Welcome to Origin's mid-quarter investor Q&A video. I'm Evan Winchester. Today, joining me is Origin CEO and Co-Founder John Bissell. Today, we're excited to be here because we're going to answer some common investor questions that we received. We have a lot of great questions and look forward to digging into them. I'm feeling good today. John, how are you doing? How are you feeling?
Great. I'm doing really, really good.
Great. Well, let's begin. At the top of this, I want to put a couple of questions that were big picture questions. So they would be good to answer at the beginning as a sort of framing for the rest of the conversation. One question is, what makes you confident that the company will survive until profitability? It's a big picture investor question. Are you going to make it? Are you going to win? And then another investor question that was big picture was, what can we look forward to in the next couple of months? And are we confident of getting us over $1, the stock price in the near future? So why don't you go ahead and set the stage for the conversation?
We're going to be talking about a lot of things that have to do with things that we're looking forward to in the next few months. But why don't you give us an overview here at the top of the call?
Yeah, so I think at the biggest scale for this, what we see is an industry that desperately needs for their packaging to be sustainable and recyclable. We see this over and over again in our individual conversations with customers, stakeholders in the industry more broadly, maybe, and a bunch of us just got back from Drinktec, and what we saw there was over and over and over and over again how important it is for our customers to have a credible, sustainable solution for their packaging, and that a PET cap that is recyclable and can be made out of recycled content is a critical part of that sustainability story, and so we are sitting in the middle of an industry that needs this solution so badly from our perspective, and as a consequence, we just don't see a reason for this not to succeed.
We think just there are so many ways for this to succeed, and we are making such good progress on the way to it that success feels as inevitable as it could be.
Cool. Yeah. I'm also sensing a lot of confidence from the team right now from the success we've had in various avenues this quarter. I want to talk about demand first. In this conversation, we're going to talk about demand and customer announcements. We're going to talk about customer qualification. We're going to talk about the product and competition, and also the CapFormer build that is underway right now. So first off, demand and customer announcements. A couple of questions here. The first one is about water applications. The question is, is there strong commercial demand today for versions of the still water 1881 cap that you can supply now? As we've announced, we have caps on products on shelves in California today. Or is there strong commercial demand mainly for future caps that are in development? So can you tell us about that demand story, please?
We're seeing demand on both sides. There are obviously customers who have a variety of different views on this. Some of them are very focused on CSD. And even if they have water demand, they want to see the CSD future and get through those qualifications. There are also customers who have very little, if any, CSD products in the market, and yet are still high volume and are extremely interested in this. And so as a consequence, we are seeing significant uptake in our sales pipeline for the flat water cap. We're excited about that. But it's both. We see it across the board. Every customer is a little different.
So these next two questions I'm going to combine into one because they're very closely related. One is top of mind, I think, for everybody, which is, when can we expect to see a signed customer contract? And at what point do you see a customer, like an end user customer, who's going to put our caps on their bottles, confident enough in the caps that there could be a public disclosure of willingness to buy? In short, a customer announcement. And what would that look like? Would it be an announcement of a contract, an MOU, an offtake agreement, a letter of intent? These are all forms we've announced in the past, I believe.
We expect that named announcements will come close to qualification. So I don't think that's changed. What is perhaps different is that maybe those could go faster. It's possible. But perhaps more importantly, that flat water customers could go more quickly and that we'd be able to name some of those. So we're optimistic. We're excited about it. But I can't give you some sort of specific date for that at this point. I think in terms of the shape of that announcement, our goal is to be able to talk to investors about that as soon as we can. And so the answer would be whichever of those comes soonest, that's the one that we will probably try to talk about.
It's, again, hard to predict whether a customer, because it depends on which customer it is, is going to be most comfortable after there's been some sort of contract or if it's earlier in the process. Hard to say.
Good. This next batch of questions has to do with customer qualification. So we're going to dig into some questions here. This first one quoted our last earnings release in saying, "What makes you confident that passing current qualifications is not an if, but a win? When will that qualification take place?" And generally, can you provide any more detail on the qualification for water or CSD? When do we expect them to complete? You spoke to this a little bit, but can you elaborate on the qualification process as it stands right now?
Yeah. Generally speaking, we believe it's a when and not an if because we have succeeded on the metrics that we need to succeed on for our caps in other places, in other tests. And so if you can do it in one area, that means almost invariably, at least in this world of engineering, you're going to be able to do it in another. You just may not do it the first time. Right? And again, as we've said before, because sometimes the equipment is different, there are different specific tests, and the way that the tests are done can modify it. We have a lot of confidence that we're going to be able to deliver the results that are required to make it through all of these various qualification processes over time.
Sometimes it just takes a little bit of work to figure out exactly why is it performing a little bit differently here than it has in other cases. And so really, there's sort of an existence proof across the board for at least the most important, in our view, elements of these qualification processes. We just have to demonstrate it at the volume or perhaps in that particular set of circumstances with our customers as well.
Okay. I'm going to add a question here that wasn't submitted from anybody, but I think it could be interesting to our audience, which is what I'll call the cookie dough conversation. Could you tell us about what cookie dough is and what it has to do with R&D results and testing and how it pertains to qualification and even communication of qualification?
Yeah. So somewhat tongue in cheek, obviously, we have this phrase that characterizes a behavior that we see in scientists and engineers sort of broadly. And obviously, we're an organization filled with a whole bunch of scientists and engineers, not exclusively those, but many of them, which is that we get excited about stuff. In particular, we get excited about technical results. But the reality is that you really need to look carefully at a set of technical results across a whole bunch of different angles before the ramifications of those results can be easily or reliably determined. And so what I think sometimes external parties see with us is a little bit of a reticence to share information quickly.
And the reason for that is because what we've learned over years, frankly, more than a decade, obviously, at this point, is that it is important to be just a little slow with the way that we relay and process our most important technical information inside the organization because otherwise, people can go off running on stuff that is perhaps not as baked as one might imagine. And so we call that cookie dough before it's been baked. And the nice thing about cookie dough is it tastes great, but it can also make you sick. We prefer almost invariably to bake our cookie doughs to make cookies. And we find that that's a much more scalable system. And so as a consequence, that results in this sort of a little bit slowness in sharing internal technical data.
But it results, we find, in much better, more stable progress across these sorts of technical projects like cap development, like qualification, all the rest of it. And so I think it's a useful framework to have. We want to go as fast as we can. We want to communicate as quickly as we can, but we want to do that in a way that is not detrimental.
Makes sense. And I ate a cookie last night and thought about R&D and data circulating through the organization. So I think it's interesting.
Perhaps everybody now will think about cookies and even caps when they think about cookies.
That's right. Okay. Thanks. And this next question is also about qualification. And it brings a lot of nuance to it. And I think there's like three or four sub-questions. I'm going to tell them to you. And also, I'm going to boil it down to how do you approach your in-house testing? In other words, you're going to test things in-house, but then you're going to send things to external parties. It could be a third party that's doing some analysis. It could be a customer. And the question is, how do you do testing and reduce risk on the samples that you have before you send them outside the organization? For example, does it mean that you're doing less severe tests or more severe tests? Are they shorter tests or longer tests? How does it compare to what's going to happen outside the organization?
Or whether that's a third party lab or an actual customer who's doing qualification? Can you talk about that distinction and process?
Yeah. So I think it's probably helpful here to talk about this as a bit of a journey for us, especially over the last 18 months. So where we started with caps and testing was almost entirely third parties or customers, sort of select customers where we wanted to do sort of almost a co-development kind of work with them. And that was in part because we were sort of just booting the project up. We didn't want to delay all the development until we had our own internal in-house equipment. It was different kinds of testing equipment in many cases compared to what we were doing with furanics. And so almost all third party or perhaps you might say second party testing. We also had a bit of a humility to the testing environments required for caps.
Not all of our engineers, in fact, most of our engineers had not been working on caps previously to a few years ago. And so we wanted to go to the experts and have them show us the way that they do their testing. And we got a bunch of results from that. We then took that, developed our cap around it, took it to customers. Customers would then, and this was a variety of customers. This was not just a one or two or three that we were doing sort of almost co-development type work with, but instead, this was a wide array of customers. And we got a large variety of different kinds of results back from those customers. And as we've described before, those results were not all consistent. And we didn't necessarily understand why.
We didn't know if that was because there was a nuance to the way that they were testing that was causing our cap to succeed in one case and not in another, even though the test had sort of the same name, let's say. Or if it was because they were not appropriately testing our cap. And so what we ended up doing was sending all of our, well, I shouldn't say all, many of our folks to customer sites to look at the way that they were doing this testing, really understand it better. And what we found was we needed to develop a lot of our own in-house. So we went back, we developed a bunch of our own testing. And that testing is intended to do two things.
One, of course, to mimic the testing that our customers are doing so that we have confidence in the way that our caps are going to perform when our customers do testing, and the second thing it does is it gives us confidence that the cap is going to perform the way that we want it to perform in the market, whether our customers are testing that or not.
And so we have, at this point, a pretty exhaustive testing apparatus, let's call it, and an organization so that we can do very close, if not exactly the same testing that all of our customers are doing, that we have confidence and that we understand the results, and that we can evaluate the characteristics of the performance of the cap for the things that we care about that even our customers may not be testing for, so that when we send caps, we have high confidence in the way that those caps are going to perform with customers and the way that they would perform in the market. Now, there are things that we don't have extensive testing ability for, that tends to be on the process, the use of the caps in a bottling line or a co-packer's line.
That's because we don't have our own co-packing line. Maybe that's something for the future. What we do there is once we have confidence in the way that the caps are going to perform on the bottle, we need to go take those caps to a capping line or a bottling line and see how those caps perform in the capping line. We are largely doing that with customers. Of course, we do commission our own capping line tests periodically, but we prefer to do that with customers in large part because that's where we see a lot of the variance. The different kinds of equipment that can show up that can drive a lot of the differences in testing for our customers often shows up in their bottling lines or the co-packing lines that they choose to use.
And so we don't really get as much of that information when we're just using our own selected co-packer or bottling line, although we do get a lot of valuable information there too. And the key things that they're looking for there are throughput. So can you run 10,000, 20,000, 40,000, or 60,000 bottles per hour on those capping lines? And that's one of the reasons why we were excited with some of the displays that we had at Drinktec, where we had a Zalkin capping head putting Origin caps on bottles at a nominal rate of equivalent rate of about 60,000 bottles per hour. So that was incredibly exciting. And we think that sort of data is really important, but not everybody's running a Zalkin 60,000 bottle per line, 60,000 bottle per hour line.
And so that's why we need to do the specific testing with customers on those sorts of things too. So we look at it across the board. We look at the performance of the cap, and we look at the performance of the capping systems that are using our cap.
Really appreciate how you walked that out, and before I saw that question. Thank you to whoever submitted that question because it allowed us to get into some of the nuance of testing and kind of getting into that story, so thanks to the question submitter.
We spend a lot of our time testing right now.
Exactly. Next up is a question about product and competition. So again, this comes to Drinktec, which was a conference that we participated at in Munich recently and had a lot of success at. I'm going to close the question. The recent Drinktec Trade Fair has shown us that competition for PET caps is catching up. What advantages do you have over them? What is our strategy to stay ahead of the competitors?
Yeah. So I would challenge first to premise the question. I don't think what we've seen is competitors catching up with what we're doing. In fact, I think while we have enormous amounts of respect for the companies that are also developing PET caps, and many of whom we've worked with in a variety of capacities over the years, our view coming out of Drinktec was that we are extremely well-positioned relative to the rest of the market. And I think that it's one, of course, we've talked about this a little bit and what are some of the benefits of our cap relative to existing PET caps. But I think it's also instructive to look at the length of time that some of these other PET cap programs have been in development. And also, many of them have turned on and off at various points over the years.
Our view is that's sort of indicative of the ultimate likelihood of success of those technologies. Whereas with us, I think we've seen a consistent monotonic improvement in the cap over time. Frankly, our confidence is quite literally higher now than it has ever been in the performance of our cap. We're really excited about it.
As a follow-up question, you've talked about how we're in the lead in terms of this cap is on products on shelves in California today and is the lead in that regard. Can you talk about how it's in the lead in terms of a technology and performance and just the advantages of the cap itself and the technology for it?
Yeah. Great point. So I think there are really two axes that we're talking about here. And I think that we're ahead on both. One is time, as you said. We're in market. We've got products on shelves. It's working. We've run out of commercial bottling lines. I don't think the same can be said for any of the other technology PET technologies out there, PET cap technologies out there. I think the second, which is as if not even more important, is on technology performance. So obviously, we are running a thermoforming platform to make these caps. There's a whole bunch of technology that goes into that. And what that enables with PET specifically is a thinner, lighter cap that we believe performs better and enables us to incorporate tamper evidence bands, tethers much more efficiently than you can with other technologies.
As a reminder, the alternative technologies here are really injection molding and compression molding. We think that that thermoforming platform really enables us to do things that the other platforms just can't do. Then, of course, also with large caps, right? As large caps, we can produce large caps much more efficiently because the cycle times are so low and because we can take advantage of the mechanical rigidity, right, the strength of the PET over that larger cap. It can be much lighter weight because it's stronger in a way that you can't really achieve effectively with injection molding or with compression molding because in both of those cases, you have to flow through the thickness of the cap channel. That's very challenging to do.
And so we really think that both from a time and from a technology perspective, we're really in the dominant position.
I'll just add that the caps look different from other PET caps in many cases too.
As I am one to say, I may be biased, but I think they look great.
Yeah. I mean, to me, it looks great. It's also transparent in the same way that the bottle is. It looks the same as the bottle. And my background is the brand world. And so I can perhaps very acutely appreciate the power of being different and being really attractive looking like this cap is. And we saw that firsthand at Drinktec. This last couple of questions has to do with our CapFormer system build-out, so building production capacity. Question number one, are we still on track for six CapFormer lines to complete Factory Acceptance Testing by the end of Q4 2025? This is referring to our last earnings call where we said we're tracking for six CapFormer lines to complete FAT by the end of Q4 2025. Can you speak to that question?
Yep. We are currently on track, and we expect to remain on track for those six CapFormer lines to complete FAT by the end of the year. I think we're, frankly, in this pretty dynamic global trade environment, we're excited and pretty proud of our partners. I think they've done a good job navigating that environment with us. I think it's frankly made our relationships even stronger across the board there. We're on track, happy to say so. We're excited about the deployment of our lines. We think it's going to go well.
Great. So this next question is about CapFormer deployment, but it's a hypothetical. So it says, what's the maximum number of CapFormers that could be brought online in 2027 if cash would be secured for that?
Yeah. So I think there's some complexity in that question, and I'm going to simplify it a little bit, and I'll tell you how. So rather than specifically predicting 2027, because there's a lot of caveats around 2027 specifically, exactly how much cash are we talking about, exactly when would that cash come in, what are the constraints around the cash, all that kind of stuff. Instead, let's talk about sort of what does fast look like, fast deployment look like for us, and let's call it sort of cash unconstrained fast deployment. I think our view is if we were cash unconstrained, the next constraint that we start to hit with our current setup is probably the rate at which we can successfully deploy and start up lines on their manufacturing locations.
We think we haven't really pushed this yet, but we think that with our current team and scale of team, we could do about one a month. Might take us a little bit of time to ramp into that rate, but something along those lines. As we expanded the team and got, frankly, better at deploying lines and had more practice, we think we could scale that up pretty significantly, and certainly, we also believe that with appropriate warning, our partners and suppliers can supply equipment more quickly than that, so we think that we have quite a bit of ability to improve the rate of deployment if we were cash unconstrained, but of course, currently, we still are, so we think that gives some sense of how quickly could we move on this if the cash constraints were removed or lessened.
Okay. Thanks, John. We're going to wrap up. We've answered all the questions here for our call today. John, anything you want to add before we close out? I'll just say first, thanks for all the questions that people submitted. I think we're fortunate to have such a thoughtful and engaged investor community. Sincere thank you to everybody who sent in a question. John, over to you for any final thoughts.
Yeah. No, I think, look, as I said earlier, we are as optimistic, enthusiastic, and confident in where we stand right now as we have ever been, excited about the performance of our cap, excited about the customers that we're working with, and excited about how well actually our lines are getting deployed and the manufacturing team there as well, which we haven't talked about as much this time, but really, I think the team is starting to come together on all these things, and I think we've got a lot of good stuff to look forward to in the future.
Terrific. Thanks, John. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye.