Good morning, everyone, welcome to learning a little bit about Rubicon Organics. As you can see as I was walking around, there's a number of friendly faces in the room. I'll just let these guys come on in. Those of you who were here for the last presentation, Nick Sosiak from Cannara did set up very well the Canadian opportunity, it's really great to see today here at Planet MicroCap. I believe we were the only cannabis company here last year. There might've been one other.
This year, there are four Canadian cannabis companies, I would really encourage you to take a look at each of them. We represent very well the opportunity that's ahead of us. Who are we, why are we different, what makes Rubicon sing, what's the opportunity? We're building Canada's leading premium cannabis company. We're very focused on high-quality, premium branded products. Think of this more like a consumer product strategy, linked with an agricultural company. Why we're unique is that we've actually been able to consistently deliver premium over five, six years, which is unique in our sector.
I'm sure you've all read this in detail, I'll move on, make the joke that everybody makes. Who are we, at a glance? We are the number one premium licensed producer by numbers in the country, we're uniquely positioned for craft at scale. That is not often done, that consistency of that premium craft is what makes us unique. We have two cultivation facilities. The first is Pacifica, which is our flagship facility based right in Vancouver in Delta, British Columbia, about 15, 20 minutes from the airport. It's 125,000 sq ft facility.
It also is certified organic cultivation on scale. Our second and new facility we acquired last year is called Cascadia. It's almost 50,000 sq ft of indoor production located in Hope, B.C. What's exciting about it is today, we haven't yet seen the production come out of that facility, we are producing. We haven't put it into the market yet. It's just beginning this month with drops out of that facility, it really is where we can grow even more high-quality weed. We haven't been able to meet the demand that we have for all of our supply, that's what's really exciting in how we've grown our business.
Lastly, we have three premium brands. Simply Bare Organic is our leading organic super premium brand. It holds very unique genetics and demonstrates consistently the power of our genetic library. I'll talk about that in a minute. 1964 is our banger. We go head-to-head with Tribal. They're also a great brand. We're really together building the premium market in Canada, we're very proud of what that brand does. It's got consistency, it's got brand recognition, it's really got consumer love for those that actually go into the store all the time, that's really important.
You build a brand from consistency and trust. Our last brand is Wildflower, which is one of my favorites. It's a wellness-focused brand, we have the number one topical in the country that consistently gets recognized for its effectiveness and use case. Quick why round J, I'll move around so I can chat to Nick shortly. I've just talked about our premium positioning. We've got the number one premium positioning with our award-winning brands. What you've got to remember in the Canadian market today, we sell to provincial distributors.
The provincial distributors have a list they control that then sell into retail stores. If you can't get on the list, you can't sell to a retail store. Those lists are getting smaller and smaller, the barriers to entry to getting access to the Canadian market is getting smaller and smaller. If you are there today, you are in prime position to continue to grow your brand. We're also seeing continued growth in the overall Canadian market and more growth and trust moving into brands and away from those that haven't been able to consistently do it.
Especially as you look around at the pressure on the consumer across the country, when they go to spend their hard-earned dollars, they want to know it's a great product. Taking risk with product is very different. I've mentioned our BC-based capacity. BC is known for the home of weed in Canada. There are several places in the world that are known for being wonderful homes of weed, California, the Emerald Triangle. People know Jamaica and Bob Marley, the Dutch and the coffee houses, but Jamaica and the Dutch aren't known for cultivation.
BC and the culture and the lore and the knowledge around weed is really very strong. For those Americans in the room, you may not know that it was the draft dodgers that came up from the United States that actually seeded the BC cannabis industry in a number of the small towns. I always love that point. I think it's slightly entertaining and kind of connects us all. We have a proprietary genetic moat. We have been working very hard on genetics. This is like fashion. New news is extremely important.
Rather than me just telling you that, what you can see is you can go back and you can look at what we've offered in store, and you'll see a consistent rotation of genetics that consistently win awards and recognition from consumers. We also have a track record of growth. We've had 22% annual growth rate for the last number of years, four years of positive adjusted EBITDA. We're continuing to expect to see margin growth, that's our biggest opportunity in our business. We grew the business the last three, four years.
We grew the top line through increasing yield at our existing facility, but also contract manufacturing and contract grow to grow our brands. We then saw the market turn, felt it was the opportunity to go out, buy an additional facility. We haven't yet seen that come in, we're very excited to see that come into the revenue stream. We'll have an inflection point in the second half of this year. We've got a strong and experienced management team and board, and you can ask me questions on that, but I'm really proud to have Glen Ibbott here today with me, our CFO.
He came from Aurora and built a very big business there. We've also got Melanie Ramsey. She's ex Beiersdorf and Diageo, very experienced in consumer products. She is our COO. We've got a fantastic board that really are tremendous mentors of Our board chair took a business from CAD 90 million in revenue to CAD 900 million in revenue. Think about the growth and the discipline in scaling that's attached to that. What's next? We've launched into the international markets, we've done so thoughtfully.
We are focused on the Canadian market. When you can play and compete in the competitive market and not run away from it gives you the opportunity to go into the next. If you all recall the story of BlackBerry, which we all thought we'd be using today, it was the better product that came out with Apple that actually won. The consumer or the patient goes to quality, especially in a dark market when that is what you can see. It's very simple packaging, not marketing that you can do here in the United States.
Both in the medical markets and in Canada, it's limited what you can do. The product quality has to speak for itself, and that's what we're known for. We're also getting a lot of really fun inbound inquiries asking for what we have, because what the international markets have discovered is they've gone out to many Canadian cannabis companies, and they haven't been able to get that consistency of quality supply that we've demonstrated time and time again. Again, this is not about shouting from the rooftops what you do.
It's about operating execution and just showing up every day and letting your quality of your product speak for itself. From there, you can reach out to us, but I'm going to pass it over to Nick.
Thank you, Margaret. For everyone's reference, my name's Nick Cortellucci. I'm with Atrium Research. We're a sponsored equity research firm, and Rubicon is a paying client of us for disclosure. We'll get into some Q&A, and then we'll take some questions from the audience as well. I think one of the key things with Rubicon is the strength of the team. Can you tell us a bit more about how that team came together and who are the key people?
Absolutely. Our founder, Jesse McConnell, was one of the founders of a company called Whistler Medical Marijuana. It was the first real premium legal company in the space, and it was sold in 2019 to Aurora for CAD 175 million. Jesse's knowledge of premium and the importance of brand and execution really was what underlined us today. He hired me. I was the first employee of the company, and I've mentioned Glenn and Mel and their backgrounds, but it goes deeper than that.
What we need is a strong bench strength through our VPs and our directors and people that are hungry and desired. We've been very lucky. We've had very low turnover in the team, which means this is a highs and lows business, pun not intended, where there's a lot of things that go wrong and a lot of changes all the time in your business. What you need is a culture and a team of can-do and people that are truly passionate and care to do the right thing.
Okay. Amazing. For the audience, the 2026 year, we're talking about it being a year of two halves, right? Maybe explain to the audience what that exactly means and how they should interpret it for the quarters ahead.
We purchased the Cascadia facility. It closed in the beginning of June of 2025. We put CapEx, about CAD 1.5 million of CapEx, into the facility through 2025. We obtained licensing from Health Canada, we could put plants in in late October last year. We've put all the working capital in, and we've been scaling our business to be a bigger business. There's an inevitable cost with that. When people look at our results, it looks like, oh, your gross margins have gone down, and you're spending more money.
Well, yes, because we're scaling, and we're getting ready for what's next. We believe we've built the majority of those costs now. There's always an incremental amount as you grow any business. Those costs are going to be seen in the first quarter and the second quarter of this year. What you're going to see when the Cascadia biomass begins to come in, it will begin at an inflection point in the third quarter. The third and fourth quarter, we're very bullish on the results. I will give a little sneak peek because it is public information.
April and May information is publicly available through the Hifyre data, and you can see very strong results from our Canadian business under that. We are expecting to be landing our best ever quarter on the revenue side in the second quarter this year. That being said, that is without the Cascadia biomass. It goes to show the strength of what we're building and what we're doing.
Great. Cascadia adds about 40% in capacity. How fast can you fill that up? Is it all going to come online in the next year, or is it kind of a multi-year approach?
We should see the inflection really beginning in July, we're very bullish on that. It will jump up what's available in terms of revenue. Some of that's going into the Canadian market, and some of it's into the international market. The excitement for us is where we can go after that because we won't have been operating the facility even for a year. Let me be clear, this is world-class execution to get a new facility up and running in cannabis. Typically, when you start into a new facility, it takes about 18 months to get decent commercial grade out of it.
We've been very happy, we did do a press release back in February that we had delivered our first harvests. We were expecting to increase the capacity call-out later in the year of that facility, that continues to be true today. Look, there's inevitably the odd room where you run it the first time where a piece of equipment turns off. Okay, well, you get it fixed for the next time. There's no significant concerns that we're reporting, we like to report credibly and build trust with people and do what we say we're going to do.
Fantastic. Then going back to Pacifica, which is your previous facility, is it at capacity? What other opportunities, or what are you guys doing to see some of that growth, even if you're kind of filling at the brim there?
It is, but there's opportunity to drive more capacity from it. This is a story of capacity utilization. How much can you push through? We've stabilized the grow there, but what we're looking to do is take probably two steps up over the course of the next 18 months. The second step we haven't really publicly talked about because we haven't made the capital commitment to, so I'll just leave you wanting a little bit more. To say that there is opportunity for us to increase capacity there, and we're evaluating that now.
The first step is we've actually seen with the programs that we've been doing, both on genetic identification, that are genetics that don't only yield well, but actually are what consumers want, and that's the sweet spot. Also in our grow techniques, our learnings, and the changes we've made to team, this is about continuous improvement. In any manufacturing environment, you want to be either increasing yield or reducing cost, and we're looking to do both. What yield is exciting for us is that it spreads our fixed cost base over a larger amount of units, and that obviously drives gross margin.
Okay, great. I'll just pause here if there are any questions in the audience that we can interject with.
Yeah. Thank you. That's a great question. Every two years, we do a psychometric study of consumers. We just finished the last one. What we find is the cannabis consumer is changing regularly, social stigma, habits, et c. We pay a lot of money for that, so I'm not going to tell you the results of it, but it is very important. You can do a lot of gut feel with some of the heavy consumers, but actually trend and movement is very important in making sure that your innovation pipeline, the portfolio that you're putting out, is meeting the needs of how those consumers are consuming today.
This is an 80/20 rule. Whilst I get a lot of feedback of, hey, I want this premium blah, blah edible, those people go into a store once a year. The largest consumer is 80% of the market. They know what they're smoking, they care about it, and understanding growing a product that they want to consume is extremely important. One of the challenges we've had, and I was just in Chicago at the Ignite conference, talking to a number of the international companies, the challenge they've been having is that a lot of the contract growers and a lot of companies want to grow for yield and not for what the consumer or the patient is looking for.
I think you have to start with the consumer, and that's how you get to what's next. In consumer products, people will tell you the word delight. You always want to delight your consumer, and I think you want to make them elevated. We talk about elevated experiences. That's every connection that you have with them. To us, internally, that's our tagline, elevating experiences. I'll take it one step further, that if you want to be a premium company, there's a couple things you don't do. You never hear Hermès saying negative things about Louis Vuitton, and your consumer isn't always your customer.
Your customer is also the budtender in store, the retail store. It's the provincial distributor. It's how you interact with them, how we show up every day, and that's something that really is embedded in our culture. Do you want to repeat that question?
Sure. The question was about gross margin and operating margin and where the leverage is at.
We have a series of projects to do. There's a process called patience and pace that is a bit of a theme for us in 2026 because there's a lot of opportunity there. It all starts with yield, and the focus on yield at the Pacifica facility will drive both gross margin and operating margin because it's about putting that throughput through. That's the number one opportunity for us. It's getting Cascadia stabilized, and then it's Cascadia optimized. I think a lot of CEOs would tell you, I can do it all in three months. That's not realistic.
We're an agriculture business, and we want to deliver and execute appropriately. I always want to be able to sell all of our product. We don't sit on product. We turn it into cash. That's very important because you don't want to be aging product out, because otherwise you're going to have write-offs and issues. We'd rather do something well, execute it, pace it out, do the next thing. It's a bit like running a 4 by 400 race. As you're passing the baton to one person who's executing on a project, the next person's picking it up.
That's the analogy I used with our leadership team at our offsite this year, making sure that we are sequencing projects and moving forward that way. Did I answer your question? I would say we don't give specific guidance. What I would say is I have personal targets to get us over 45% gross margin. There is opportunity beyond that. That would be a personal target in the next 18-24 months. There are specific things we need to do, we have ranked and stacked them. Those of you who've heard me speak before, I'm a CPA by training, I do like to, along with Glen, we have a list.
That list last week at our board meeting was ranked and stacked. We got alignment. We have alignment all the way through the organization on those priorities, we work at them one at a time because, again, we're about building the crown jewel of Canadian cannabis. This today, building this today would be very difficult with where capital is. Building into premium, building into something unique, and differentiated is how we actually win and compete. Depends on what segment of the Oh, sorry, the question was?
The question was, where do you see the trends in the wholesale market?
We don't sell wholesale. We sell everything branded, or we've done the odd shipment internationally to learn the market in 2025. Part of that strategy was you're going out into the Wild West. I've lived the Wild West in Canadian cannabis. I know, Mel and Glen have as well, we might've been born at night, but it wasn't last night. We didn't want to take risk until we knew who we were dealing with, we like to sit down with people, look them in the eye, break bread, and understand what things are going to look like.
That being said, we have seen price move depending on what level you're in. The international pricing has come down quite considerably in the value category. If it's value, mainstream, and then premium is held very well, and it's because there's not very much of it, and there's not very much that can consistently supply. If you're an international company trying to build brand in those markets and you don't have your own supply, you've got to buy from people. If they're just trying to push yield, and they want to push yield because they get paid per gram.
That's a very different equation than building a long-term relationship that their consumer or their patient can rely on. Remember, doctors are prescribing often to the strain. If a patient can't get that consistently, that's a major problem. I think we're actually going to see more pricing power over the next 18 months in the international markets.
Great. Well, let's stay with the international opportunity and what's the focus in terms of countries, and then what's the overall playbook for Rubicon?
We launched 1964 in the U.K. in the spring. As I said, we evaluated many, many markets. We like the U.K. market for many reasons. It only had 100,000 patients when we launched into it. It is growing rapidly. It is a premium market. It's English-speaking. That consumer, or that patient, excuse me, and the doctors right now are very close to each other, and there's a lot of communication happening. They also have a history of loving premium products, if you look at the alcohol industry and various other. They've got the money to spend.
We felt like in that chain, we could actually get our branded product to the patient in a way that they would be satisfied with the quality that we could get out. That's why we launched there. We are obviously investigating other markets. We may start with some wholesale arrangements, more to see how our product shows up. We have been asked to launch brand in many countries. The German market is obviously very appealing. I can give you an anecdote that I'm sure I've said to Nick before, which is we were at ICBC, which is the International Cannabis Business Conference.
It's really where the international market is meeting now in 2025. It was our first time there. We were there to listen and learn. In doing so, a lot of people said to us, highest THC, lowest price. Just how much tonnage. The word was tonnage and volume. That's not who we are. We said, Okay, that's great. We're focused in Canada. We make money there. When you're ready, call us. This year it was a very different story, and the inbound inquiries are not surprising because we expected it, but the people said, so yeah, I can't fill my premium brands. I need to launch. I'm not satisfying my patients. There's a real tonal shift.
What a percent of revenue do you think the international can be?
I think we could probably today could sell everything, but that's not our focus. The power of competing in the Canadian market teaches you discipline, shows you what strains work, and it's a very important consumer. It's also government-backed receivables and a steady market that's growing. You don't leave your strong domestic market to take risk into where a regulatory barrier could come down and take your business away. In 2026, we expect it's going to be around 10% of our business.
What's interesting is that it's a lower per unit top line, but the margin is better. We've got to make some decisions of, well, we have, but I'm not going to tell you all of them, of our team wants to push for a top line. It's not all about top line. It's driving cash flow into the business. They also pay more quickly, and we don't have to put the working capital out if we're selling bulk flower. We don't have to pay for the packaging, the labor, etc. , everything after the harvest door. We're making some decisions around that. It's a fun and interesting position to be in.
Understood.
Makes me very proud, actually, to have the inbound.
Yeah. That's great. Okay. Are you comfortable with the balance sheet and liquidity position for the company?
Everybody's going to say yes, and everybody's going to say, but sure, show me the money, right? That's our job. Today, we're where we expected to be in terms of what happened with the outflows. We've bought the Cascadia facility. We were sitting on CAD 10 million in cash, but now we've bought the Cascadia facility, done the CapEx, done all the working capital, and the revenue's just about to come in. We're at the expected low moment. That doesn't scare us at all because, as I reported earlier, we've really seen strength in revenue and demand.
We've increased a line of credit for some working capital support with one of our lenders. Our lenders have us at 7.5% A credit rate, which is interest rate, which is great. We're driving forward. We can pace out our investments, and that's our plan. We expect to use our operating cash flow, build up our operating cash flow, and then pace out our investments and drive a really strong business.
What are the major kind of milestones and catalysts we should watch out for Cascadia in particular?
The first milestone is you're going to see the revenue from Q2. The next milestone is you'll be able to see through, if you've got access to some of the sales data in Canada that's public, you'll be able to see that we're showing growth in our revenues, and that will be driven from Cascadia. We'll be communicating to the market how we're doing. Q3 should be great results out in November. That's when you're going to see the inflection point. Reminder today, we've built the foundation of the business. We've got the brands. We've built the scale. We're just waiting for that revenue to come in.
If you look at the share price today, and I'd be remiss to say, you should look at the share price today relative to what we're just about to be able to be presenting, and I think it's a pretty exciting opportunity.
I think we had one question in the back here.
I wouldn't have gone into the nuance of it, and I will. The question was, is cannabis truly like fashion, or do you need to constantly be changing strain? I have a black T-shirt and a good pair of jeans that I've been wearing for 10 years. We have strains that we call hero strains that come into our portfolio. Our Comatose, for example, and our Stinky Pinky, awful name, wonderful name, and our Blue Dream consistently sell. Consumers, like with beer, go back to the things that they love. There is this band of consistency, and we call them core strains.
You'll see them when you go and look at our portfolio. It's very obvious. They've been up on the boards for years, and they consistently sell. If you want to be winning and demonstrating the power of your house, in our super premium brand, in Simply Bare, that's where we rotate the genetics through because that is doing two things. One, it's delighting the consumer. It's available for a short period of time, and it's gone. We can charge a price premium for it. We started out with a small three and a half gram or an eighth of weed. It moves to a large pack, and then it's gone.
Sometimes we bring it back when it's really a hit. In that Simply Bare portfolio, we also have a Fruit Loopz strain, and it stays, and it sells consistently. It's a little bit of both. I go into the wine store, I have things that I love to buy all the time. Sometimes I put something new in the case. That's a bit of what the balance is of it.
Thanks, everyone.
Thanks.