Okay. Hello, everyone. We will just give another couple seconds, make sure everyone is in, and then we will begin. Okay. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining Organto Foods Q2 2026 results review and business update. My name is Lauren Bech-Hansen, and I will be moderating today's session. We will begin with a brief presentation from Steve Bromley, CEO and Co-Chair of Organto Foods, and Darryl Bergman, President of Organto Foods, who will walk through the company's second quarter results and operational highlights. Following the presentation, we will move into the Q&A. For those joining via Zoom, you can submit questions at any time using the Q&A function at the bottom of your screen. We will aim to address as many questions as possible, including questions that were submitted in advance of today's session.
Before we begin, I will note that today's discussion may include forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws. These statements may relate to Organto's expectations, plans, objectives, strategies, financial outlook, anticipated growth, operating performance, market opportunities, expansion plans, and other future events or developments. Forward-looking statements are based on management's current expectations, assumptions, estimates, and beliefs and are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. For a discussion of these risks, assumptions, uncertainties, please refer to Organto's public disclosure documents, including its MD&A, available under the company's profile on SEDAR. Today's discussion may also reference certain non-IFRS financial measures, including EBITDA or adjusted EBITDA. These measures do not have standardized meanings under IFRS and may not be comparable to similar measures used by other companies.
Please refer to Organto's public disclosure documents for additional information, including reconciliations where applicable. Nothing discussed today should be considered investment, financial, legal, or tax advice. Organto undertakes no obligation to update forward-looking statements except as required by applicable law. Thanks again for taking the time to join us today. I will now hand things over to Steve Bromley, CEO and Co-Chair of Organto Foods. Steve, over to you.
Great. Thanks a lot, Lauren, and good morning or good afternoon, wherever you might be. It is wonderful to have a chance to talk to you and update you on our second quarter results and the record first half that we have had at Organto Foods.
Today, we will cover operational highlights and a high-level performance review. We will dive into the financial statements a bit. Darryl, welcome i n your role as President. Darryl will take us through our key priorities going forward, and then we will open up the call to Q&A. So thanks again for joining, and really look forward to updating you on how things have gone. So a record second quarter for the company. We continue to realize record growth, and we have a very solid financial position. So we are very pleased to be here today with a very positive outlook on our business and the performance that we have had.
The first six months have been a very busy period for the company, as you'll see from the financial results that we'll go through. We've added six new growing partners in key sourcing regions, which was very important. We've added eight new European retailers to our customer portfolio. We moved into three new geographic regions, being Switzerland, Spain, and the Ukraine. We've added four new sea carriers, two new ports of origin, three destination ports, and some of that may sound really simple on the surface, but there's a lot of work that goes into making all of that happen. We're very pleased with the efforts of our team and our partners throughout our organization who have really helped set us up for a good start to the year. At the same time, we've expanded our operating platform and resources.
As the business continues to grow, we're adding new team members and new processes and new systems. While we're adding that, we're leveraging the platform that's in place. We've now opened up a center of excellence in Madrid, Spain, and we also have an expanded center of excellence in Munich, Germany, to go along with our operations that are based in Breda in the Netherlands. Our European footprint continues to expand in hand with the expansion in the business. We've really ramped up our implementation of a number of digital technologies, including artificial intelligence technologies, to really provide us with more business insights and also increase efficiency. Efficiency is really important for us, because one of the core platforms that we're operating on is to drive efficiency through our overheads, and it's a key metric that we track.
Utilizing advanced digital technologies is really, really important to us. Quite frankly, we think we're on the start of a long digital journey in the company, which we'll be talking about in the coming quarters. A really busy start to the first half of the year and into the second quarter. Our leadership team, we continue to fortify it for growth. We were pleased to have Darryl join us on June 1st as President, and he's been a critical new resource to the organization to bring more depth given the growth efforts that we have underway. We reorganized our management team, a number of people were elevated. Leaders in the organization were elevated to focus on the operations, and we freed up some other leadership to really help us with strategic growth. That's been underway as well.
You'll hear the word growth a lot, but growth is important to us. Positioning the team to be able to execute on that has been really important, and we've made some great strides in that regard. Our strategic growth pipeline, our M&A pipeline, our strategic partnership pipeline, our new business opportunity pipeline is continuing to grow, and we don't have any news for you today, but I would hope that before the end of the year, we'll have more than a few opportunities to talk about our strategic growth pipeline and opportunities that we're working to bring to fruition. A lot going on in the first half. When we peeled back the onion a little bit on the second quarter, we had record sales, and we'll dive into the numbers here a little bit in a minute.
We had record sales of CAD 27.7 million, largest sales quarter in the history of the company, up 61% versus the prior year. The really great news is that gross profit grew 65%. Gross profit grew faster than sales in the second quarter. A gross profit record of CAD 2.1 million. In that same time, up 204% when you factor in currency hedging, which we will talk about later. Again, largest sales quarter, largest gross profit quarter. Our cash operating costs continued to leverage down as a percentage of sales. They were down to 6.3% versus 6.8% in the prior year, and 7.6% in all of fiscal 2025. As we are growing the top portion of our business, we are also growing our overheads, but they are growing a lot slower than our sales, which is exactly the target that we are after.
As I mentioned, digital technologies, et cetera, continue to also provide some great support there. We have record positive EBITDA of CAD 400,000 versus CAD -500,000 in the prior year. A real turnaround on our EBITDA. Really, when we started this year, we said this was a year of positive EBITDA. We are now up to about CAD 500,000, and so we are on the trend. We are on a journey. We are quite frankly, exactly where we thought we would be at this stage of the game. I think equally important is with those results, we are now running at an annualized sales rate of over CAD 100 million. So, real positives on the operating side of the business. At the same time, we have maintained a nice, strong balance sheet. We ended up with a cash position of CAD 5.4 million.
On top of that, we had restricted cash of another CAD 1 million. Our working capital increased to CAD 15.3 million, so a very solid working capital position. We have no long-term debt. Our equity is up 87% since year-end to CAD 16.4 million. At the same time, we expanded our Rabobank flexible funding facility to fund the growth in the business as well from EUR 4 million to EUR 7 million. We completed the early exercise warrant, early exercise program in Q1 for some growth proceeds as well. Overall, when we take a look at Q2, and we will dive into in a bit more detail, record growth and combined with a solid financial position and lots of exciting things in the pipeline. We always like to take a minute and talk about our guiding principles. These are the principles that shape how we grow.
We are focused on providing healthy organic food products. We are focused on driving value across our entire ecosystem. That is for our growers, for our suppliers, for our shareholders, for our team members. We want to bring value throughout. We are about sustainability. We are committed to responsible, transparent, and sustainable operations and business practices, and those are the core principles that really guide us on a day-to-day basis. To step back and take a look, we are now serving 20 major retail accounts across Europe, in 16 different countries. We serve the number one and two largest grocers in France, Austria, and Germany, and the number one and three largest growers in Denmark. So, we have a vital role to play in servicing the customers and linking our customers with strategic growers and making sure that that product gets to market.
Our core products remain bananas, ginger, mangoes, and blueberries, other seasonal products. Over time, you'll see us add to the portfolio, but our first and foremost goal was to stabilize the platform, drive growth, and get to EBITDA positive. We are there, and so now the real fun begins. Also, on our operating platform, as I mentioned, we go to market in 16 countries in Europe. We source from numerous places around the world. As noted on here, we now have the three centers of excellence operating to support the European platform today. If we dive a little bit more into the numbers. For the quarter, we were up 61% in sales to CAD 27.7 million and up to CAD 53.3 million year -to- date, so up 73%. That CAD 53.3 million leaves us tracking well over CAD 100 million run rate.
The CAD 27.7 million in Q2 really puts you at about CAD 110 million run rate. Our gross profit, as I mentioned, was CAD 2.1 million or 7.5% of sales in the quarter, and CAD 3.9 million or 7.3% of sales in the year- to- date and for the six months. So up 65% in the quarter and 63% year- to- date. The growth, when you factor in the impact of our currency hedging initiatives, was up 204% over the prior year. We had a very poor position last year. We have a stable position this year. That's really driven some nice growth, 204% and 108% year -to- date. Our cash overheads are CAD 1.7 million in the quarter. You see how our cash overheads grew from CAD 1.2 million to CAD 1.7 million in the quarter.
As a percentage of sales declined from 6.8% to 6.3%, and we expect that continue to trend down. Our longer-term goal is to have those cash overheads well under 5% and heading for 4%. On a year-to-date basis, 6.2% of sales. So a little bit up in Q2 because we added more team members to deal with the growth of the business. Record EBITDA of CAD 400,000, about 1.5% of sales. We have no intention of stopping there. We want to continue to grow EBITDA as a percentage of sales. But in our journey, this is where we expected to be, so we're very pleased by that. Year- to- date, CAD 500,000 versus CAD -200,000 in the prior year. So heading in the direction we expected and feeling positive about how the financials shook out.
When we take a look at the balance sheet, our current assets grew to CAD 27.5 million versus CAD 14.9 million at year-end. When you think that the business doubled in size, the working capital doubled in size as well, going from CAD 7.6 million to CAD 15.3 million. But compare that to CAD -14.6 million in 2024. So a combination of the strengthening of our operations and the restructuring of our balance sheet leaves us in a really good position with strong working capital, no outstanding debt or short-term loans, and an equity position of CAD 16.4 million. So strong growth and profitability coming into the business, combined with a strong balance sheet.
Just taking a look, we have 190 million shares outstanding. About 20% is owned between management and the board. Our fully diluted shares are about 210 million, and our market cap is sitting in and around CAD 120 million-CAD 125 million. With the earnings comes a stable positioning with our cap table. Oh, pardon me. Last before I turn it over to Darryl is I want to go back and talk about our focus on evolving our product mix from volume to value and with that, driving increased margins. We readily focused when we repositioned. We focused the business on categories where we really felt we deserved to win, understanding that they weren't always the highest margin categories, and we would go back to some of the higher margin categories as we build the business.
We're in the process of doing that. Clearly, as part of our growth strategy, we want to continue to grow our Euro Fresh platform, which is where we go to market today to the 16 countries and the key customers that we have. We want to add new customers and geographies and also add new higher margin products. Over the course of this year, you should expect to hear from us on new products that we'd like to add to the portfolio. We want to expand this portfolio into North America, so we're looking at a number of options to do that, which is very exciting. Why do we want to be in North America? That would leave us as the only current organically focused business that we're aware of in the fresh side of the business with operations on both sides of the ocean.
We think that would bring some huge benefits to both our customers and our growers. We're actively working on that, and it's a key focus for us. Then with the platform in place, we want to add non-fresh products. Think about oils, nuts and seeds and those sort of things. Also value add. Think about further processing of a number of those raw materials or, and fresh products that we, or non-fresh products that we have today into value-added ingredients or right into consumer packaged products. It's a long journey, but we're on the journey and it's where we're really focused, and we're spending a lot of time in that area.
Of course, we want to support all of these developments with a digital technology platform and shared services platform as well. We're in the early stages of what we expect to be a very exciting growth platform, a growth curve for the business as we go forward. With that, let me turn it over to Darryl to talk about our key priorities as we look to the back half of the year and beyond, and then we'll wrap it up with some Q&A. Darryl.
Sounds good. Thanks, Steve. Turning to key priorities, let me jump right in. Our primary focus for the balance of 2026 is going to be execution. We built significant momentum in the first half and our priority is going to be converting that momentum into sustainable, profitable growth. We will continue scaling our core European Fresh platform, as Steve noted. We already are operating at an annualized run rate at above EUR 100 million, and we see further opportunities through existing new customers, existing customers and a broader product portfolio. That said, I believe it is important to note that growth is not just about revenue. We are focused on managing gross margins through better supply chain leverage, product mix, pricing and risk management, while continuing to drive operating cash flows towards that target that Steve mentioned of just below 5% of sales.
We are continuing to focus on leveraging our platform, which means continuing to grow our core categories while selectively adding higher margin products and using technology and AI to improve efficiency, transparency and waste reduction. Strengthening the organization to support the next phase of growth is always in focus. The additional resources and organizational changes we have made are intended to give us operating depth and execution capability. We deeply believe in talent, that talent drives growth, and we will continue to look to talent to accelerate our strategy. Strategic expansion remains an important part of our growth plan. We have dedicated resources to building our pipeline and evaluating strategic growth and M&A opportunities. The emphasis is on opportunities that complement our platform and support our longer-term growth objectives.
Finally, we believe that there is an opportunity to increase market awareness of what Organto is building, particularly with investors focused on health and wellness and sustainability. As we look to the balance of 2026, the message is straightforward. We continued growing the core business, protect and improve margins and operating leverage, strengthen the platform, and selectively pursue strategic opportunities that fit our strategy, will accelerate our growth, and we have built momentum. We will continue to drive forward, all while striving for best-in-class execution. I will pass it back to Steve.
Super. Thanks, Darryl. Appreciate it. Yeah. With that is the end of our opening remarks. Clearly, we are pleased with the progress that we have made. We have got lots of work to do. The job is just beginning. It is not over, and that is the fun, and that is the opportunity. But clearly, we are very excited about the future. As we say, the future is bright, execution is key, and the time is now. With that, Lauren, I will turn it back over to you, and you can queue up the chat room if there is any questions. Hopefully, there are.
Yep.
We'll leave it with you for a sec.
Yep. No, of course. That brings us to the end of the formal presentation. We do have a couple questions in the queue already. Just a reminder to everybody, if you'd like to submit a question, you can do so using the Q&A function in Zoom. You may need to click more, the three dots in order to access it, but please do feel free to submit questions, and we will do our best to get through as many as possible with the time that we have today. I'll just give it 30- seconds or so to let some questions come in, and then we'll jump right into it.
Okay.
Okay. Well, I think we're good to begin. Let's start with the first question here. How much of your growth this year was with new customers versus increases with existing customers? You have now reported two consecutive EBITDA positive quarters.
Yeah.
Sorry. Ignore that last part there, yeah.
Sorry. The first question that you raised was how much comes from existing customers and how much came from new customers?
Yes, that is correct.
In really ballpark numbers, about 60% of our growth. If you think about the 73% growth that we had this year, about 60% of that, give or take a few percentage points, comes from new customers that we have added to the portfolio. Keep in mind that we added Switzerland and Spain and Ukraine as new countries to serve, so about 60% from new customers, and about 40% of our growth from existing customers. I guess if you peel the onion back on the 70% growth, about 30%+ would be internal, from existing customers year-over-year, then 40% from new customers.
Great. Thanks, Steve. Our next question here. You have now reported two consecutive EBITDA positive quarters. Do you expect this trend to continue, and what are your longer-term expectations?
I'll grab that one, Steve.
Okay.
I think the answer to the trending is yes. We don't give specific guidance, but as I addressed in my speaking to the key priorities, we are focusing on long-term and continuing to drive our top line with a focus on managing gross margins through our better supply management leverage, our product mix, our pricing, our risk management, while, again, as we mentioned a few times in the presentation, we continue to drive those operating costs towards our target of below 5%.
Okay, great. Thank you. Next question. How are the organic and sustainable foods markets faring with rising inflation?
Darryl, I can take this one. Look, it's a crazy time out there right now. There's super inflation. A lot of inflation's landing in food products. All of us go to the shopping— well, most of us go to the shopping center, and you see the increases in prices. It's interesting, the organic and sustainable foods consumers, they're lifestyle choices that are made. For the most part, we don't see demand fall off because of what we're seeing at the moment. I guess there's a limit to everything. How high can the prices go? Normally, what's happening, though, the organic and the conventional, they're both going up and down. We haven't seen a real erosion in the consumer. We're watching it all the time.
I guess the good news for us is that consumers are continually focusing more and more on healthy and organic foods, which is great, and connecting lifestyle and diet to health, which is positive. So there's growth in the category. Might the category slow down a little bit for a period of time, we haven't seen it, but can't predict the future. Look, we've realized continued growth, and what we're not seeing is a rapid change of flavor for consumers where they're like, "Look, I just can't afford any of that stuff anymore." What we see is that consumers, once they've made the lifestyle choice, they continue to buy what they buy, and they change other purchasing decisions. But the whole health and wellness thing is important, and so they're not trading down.
Okay, thank you. Next question. I think this is referring to the earlier question that we had answered. How sticky are these new customers? As long as you can provide quality supply, do they keep ordering?
Yeah. Most of our customers, depending on the product category, make annual commitments or in some categories every three months. Look, they're sticky, but we have a job to do, and they won't be sticky if we don't do our job. We've got to get them product. We've got to execute on all of the steps in the process that we're responsible for. And we've got to get them good quality product. That's what we have to do. And so long as we do it, we feel that they can be sticky customers. If you think about it, and you take a look at our growth, we grew 194% last year, and the year before, I think we grew 40% or 50%. A lot of that's with existing customers, and as I said in the numbers earlier, 30% of our growth is from existing customers.
One is for them to be sticky, and two is for them to be, I don't know what the right word is, [sticky-sticky]. We want not only to continue to do business, but we want to do more and more every year. So far, we've been lucky. But look, we're like everybody. We're not perfect. We'll end up with quality challenges at times, and that'll impact our volumes with a particular customer for a period of time. But if we do our job, they're good partners and sticky to us.
Okay, our next question opens up first by saying good progress on new regions and retailers. Is growth being driven by core products, or do you see scope to expand into value-added products like juices, et cetera? Would this require investment, or could third-party manufacturing be enough to unlock additional value?
Yeah. No, listen, a core part of our strategic growth of the platform is to move and add value. Examples that I would give you is organic bananas. Well, 30% of organic bananas never end up in the marketplace because they're not of retail quality. So they go to all types of different things. One of the fastest growing food categories is organic baby food. And one of the biggest ingredients in organic baby food is organic banana puree. It's a value-added product. That's an example of something that we have consideration to do as we move forward. So I think there are lots of opportunities. First, you have to have the core base operating, then you can go and value add. So that's our intention, and that's core to the strategy on. I'm trying to move the, s orry, t hat's core to this strategy.
If you go to the far right of the chart, that's all about the value-added ingredients and consumer packaged products. So it's core to our strategy. We see it as a huge opportunity. It's an opportunity to grow the business, it's an opportunity to diversify the customer base of the business, and it's an opportunity to improve margins. So that's core to what we do. The second part of the question, Lauren, had something to do with assets or?
Yeah. I can re-ask it. Would this require investment, or could third-party manufacturing be enough to unlock additional value?
Well, look, we have this strategy called OMP or OPM, other people's money. When we want to move into categories, if there's processing capacity around, we'd like to start there. Then when we get to a point where we can fill up our own facilities, do that. So it could be a combination, or it could be all third party packed, or it could be all with our own platform. So we're open to all of those ideas, and until we know which one we're doing. We don't know what the option is, b ut preferable to start with using somebody else's platform to prove out the model.
Okay. Thank you, Steve. Our next question, what is the plan to diverse away from bananas?
Yeah. So very good question, and I think the plan to diversify away is really laid out on this chart again. We're going to selectively add new products to the platform where we deserve to win. We really like the berry category because in this new GLP-1 world, blueberries and blackberries and strawberries and raspberries are becoming snacks, and you see people eating them like they used to eat a bag of chips. So we really like the berry categories. We like a number of other different categories. We're going to selectively add those to the platform as we move forward. As we note, we're looking to acquire, and I can assure you when we're looking to acquire, we would prefer to acquire businesses that do not do any of the products that we do.
That is where we can really drive a lot of value and synergy. On top of all of that, it is value add, it is non-fresh, it is nuts, seeds, and oils. So that is our strategy. We are working on a whole bunch of phases of that all at the same time. But I would be pretty disappointed if a year from now, we were focused on the three or four core products that we have. I think it will be much more robust by that stage of the game. Keeping in mind that we did what we did entirely intentionally. If you went back three years ago, we had 25 different products. Today, we are focused on a core number of products, and that is proving to be really successful, and over time we will expand, which is really important.
By the way, when you talk about bananas, and I do not know if I have the right number, but I do not want you to think that we just do a banana. I believe we have 56 different SKUs of bananas, just to put that in perspective. It is organic, it is fair traded, it is size, it is sugars, it is everything. But it is a major category for us, no doubt. But I do not want you to leave the impression that all we do is sell one banana. There are 56 different ones that I think it is 56. I might have the number wrong, but it is a lot of different. There is a lot of complexity within that category on its own.
Thanks, Steve. Our next question. You have mentioned M&A as a key part of Organto's growth strategy. Where are you focused, and do you have any updates on potential opportunities?
Darryl, do you want to grab this one?
Sure. With respects to M&A, again, going back, looking at the value step chart that Steve talked about, we're looking into not only continuing to expand in our European platform, but as we look to go forward, looking to expand into a North American platform as well. The M&A pipeline in both geographic regions is strong. With respects to potential opportunities, I'm pleasantly surprised with respects to, like I said, the strength of that M&A pipeline and there is definitely opportunities going forward with respects to us to execute on the strategy that we're looking at. There's nothing currently in place that we can talk robustly about. Hopefully by the end of the year, that will change.
Okay. Thank you, Darryl. How are you dealing with rising fuel costs?
Yeah, good question. Yes, the costs change every day, right. It's an incredible time. I think we're really using three different things that we're doing. Obviously, we're working with our customers and passing price through wherever possible. Clearly, from the stability of our margins from Q1 to Q2, we've had some good success there. I think that's really important. It's also required us to work closely with the shipping lines. Quite frankly, we've had to shift volumes between shipping lines based on how ahead they were on some of the BAF, which is the diesel fuel for the boats. We've had to shift that around. We've worked very closely with various shipping companies. We've also had to work with our growers, who are our key partners, and so we've all had to flex, bend, and move in order to maintain the margins.
And look, two weeks ago, we were talking about the fact that, oh, geez, I think all these fuel surcharges will be starting to come off, and we can go back and adjust some pricing and do some things. Then, 48 hours later, no, they are all back on and they are going up. I am really proud of our team. I think they have done an exceptional job in a really fast-moving environment, and I think it is a credit to them. I was looking at our sales are up 61% in the quarter and our gross margin is up 65%.
A large player in the fresh space, who would be known by most people, but I do not want to call them out. Their sales went up 3% and their EBITDA went down 31%. In reading the report, it was nothing more than demand was there, costs killed us. I think our team being smaller and more nimble, we are able to really manage well and that makes us very encouraged for the future. It is not a perfect science by any stretch of the imagination, but I think the team has done well, and our guys can quote you the prices of fuel every day. So yeah. So we are managing, I think we have managed well, and we will continue to manage it. By the way, we are not the only company, right.
Everybody has got the same problem, so at different levels, but everyone is dealing with the same issue. Misery loves company, and everybody is working hard, all the way from the retailers who have to manage price, to the growers who have to manage volumes, manage margins, to ourselves who have to handle all the logistics and the marketing and all of that sort of stuff. Everybody is involved.
Great. Thank you, Steve. We are getting close to time, so we only have—
By the way, I want to say one more thing. If you are talking to a food company that tells you they are not impacted by it, they are not telling you the truth. Everybody is impacted. Sorry, Lauren, that was a side note.
No, that is all right, Steve. Okay, we have time for one more question, and this one is for Darryl. Darryl, what are your observations now that you have been with the company for a few months? Any surprises?
Okay. Let us start with observations. After my first few months, I am very encouraged by the growing strength of the underlying business, the team, and the growth opportunity. There is strong board leadership alignment, accountability, operating cadence, and financial discipline. With respect to surprises, in terms of surprises, I have to say the biggest observation or biggest surprise is the breadth of opportunity relative to the size of the organization. As I said, there are a number of attractive growth initiatives in front of us. That just reinforces, though, the importance of prioritization, resource allocation, discipline, execution. The opportunity is there. Our challenge is going to be making sure we remain focused and execute consistently.
Okay, great. Thank you, Darryl. That is all the time that we have for questions today. Thank you for joining us for Organto Foods' Q2 2026 Results Review and Business Update. A replay of today's webinar will be made available following the session. For additional information, we encourage you to visit Organto's website at organto.com, as well as the company's public filings available on SEDAR. If you have any follow-up questions, please feel free to reach out to Organto directly through the website, or contact Steve or Darryl or any members of the team. Thank you again for joining us, and have a great day.
Thank you. Take care.