Hello, and welcome to the Beyond Oil Fireside Chat. My name is Adam Lowensteiner, Vice President of Lytham Partners, and today we are joined by two leaders of Beyond Oil, Mr. Robert Kiesman, Senior Vice President and Director, and Michael Nemirow, Pr esident of North America. They both have joined us for a Fireside Chat discussion. Beyond Oil trades under the ticker symbol of BEOLF on the OTCQB and BOIL on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Let's get started. Robert and Michael, welcome. The floor is yours.
Thank you, Adam. Good to be here. Thank you for joining us, everybody. We are very pleased to be presenting Beyond Oil to you. Just before we get started, I wanted to point out that we will have some forward-looking information in today's presentation, and everything that we are discussing today, including the Q&A session, is subject to this disclaimer on the screen. I would just like to start by asking people if you have ever worked in a restaurant before. If you have worked i n a restaurant, particularly one that fries food, you are probably very familiar with the fact that in the deep fryer, after you fry the food for a few hours or a few days, the oil starts to look black. It starts to get thick. It starts to smoke and smell really bad. Just like you can see here on the photo on the left.
This is a deep fryer that had been frying in the same oil for about three days in one of our customer restaurants. You can see how thick and black it is. But if you look at the photo just to the right of that, you can see that the oil is clean, it is clear, it is golden. What you cannot tell by this photo is that it actually smells a lot better, and the reason for that is becau se of our product. Our product, you can see here, is a patented, FDA-approved white powder in a bag that you simply dump into the oil at the end of every day. You treat the oil once a day, and we take all of those toxins out of the oil on an ongoing basis that keeps the oil like new. It is fresh, and it lasts a lot long er.
You can look here after we dump the powder into the oil in the fryer, this is what is left over. This brown sludge that you can see at the bottom is scraped out of the bottom of this fryer because we are removing all of those toxins out of the oil again on a daily basis. Instead of seeping into your food, whether it is your French fries or your chicken strips or whatever you are eating, we are taking it out of the oil before it is fried and dumping it out into the garbage. The result, you can see these French fries here in the middle of this photo. They are cleaner, they are fresher, they are crispier. They are not as soaked in oil because the oil is much cleaner and it has not degraded like it would without ou r product.
Why should you care about that as an investor or a consumer? You should care about it because we are selling food. We are enabling our customers to sell food that is healthier because we are removing the toxins from the oil. I want to show you a couple of graphs here. You can see trans fat in the top right. The yellow line is oil that is not treated with Beyond Oil over a certain number of days, and the green line is the same restaurant, same oil, but it is treated with Beyond Oil over some days. What can you see here? Two things. Number one, you can see that the trans fat levels are much lower with our product because we are removing those trans fats out every single day, and as a result of that, the oil is cleaner, so it l asts much longer.
We are taking the toxins out of the oil, making it healthier and cleaner so it lasts much longer. We do the same thing with metals that accumulate in the oil, plastic molecules that accumulate in the oil, and as you can see in the top left graph, acrylamide, which y ou may not be familiar with, but acrylamide forms in the oil when you fry potatoes, and it is a known cause of cancer. As you can see in this graph, we keep the acrylamide levels at near non-detectable on an ongoing basis. This is a revolutionary product that nobody else can achieve these kinds of results. What does that mean in terms of the restaur ant customers?
Because we are removing the toxins out of the oil, the oil, as I mentioned, is lasting longer, so the restaurants don't need to keep dumping the oil out after every three or four days and replacing it with new, expensive oil. It is lasting 3x longer, 4x longer, sometimes even 10x longer, depending on the context. These restaurants, in addition to selling food that is healthier to their customers, they are actually saving money because they are not going through as much oil. The amount of money that a restaurant might save, it varies. It depends on what kind of oil they are using and what they are frying and so on, how many fryers they have. But we can save them between $5,000 and $10,000 per location per year.
You can imagine if you have a restaurant chain with thousands of restaurants, we can significantly impact their bottom line. This is our value proposition, healthier food, better tasting food, higher quality food, and that happens to save the restaurant money at the same time, and we achieve this by removing very potent toxins from the oil on an ongoing basis. It is a recurring revenue model. I am now going to turn it over to Michael Nemirow, who as Adam mentioned, is our President of North America, who is heading up the sales effort that we are working on to expand into the U.S. market. I will turn it over now to Michael, to lead t hat discussion.
Great. Thanks, Robert.
As Robert said, we are really providing a lot of benefit to the customer in terms of food quality and health and definitely savings. Because as we extend that oil, even though they're using the powder, the net oil savings, the cost of the powder, and the amount that they're saving in oil, we provide a financial benefit. That's a piece of the puzzle that certainly our customers care about. What we're seeing time and time again is what's really exciting our customers is the food quality. When you remove all these nasty elements from the oil, it has that benefit of health and all of the benefits to the workers not breathing in those fumes and the customers who are consuming that food. All of those things also impact taste.
When we're doing a pilot and an evaluation, the kitchen staff really see the benefit of that food quality, and it excites them, and it becomes a more and more im portant part of our overall value proposition to the customer. One of the things we're doing in North America is, and we've been doing this over the last year, is strengthening our team, really adding people with decades of experience in selling oil management solutions or offerings that support the kitchen in their overall operations. These folks have come to our team with a lot of experience in customer management, their own contacts, and certainly how to navigate the complex selling process inside of these various organizations.
We've also added a person to lead the customer success team, who has led also an oil management customer success team, and bringing that experience into how we work with our customers during evaluation and during market tests and broader rollouts has really brought a lot of value to that part of our business as well. Folks right there as part of our customer success team wit h restaurant experience, because at the end of the day, we're in those kitchens, and we're working side by side with the customers and helping them understand how to use the product, but also seeing the excitement of what we're providing. All of that work is going on, and the team is very busy. We're doing a lot of evaluations, pilots with customers, as I said, market tests.
We're working with some of the customers, some of which we've already announced, where we've done some early-stage rollouts, and we're working with those customers. We recently announced a grocery customer that we expanded as we refine how we are going to expand with these customers that we've done initial rollouts with them. We're doing that in a variety of cases. Around th e world, the team is also, outside of North America, very busy. There's a lot of activities happening globally. In many of those markets, there's actually enforced regulations related to oil health, which really helps in the benefit that we provide because those customers are familiar and have a requirement to make sure that their oil is at a certain level of, I'll just say healthiness.
Part of what we do or a key aspect of it is we keep that within that regulatory requirement for a much longer period of time. That's basically what's happening in North America.
Great. Thank you, gentlemen. We'll pivot now to the Q&A session. The company has an amazing product offering. How is the sales cycle, and mor e specifically, how are you getting the opportunity out to potential customers? How long do potential customers take to test and validate your product?
Yeah, Robert, I'll take that. First of all, because we save our customers money with their spend on oil because we're extending the oil life, because we make the food healthier, because we make it easier on the kitchen operations, and we help their sustainability goals and their health goals, our value proposition fits a lot of customers in the food service industry, right? The trick is figuring out who to go after when you have a product like ours that fits so many scenarios. We seg ment the customers a couple different ways. The first is by size. There are those really large multinational brands. I'm sure you can imagine what they are. Those are a piece of the puzzle. They're important, but it's a much longer, complex sales cycle. That's a part of our strategy.
Part of the strategy are those smaller customers, one- tens of customers, and for those, we are building our distribution network, and in some cases, for certain type two customers, working with them directly. That is a big market that distribution can support a lot. Then there is that meat of the market. I often say the 200- 2,000 largely corporately owned. They can make a decision. We focus on those. We look for customers like that with strong operations, who care about oil management. It is a huge market, so there are a lot of customers that fit that category. So that is kind of the first segment. Then we also segment by customer type, so quick serve and fast casual, grocery convenience, and we try to have a mix of those at any given time.
In terms of the sales cycle, right now the sales cycle is longer than we anticipate it will be over time because we are a new entrant. So first, we need to build awareness with the customer of our product and our offering and the benefits. Then we work with them to structure a pilot that is really assessing all the value that we bring, where they understand the savings a nd the food quality improvement, and working with the staff to do that very effectively. Then they evaluate that. Then we have generally a market test and then evaluation of that, and then a rollout. So that is a many, many month process today.
Our expectation and experience of our staff who have introduced products into this industry and just intuitively, but certainly the experience of the broad team is as we gain more marquee customers and we get more of a presence in the market, we expect th at sales cycle to shrink pretty dramatically. We would anticipate about a three month sales cycle after we get more recognized in the market with, of course, some of those larger customers taking longer. I think the other key piece of the puzzle that is happening in all of this with the people we have added and the experience that we have added, we are doing a better and better job of focusing at the beginning on the food quality that we always know excites them at the end. So we are adding that to our sale process a lot more effectively all the time.
On that subject, using your product has many benefits on multiple fronts. While economics is probably a major one, another two of those are better tasting and healthier food. How important is food value to your customers?
Yeah. I will take that again. It is really important, and it is really important for a couple of reasons, or a lot of reasons, but I will mention a couple of them. At the end of the day, oil degrades pretty quickly as you reuse it. As you are frying over and over again, a restaurant is frying over and over again, the profile of that oil is degrading pretty dramatically. A restaurant will have a range of quality, and at their top quality is when the oil is the freshest, and we are resetting the oil and k eeping it at that top quality. Well, one piece of that is when you have a product that the kitchen is the ones implementing it, if it is just something that the CFO likes, and there is no direct benefit in the kitchen, you can win that, but it is a harder battle.
If you work in a kitchen and you see the food quality improvement, they become our biggest advocates. One of the great benefits of the food quality is it is not a financial. It has a financial benefit because as your food quality stays good, your customer experience is better, your loyalty of customer, all of those things are benefited by high food quality. But your kitchen staff see the food quality, and that helps with them using the product, wanting the product, and we see time and time again when we do a pilot and a market test, it is that kitchen staff that really become our biggest champions. That is a key piece. Also, with delivered food, there are two things that happen as oil degrades.
One is it creates. Well, there are a lot of things that happen, but two of the things that happen is, it has an off taste, so it affects the taste of the food, but it also more of it gets absorbed in the food for a whole bunch of reasons. The amount of bad oil in the food is increasing as the oil degrades. Well, with delivered food or takeaway food, as it cools and it creates sometim es that bad experience in the customer, even more pronounced for delivered food, which is a bigger and bigger part of the market, because we are resetting the oil, it really impacts that delivered food even more, I guess, than in the restaurant because of the nature of what happens as it is cooling. It is a really big key piece of the benefit we provide.
I think at the beginning, it is a part of the puzzle, and by the end it is a very important part of the puzzle when we are talking to our customers.
You currently manufacture only in Israel and have capacity of, I would think, 100 million. If U.S. adoption experiences a sudden step function inflection, how quickly can you expand production capacity?
Robert, I'll let you have a do. I would say that a couple of things. First of all, we have capacity with our current production, as you said, for quite a bit of expansion. But the other thing the company has done really well is it's built a strong supplier network. So we have the ability for all those important pieces of making a product. We're set for growth. We also have all of our processes designed in a way to be able to grow, and we have plans related to expanding outside of Israel, both if we need it economically or strategically, including how we would expand in North America. So we're very well set for expansion.
Beyond Oil recently announced it has expanded its rollout into a second ownership group of a top-tier U.S. supermarket brand. Why is this deal important for Beyond Oil?
Well, I'll take that one, Adam. Certainly there's nothing more validating than having a customer doing repeat orders and also expanding the sale of your product within their company, and that's what's happening here. This is a very large supermarket chain, it's a very significant supermarket chain, and it really validates the product. So we're really delighted that they're expanding t he use of this product in their locations. I also just want to emphasize another point on why this is import ant, and this is something that we had never thought about before, by the way, when we started rolling this company, this product out into the U.S. in particular. And that is in these supermarkets, when they're frying food in the middle of the store, whether it's at a deli or whatever, it's the only context where the customer looks at the fried food before they buy it. Right?
You don't see the food before you buy it in a restaurant. It comes to you after you've ordered it. But you go into the supermarket and you see these glass displays, you see the fried food, and our food, the food when it's fried in our product, looks better. It looks fresher, it's cr ispier, and it's lighter. That is another big plus on the supermarket context, in addition to what Michael mentioned earlier, that there's less smoke and steam in the frying process because we're removing those toxins out of the oil.
What are some key catalysts why investors should tune in now?
Yeah. There's four or five really key things, I'll take this. Announcing more chains in the U.S. As Michael said, they've been building this team and this infrastructure in the U.S. over the past several months and elsewhere. We're in Europe, we're doing some business in Asia and the Middle E ast, and of course, Israel as well, where we're located. So more announcements on that. As these deals mature and expand within the deals themselves, adding more locations, for example, just like we did with the supermarket chain, we're expecting the revenue growth to follow later on in the year as well. So we will be seeing revenue growth as we start announcing more of these deals.
Corresponding with that, we're going to start putting more effort into getting the word out in an IR manner to U.S. investors as we start developing and expanding the U.S. commercial business. In addition to that, I would say up listing to a senior exchange in the U.S. has always been part of our plan. Whether it's NASDAQ or NYSE, we are going to do it when we start seeing enough growth in the U.S. in terms of revenue. I could see the process starting next year if things go as planned. So U.S. investors can expect and know that that is at the forefront of our minds to be doing an up listing as this company becomes more of a U.S.-focused company.
Is there anything else you want to add to the discussion before we conclude?
We have a product that is very unique. We have a company that is very unique because we have a product that can make food healthier, it has logistical improvements, and it saves the restaurant money at the same time. You don't see that very often. This is a story that we think is going to resonate with the retail and then the institutional sectors in the U.S. market. We're expecting significant appreciatio n in the value of this company and our share price over the next months and year ahead as we start announcing these U.S. deals. We have a very tight share structure to support that growth. We have distributors as shareholders, we have commercial partners as shareholders, we have restaurant owners as shareholders. The insider ownership is very significant, and we have one of the largest financial institutions in Israel called Harel Insurance.
They invested ILS 17 million in us in equity and secondary purchases last year. We have a very good shareholder base, and so when we start announcing these U.S. deals and app reciating them in the revenue, we're expecting the stock to react accordingly.
If listeners want to reach out and learn more about the company and staying in touch, how can they do so?
Best way to go is to our website, beyondoil.co. We have an investor relations page that has all of our news releases, contact information, and we are of course on LinkedIn and other social media channels as well. So feel free to reach out to us anytime with questions. We are more than happy to speak to shareholders or people who are considering becoming shareholders. But now is definitely a great time to jump into the story as we are expecting significant growth in the U.S. market.
Thank you, Robert and Mich ael, and thank you for everyone for watching. If you have any questions or would like to schedule a meeting with Beyond Oil, please send me an email at lowensteiner@lythampartners.com. We have more presentations and fireside chats coming up next, so don't go anyw here yet. Thank you and have a great rest of your day.
Thank you.
All right. Fantastic, guys. Thank you so much for your participation here in the summit, and for the insights into Beyond Oil. Up next, stick around because we are going to sit down with Andy Hey ward, the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Brian Parisi, the Chief Financial Officer at Kartoon Studios, to talk about the transformation taking place at the company. Please stick aro und.