I could ask one additional question on just the cost per lbs metrics, which looked fantastic, that appears to me to be predominantly driven by a pretty substantial improvement in yields. I think I'm seeing that there was probably some cost reduction as well. For the latter specifically, I'm kind of curious which part of the operation you would say most contributed to that.
Yeah, I think we've done a couple of things. We have tightened up labor. It's interesting, our GM in Oregon, I mean, you know Rector well, but fantastic. We made some wage increases recently, and I was like, we're under this price pressure, like why are we raising wages? It was just so impressive. He had me look at overall cost, overall number of people, and all that was trending very positively in the right direction. I think labor is a big part of this, just as we're prioritizing talent and paying people maybe a little bit more, but having less people do the same amount of work. I think that's been a net benefit. In Michigan, we've seen some reduction in utility costs, which has been helpful. That was one of the big drivers that I think we've seen a little bit of improvement.
As we've gotten bigger, now this goes to the scale of the organization, now we've been able to negotiate better kind of material and supply input costs. We formed a role last year. We call it our national procurement director, that is working with our vendors to kind of drive supply distribution into all three markets, soon to be four and then five, which helps lower costs and just makes everything a little bit more efficient. The big driver is in yield. That denominator is a really important component to how your overall cost of production kind of manifests itself.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you once again. Should you have a question, please press star four by the one on your telephone keypad. There are no further questions at this time. I will now hand the call back to Mr. Obie Strickler for any closing remarks.
All right. Number two in the books. We expect to continue to complete these on a very regular basis. Thanks to everyone who took the time out of their day to join us. Thanks for the questions. If you guys have anything, if there's more thoughts that come up as you review the press release and the financial statements or any of the commentary on this call, don't hesitate to reach out. Always happy to talk about our business and the drivers that are going to continue to create the success that we are looking to achieve. Thanks, everyone. Really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your night.
Thank you. This concludes today's call. Thank you for participating. You may all disconnect.