Q4 2023 Blend Labs Inc Earnings Call

Winnie Ling: Good afternoon and welcome to Blend's 4th Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference. My name is Winnie Ling, and I'm head of legal, Joining us today are Nima Ghamsari, co-founder and head of Blend, and Amir Jafari, our head of finance. After Nima and Amir deliver their prepared remarks, we will open up the call for questions moderated by our investor-elected... Bryan, You can find the supplemental slides on our Investor Relations webpage at investor.blend.com. Jeremy McCall will refer to certain non-GAAP measures, which are reconciled to GAAP results in today's earnings release and in the appendix to our supplementary.

Unknown Attendee: Non-Gap Measures are not intended to be a, Unknown Attendee, Michael Ng, Amir Jafari, Bryan Michaleski, Dylan Becker, Ryan Tomasello, Unknown Attendee, Nima Ghamsari, Michael Ng, Amir Jafari, Bryan Michaleski, Sebastian Joll, Blend Labs Unknown Attendee, Nima Ghamsari, Michael Ng, Amir Jafari, Bryan Michaleski, Sebastian, Also, certain statements made during today's conference call regarding Blend and its... In particular, its guidance for the first quarter of 2024 may be considered forward looking. The company cautions you that forward-looking statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties, and a number of factors, many of which are beyond the company's control, could cause actual results, events, or circumstances to differ materially from those described. Please see the risk factors we've identified in our most recent 10-K, 10-Qs, and other efforts. We're not undertaking any commitment to update. With that said, I'll now turn the call over to... Thank you, Winnie, and hello, everyone.

Nima Ghamsari: Welcome to today's earnings call. The past year was one of focus and execution for Blend, and the fourth quarter proved to be no exception. Let me walk you through some of the highlights first.

Nima Ghamsari: To start with, on the consumer banking side, we signed several major deals in Q4, including Citizens Bank, a top 20 bank by retail customer base. And we have a solid slate of deployments that give us a high degree of visibility into our expected revenue growth for 2024. At full rollout of all existing customers, including those signed but not yet deployed, we expect our consumer banking suite to be approximately $50 million in annual revenue run rate. 2023 was an expansion year for us and 2024 has already started strong. Our consumer banking business is well received by existing and net new customers, driving growth with a robust pipeline of 70 opportunities. On the mortgage side, we welcomed two new top 100 financial institutions by retail customer base to blend in Q4.

Nima Ghamsari: We maintained our industry leading market share, and we continue to see adoption of our value created add on products. Spending our economic value for funded loan and giving us even more leverage for revenue growth independent of the macro environment. And on the cost side, we delivered significant efficiencies across our business, allowing us to report ahead of our guidance for non-gap net operating loss and keeping us on track for our profitability target in 2024.

Nima Ghamsari: Achieving this momentum, despite 2023 being one of the worst years on record for mortgage industry origination volumes, increases our confidence in our ability to navigate the year ahead as the market looks to stabilize, and the cherry on top, we also signed two multi-year eight figure deals in Q4, which validates the trend that our large stable customer base is continuing to expand their relationship with Blend across multiple products. More customers than ever treat us as a critical software powering their enterprise, and we're happy to see this continue into the new year. Before I pass it on to Amir, who will go into more detail on the financial results and 2024 guidance, let me first dive deeper into the progress across these three focus areas. Starting with our consumer banking business, we're seeing growing interest across our entire products. This is starting to play out in a huge way for us.

Nima Ghamsari: By the end of 2023, we had seven of the top 30 depository financial institutions by retail customer base, signed up for one or more of our core consumer banking products, excluding our traditional inequity products. And I'm pleased to announce that in Q4, we signed yet another significant consumer banking deal and multi-year partnership with Citizens Bank, a current mortgage and home equity customer, to help them deliver a more consistent, frictionless application experience to their customers for their other consumer products. Having one of the nation's oldest and largest financial institutions choose Blend as a key part of their digital lending strategy is a strong validation of our consumer banking capabilities, and we are proud to partner with citizens to bring more value to their customers.

Nima Ghamsari: This adds to our already strong revenue base. As I mentioned earlier, at full rollout of our current signed customer base, we expect our consumer banking suite to be at approximately a $50 million annual revenue run rate. Given that about half of this was signed in 2023, we have quite a number of active deployments. While it takes time for these rollouts to be completed, which has implications as to when we recognize revenue. The market is starting to speak to the necessity of modern technology across all banking originations. And just like in our mortgage suite, our early success starting with the largest financial institutions matches the playbook we applied in the early days of Blend with our mortgage product, started there.

Nima Ghamsari: And once we had proven the product could work at scale, and for the most demanding institutions in the country, we took it to the rest of the market, leading to our almost 20% market share in mortgage today. This is exactly how we're approaching the consumer suite. We're only just getting started, and 2024 will be the first year we cast a broader net and plan to serve customers of a variety of sizes. The CastNet, BroaderNet is already working. Our pipeline and consumer banking alone is 70 opportunities. And we're only two months into the year. We're very active in the market and expect 2024 to be another strong year in growth for consumer banking business. Moving on to mortgage, let's start with the tough, 8% interest rates in Q4 led to lower mortgage industry volumes than forecasters were expecting. While MBA was projecting $380 billion in volume in Q4, inside mortgage finance and Fannie Mae data leads us to believe the industry was closer to $300 to $330 billion in Q4. Using an approximate loan size estimate, this translates to somewhere between 825,000 to 875,000 units, or approximately 15% to 20% below the forecast from the MBA.

Nima Ghamsari: We expect Q1 will be roughly similar unit volume to Q4 based on trends we've observed to date in the quarter. Despite this, we still achieved our platform guidance range, which should credit to the strength of our customers in this market and the growing unit economics we are seeing even on lower loan volumes. We've always said when the industry consolidates, our customers would benefit because they're more efficient compared to the rest of the market. And we're seeing that in practice with many of our customers gaining market share and our overall share remaining very strong. On top of that, as I mentioned earlier, we signed two more of the top 100 financial institutions measured by retail customer base to our mortgage platform, including another top 10 credit, We're seeing customers use this environment to set up a scalable tech forward foundation for the future. Already this year, we've seen a credit union sign away from a competitor and deploy our solution within 60 days to prepare for the future. Adding to that, we have approximately 30 other opportunities in our mortgage pipeline, including one of the largest financial institutions in the country.

Nima Ghamsari: Our key add-ons, like Blend Close, are also driving pipeline growth and improved unit economics, and I'm encouraged that this trend will only continue in 2024, as some of our largest customers are currently in pilots to enable the defaulting of e-closings across their entire loan portfolio. Digital closings have obvious benefits for consumer experience, but shortening the timeline to close a loan has meaningful financial benefits for our customers as well. The growth and adoption of digital closings is helping grow our unit economics and setting the industry standard for a modern closing experience. We're also seeing tailwinds on the adoption from state regulators as well, with California approving out-of-state remote notarizations as of January 1st this year.

Nima Ghamsari: These are encouraging trends that we believe will propel our mortgage suite's economic value per funded loan even higher than the record $91 we saw in this quarter. These advancements highlight only some of the innovation we had in 2023. We were early integrators of soft credit verifications and deriving asset based income verification, and also kicked off work on a Spanish language.

Nima Ghamsari: We also added early funnel features to help drive conversion, as well as more features for loan officers to serve their customers better than ever, layered on top of that was our announcement of Blend Copilot, a generative AI product on our platform designed to turn every loan officer into a super loan officer. In all, our customers expect us to drive innovation in the space, and 2023 was no exception, combination of all these factors increase our confidence in the embedded leverage of our business to a recovery. Not only do we have customers gaining share, we're signing new customers and they're using more of our products. There is, of course, some churn in the tough environment as there's consolidation, and some customers have gone to lower cost or free options to manage a low margin environment, but this is more than offset by the other vectors of our growth. Lastly, as we prepare for recovery, we're investing ahead of it, preparing our customers for scalability in what will likely be a very different market in 2025. In particular, we're building a next generation refinance flow during a historically bad time for refinance volume. Why?

Nima Ghamsari: Because the longer this high rate environment lasts, the larger the backlog of customers will benefit by refinancing when rates ultimately come down. To help support this, we want to make sure our customers are set up to do this with their current teams without having to massively scale up resources when rates come down and streamlining timelines for consumers who will desperately need to save it. Achieving this is a monumentally complex task and one that our team and our platform are uniquely positioned to solve. It involves combining existing customer data. All the verified third party data sources we've worked on for over a decade to integrate with. The ability to quote and approve a loan in real time and delivering an accurate, actionable loan estimate so the consumer can lock in their improved mortgage rate and savings and prepare for their digital closing.

Nima Ghamsari: It's the culmination of every aspect of our software suite and is a direct result of our focus on creating simple, proactive, and instant consumer experience. We believe this will mean our customers can capture a greater share of refinances at a lower cost to them and to consumers during recovery. It's a win for everyone, and something that our customers can use to come out the other side stronger. Lifting Gears.

Nima Ghamsari: Lastly, I'd like to give an update on our final priority, which is to manage our business to non-gap profitability this year. This was a huge effort for the company in 2023 and I'm proud of the amount of progress we made. We managed to reduce our operating expenses by over $90 million in 2023 and improved our net operating loss in every quarter of this past year.

Nima Ghamsari: We've taken out a significant amount of cost, but to be clear, we've done it in a way that strengthens us structurally and sets us up for more efficient growth. That's where our Blend Builder platform becomes such a critical differentiator for us. Because of its built-in functionality and configurability, we believe we'll be able to innovate and scale at an order of magnitude faster and cheaper than before we had Blend Builder deployed.

Nima Ghamsari: And as the market eventually recovers, we have significantly enhanced our operating leverage for each additional loan or consumer product that funds on our platform. We'll continue to manage our expenses and revenue to ensure we will reach our target of non-gap operating profitability by the end of 2024, regardless of the macroeconomic environment for this year, and without sacrificing our commitment to innovation and supporting our customers. Even if the fourth quarter of 2024 were to remain at historically low levels of origination from this past quarter. Our profitability target for this year would not change.

Nima Ghamsari: We're reassured that the continued growth in consumer banking, the improved economics in mortgage, and continuing to drive efficiency give us sufficient insurance to achieve this goal regardless of the macro. Overall, I'm encouraged by Q4 being another period of strong execution. One, we remained on track with our growth plans for our consumer banking business.

Nima Ghamsari: Two, we've protected the most important parts of our mortgage business and are increasing the value we deliver to our customers. And three, we're staying committed to achieving non-gap profitability this year. Now I'll pass it over to Amir who will go over our financial results and 2024 outlook. Amir, over to you.

Amir Jafari: Thank you, Nima, and good afternoon, everyone. I'm pleased to be joining you today to discuss our financial results for the fourth quarter. Our fourth quarter marks another period of strong execution. I'm encouraged by the progress we made in 2023, and more importantly, the momentum we are building across the business. We improved our operating loss in every quarter of 2023.

Amir Jafari: We are picking up pace as we move forward and I'm encouraged by what's ahead for 2024. Before I jump into the results, let me just remind you that unless otherwise stated, all results are non-GAAP. Total company revenues in the fourth quarter were $36.1 million, in line with our guidance range. We reported platform revenue of $25.9 million, which also fell within our guidance range. Our mortgage suite revenue declined by 3% year-over-year to $17.2 million despite the origination environment declining approximately 20-25% over the same period by our own estimate.

Amir Jafari: Our mortgage suite economic value per funded loan rose by $10 over the same period last year, reaching $91. This puts us ahead of schedule on the targets we shared with you at our investor day, with plenty of runway to expand this further, as our value accretive solutions, like BlendClose, are growing in adoption quickly. Returning to Consumer Banking. Our Consumer Banking Suite revenue totaled $6.4 million in Q4, an increase of 15% as compared to the prior year period.

Amir Jafari: This growth reflects new deployments and ramp-ups across our builder-powered consumer suite of offerings over the past year, as well as contribution from incremental platform features. As Nima shared with you, these deployments and our already live customers give us direct line of sight to 50 million of revenue run rate once fully ramped, keeping us well on pace to the 35% growth kegger we shared at Investor Day. We also generated $2.3 million of professional services revenue, up 11% from last year due to fees associated with our ongoing slate of consumer banking and mortgage deployments. We've reported title revenue of $10.2 million, near the high end of our guidance range and in line with our expectations amidst the challenging environment. Moving on to gross profit. Total company non-GAAP gross profit was $19.9 million, which was 33% above the same period last year, despite a 16% decline in total revenue.

Amir Jafari: Our non-GAAP blend platform segment gross margins showed continued improvement reaching 71% compared with 59% the year prior. First off. We reported non-GAAP software growth margins of 79% up from 72% from the same period last year.

Amir Jafari: Our Gross Margin Expansion reflects the benefit of increased high-margin consumer banking suite revenues, as our consumer banking segment now accounts for 27% of total software revenue compared to 24% from the same period last year. Our margins are also benefiting from the vendor optimizations we've implemented within our mortgage suite. We continue to be optimistic regarding our gross margin performance and affirm our belief that 80% represents an achievable target for our non-GAAP software gross margins in 2024. Our non-GAAP title margins came in at 15% for the fourth quarter, increasing meaningfully year over year from the fourth quarter this time last year when we reported negative gross margins for title. This improvement reflects the ongoing cost optimization programs we've undertaken and highlights our ability to align the cost to deliver this service with the current economic climate. Non-GAAP operating costs for the fourth quarter totaled $33 million compared with $58.1 million in the previous year.

Amir Jafari: This improvement reflects the full realization of all cost-savings initiatives we started last year and additional programs we've identified to ultimately manage our costs per employee to more competitive market rates. As we move forward, these initiatives are gaining momentum and we continue to identify more areas for efficiency without compromising sustainable growth and investment. Our non-GAAP loss from operations was $13.19 in Q4, coming in well ahead of the high end of our guidance range and finishing the year having improved this in every quarter of 2023.

Amir Jafari: We expect to continue this momentum into 2024 as we track towards our ultimate goal of reporting the first quarter of non-gap profitability in Q4 this year. While we continue to take efficiency actions that we believe could accelerate this earlier in the year, the timing will ultimately remain dependent on the level of origination activity, which is still uncertain. With that, we remain committed to this goal and have identified areas to adapt our operating model to achieve this profitability target should the market environment deteriorate further. We saw strong renewals and new customer signings that incorporated committed feeds. This translated into growth in our remaining performance obligations this quarter, which reached 94.9 million in the fourth quarter. We expanded RPO by more than $35 million versus Q3, reflecting five new seven-digit contracts and renewals in the quarter.

Amir Jafari: We expect to see continued expansion in our RPO as we land new logos, execute more renewals under our subscription model, and as we enter into platform deals with longer and larger commitments. Q4 marked another quarter of improvement in our cash burn, as measured by our free cash, We continue to make improvements here, including the reduction of our interest burden following the opportunistic pay down of our term loan. As a reminder, during the quarter, we prepaid $85 million of our term loan balance and amended the maturity date to provide for a one-year extension to 2027, provided we meet certain conditions.

Amir Jafari: With our balance sheet in strong position, we made a decision to reduce our debt load to optimize our capital structure and add optionality around the maturity of this obligation. Our actions to operate with efficiency in combination with our resilient top line and improved margins are having a significant impact as we reflect toward positive cash generation. Now turning to the balance sheet. Our cash, cash equivalents, marketable securities, $144 million as of the end of fourth quarter.

Amir Jafari: We are confident we have taken the appropriate measures to ensure our business remains well capitalized and that we have sufficient liquidity based on our current projections and in this macro environment. Lastly, let me move on to our outlook for the first quarter of 2024. We expect platform revenue to be between $22 million and $24 million in Q1 2024. We expect our title business revenue to be between $10.5 million and $11.5 million.

Amir Jafari: Our total company revenue outlook is expected to be between $32.5 million and $35.5 million for Q1. Our guidance is based on our internal assessment of customer level growth, as well as our own outlook of Q1 origination activities based on the application volume observed to date through our own customer base, which we feel is representative of the broader market. We see Q1 mortgage volume to be consistent or slightly below Q4 2023 for approximately 800,000 to 875,000 total origination. Our total non-GAAP net operating loss is expected to be between $12 million and $14 million for Q1, with the midpoint representing a greater than 50% improvement year-over-year.

Amir Jafari: We believe we have built the business and operating model to respond swiftly to the market fluctuations and will continue to adapt as the conditions evolve. I want to reiterate that we remain confident in the long term targets we've shared with you at Investor Day and are encouraged by the strong set of opportunities we have in front of us. As we continue to execute, we are building resilience in our model against the short term fluctuations in the market and adding further diversification in our business that will serve as counter cyclical offsets in the future. This is paramount to our strategy within our second phase, and we look forward to continuing to update you on the progress. With that, thank you again for joining.

Bryan Michaleski: Bryan, we're now ready for questions. Thank you, Nima and Amir. Thank you, Nima and Amir for your remarks. With that, we'll begin the Q&A portion of this call. Our first question comes from David Unger with Wells Fargo. David, you can go ahead and unmute and please state your question. Thank you. Thank you very much.

David B. Unger: Thanks for taking the question. Well, I've covered the prepared remarks, I appreciate it. Um, so definitely want to get a better sense for BlendStans relative to its 2026 forecast provided from the investor day. Obviously, rates have been less favorable since and, you know, maybe the base case is closer to the conservative case today.

Nima Ghamsari: Based on the updated mortgage volumes, you know, that said, I wonder if the lower volumes, you know, impact your market share or revenue per fund alone in a good way. You know, I heard the comments on the big pipeline. You know, so wondering if a challenge macro can keep improving your market share, you know, given your strong footprint, any, any color there would be great. Yeah, good question. Thanks, David.

Nima Ghamsari: A couple things. One, we definitely are seeing some of our customers gaining market share in our numbers. And that's one piece.

Nima Ghamsari: And we mentioned that earlier. And that's how we've really maintained and plan to grow market share over time, on top of signing new customers. The other thing I would say is they are using this time to get more ready to scale. And that's doing things like digital closings, so you're not sending paper back and forth with title companies. And there's a lot of those things not only help them, but help us not on the market share side, but help us on the revenue per funded loan side. So those kinds of things are the baseline and then some of the new logos.

Nima Ghamsari: I also mentioned that we had one of the largest banks in the country as a potential new logo for us that's in the pipeline. And so we're seeing a lot of interest across the board. And David just answered the first part of your question with regards to the 2026 numbers. We still feel good about what we've shared at Investor Day across both mortgage in terms of the long-term outlook. And to your point, we obviously gave those scenarios intentionally.

Nima Ghamsari: And then also with regards to consumer banking, reiterated just by what we shared in the prepared remark. Our next question comes from Ryan Tomasello with KVW. Ryan, you can go ahead and unmute.

Ryan John Tomasello: Hi, everyone, thanks for taking the questions. As we think through the components of the fully loaded revenue per funded loan opportunity in mortgage. Are there certain areas you think are more actionable near term? You know, for example, The income verification product seems pretty interesting relative to, The incumbent solutions out there, you know, just trying to think about what are some of the lower hanging fruit opportunities there to grow revenue per loan and just how you're thinking about the income verification opportunity. Well, just just to call out, we do have a really good near term pipeline of the blend income products. And that's a nice product, because it's very simple to turn on, it's a flip of a switch, and it pulls in new revenue for us in, you know, within a quarter of them, them signing that deal, typically.

Ryan John Tomasello: But I think where we see the most near-term upside, Ryan, is on the digital closing side, and in particular, e-notes and remote online notarizations becoming very important, for our customers and we're seeing improvements around even states expanding their coverage of what they allow. California had a big change earlier this year. And and our customers are taking note because it drives real savings for them. I kind of said this in the prepared remarks, but one of our biggest customers is doing a standard rollout around every single loan going towards remote online notary by default.

Nima Ghamsari: And of course, there are exceptions and the consumer can opt out if they really don't want to do that. But those are really good for the consumer. It's really good for the bank or lender. And of course, really good for Blend as well.

Ryan John Tomasello: Great, thanks for that, Keller, Nima, and then this is a follow-up, on the remaining performance obligation. You know, clearly strong growth in the RPO metric, 36 million sequentially. You know, just as the market market maybe starts to focus more on that disclosure going forward, can you just help us understand what is included in that metric, given the different contract structures you have, you know, for example, how the success based pricing on the mortgage side is?

Ryan John Tomasello: [inaudible] of the United States, you know, the visibility we can get into your your growth profile out of that metric. What you're seeing in it, Ryan, is exactly some of what you described with regards to it is indicative of the customers that we're signing up, whether it's renewals and new logos. It is and it illustrates both what we're seeing from a commitment perspective, given our unit economic structure and our revenue model, also platform fees to the point you mentioned.

Joseph Anthony Vafi: And we've shared this historically, we obviously saw an incredible quarter this last quarter in terms of what we've shared, we expect us to continue to grow as you as you see, you know, just us continue to execute. Our next question comes from Joseph Vafi from Canaccord. Joe, you can please go ahead and unmute. Can you guys hear me?

Nima Ghamsari: We can, go ahead, Joe. All right, sorry about that. So we focus on the consumer banking sector a bit here for a second and, you know, kind of talk about what are some of the dynamics going on here with some of the strong recent signings. You know, obviously, there's a continued kind of war for deposits going on out there amongst financial institutions as, you know, consumers look for the best interest rate and banks look not to have their customers turn those deposits. But if you could balance that versus product offering versus the competitive landscape there, provide us a little more color on how you're winning some of these new clients. Yeah, good question. And I think that the hardest part of opening a new deposit account, I'll break into three different components. The first part is you have to be really good at fraud verification.

Nima Ghamsari: And we have connections to so many different fraud providers through some of our partners. We're not a fraud engine ourselves. We connect to some of the best ones in the market, and we do quite a bit of orchestration around that. So that's one piece.

Nima Ghamsari: The second piece is actually funding and making that your primary deposit account. That's something very, very important to our customers and something that we help with. We have, you know, we have the ability to fund in so many different ways now. Debit cards, ACH, direct bank connection, wire transfer, those things are all built into the Blend platform now to help maximize deposits.

Nima Ghamsari: And then the last piece, which is probably the killer app for Blend, is it's not just about getting that deposit relationship, Joe, it's about turning that deposit relationship into a deeper, broader relationship where we can do things like sell that deposit relationship as part of a mortgage offering or add a credit card to their deposit account opening alongside their debit card opening. And so that becomes a customer for life for that institution. And that's something that's pretty unique to Blend.

Dylan Becker: I mean, we're the only platform that solves for mortgage and deposit accounts, which are our two primary product offerings we're most focused on this year, but all the other products that they might have as well and credit cards and personal loans, auto loans, et cetera. And so I think those those are the core differentiators of Blend and where we're spending the most time as we go to market and where we're seeing us win deals with with customers who aren't even on Blend yet at all. Our next question comes from Dylan Becker with William Blair. Dylan, you can go ahead and unmute.

Nima Ghamsari: Hey guys, appreciate the questions here, maybe two. Nima, starting with you on mortgage, you kind of talked about investing ahead of, a potential inflection into 2025. And you guys have done a really good job of controlling what you control there in gaining share and increasing that take per funded loan, right, just a broader sense of kind of how you're thinking about that, that landscape evolving over the next kind of several years here. Again, given it seems like you're in a better position now, and you're starting to see kind of some of those originations start to stabilize, certainly relative to the to the prior few. Yeah, thanks for the question, Dylan.

Nima Ghamsari: And I'd say where we're ahead of schedule is, and you see this in the revenue per funded loan ahead of our 2026 targets that we shared investor day, is on the revenue per funded loan, we're ahead of where we had planned to be. And that's because our add-ons, like the Blend Close add-on, are just getting really wide adoption from our customers. And actually, I would say it's been very helpful to us that the market has stabilized in terms of volumes haven't been going up a ton or down a ton. Now, we were hoping they were going to be coming back up slowly earlier, and they haven't, but eventually interest rates will go down and that'll happen.

Nima Ghamsari: But just the stability has allowed our customers to invest forward a little bit, because they have visibility into the revenue, and they have visibility in what their budget's going to look like. They're not worried about that changing. And so that stability has really helped us and helped our customers invest in things like digital closings, as well as the next generation refinance product that I mentioned in the prepared remarks. And I think it's going to be so important for our customers to be ready for that refinance wave that's going to happen at some point, well before it comes into play, so they can get their processes in order, get the right technology, which, you know, hopefully, obviously, is what I described in the call. And also, you know, the right people in place, they don't have to massively scale up their operations to support that. Got it.

Nima Ghamsari: Okay, that makes that makes perfect sense. And then maybe one other one, too. I know the builder solution, obviously, pipeline seems pretty healthy here. And it's early. But as we think about kind of the long term opportunity there for both mortgage and consumer, I wonder how you're thinking about that partner ecosystem evolution and kind of the opportunity there to layer on configurability, maybe again, kind of validation, go to market capacity, things of the like, it seems like that could be something that's pretty interesting. But But how are you guys thinking about the partner angle and leveraging builder going forward as well? Thanks.

Nima Ghamsari: Yeah, I mean, I think of it as actually partners will probably be the next ones to really get, Blend Builder platform, and start to be able to build things that make sense for a broader set of markets that we historically haven't been able to focus on. I mean, we at Blend have a limited capacity of not just building products, but the product marketing, the marketing, the sales and the deployment and being able to do that really, really well. We want to be really focused and why our focus is on the mortgage suite and deposit account opening products in particular. But I do think that it is such a powerful platform and it has taken all the components of Origination and made them these building blocks. And it can be used not just within banking, but I think in other industries as well.

Nima Ghamsari: And so we're sort of, I think, taking it piece by piece. We're really hardening the platform with our existing customers. We've already started conversations with some partners in the context of specific customer deployment, some of the big ones that we've signed in the last year to start to build out that muscle with them.

Nima Ghamsari: And I think it'll take some time, but I do agree that it'll open up a lot of doors for us. Great. Thanks, Nima. Our next question comes from Mike Ng with Goldman Sachs. Mike, you can go ahead and unmute.

Michael Ng: Hey, good afternoon. Thank you for the question. I just have two.

Michael Ng: First, on the consumer banking suite opportunity, you called out the potential to hit a $50 million annual revenue run rate. I was just wondering, if you could talk about the visibility, Reaching that could we could we reach that annual revenue run rate at some point during, 2024. And then I just have a quick follow up.

Michael Ng: Yeah, so it's a good question. And the way that we, we, sort of calculate this as these are existing signed customers for rollouts that are already planned with them. In terms of when that happens, some of these things for what it's worth, Michael, are, you know, we'll sign a customer for two product lines. And if it's a big one, maybe they roll out the first product line in 2024, and the second big product line in 2025. And so I don't think it'll all happen in 2024.

Michael Ng: But, you know, these are sort of pre planned things that we've already started working on with our customers in a lot of cases to space out. And so I just also want to call out, I sort of mentioned this in our prepared remarks, about half of that was signed last year. And so, you know, we're feeling really good about the growth in that business. Again, it's going to take time for that revenue to come to be because of the way that we recognize revenue. But that business is really healthy. And we're seeing a lot of interest and I don't I don't, Giveaway too much on Q1, but Pipeline has been healthy and our customer list is growing, so something we're excited about. Wonderful. Thank you.

Michael Ng: And, Just on OPEX, obviously, you guys have done a good job with OPEX, you know, coming in, better than expected this quarter. And, you know, it seems like you're already on track to hit that $130 million OPEX number for 2024 that you gave at Investor Day. Are there opportunities to, you know, reduce OPEX further and exceed that 2024 target? And, you know, what factors might result in profitability coming sooner than the fourth quarter if it does. Thank you. Thanks, Mike. I would say, starting with the latter, as we think about it, obviously, the macro has a component to that with regards to when could we potentially have profitability faster.

Michael Ng: The piece that we're focused on is really what we can control, and it's indicative of just what you've seen on the top line, but also to your point where you're seeing with regards to our operating expenses. We have stated this, and I think we will continue to reiterate. We're looking at everything that we do just through the lens of operational excellence.

Michael Ng: We're checking and revamping a lot of our processes to ensure that there's velocity, that there's efficiency. It's these types of things, in addition to kind of what builders expose, which is our ability for us to do things more efficiently, ironically, as well. It's these things that are allowing us to kind of get to the point that you're making, which is we are performing quite well with regards to our expectations as it pertains to OPEX. Great, thank you. Our next question is a follow up from Ryan Tomasello from KBW. Ryan, go ahead and unmute. Hey, guys, thanks for taking a follow up. Yeah, just on mortgage.

Ryan John Tomasello: Nima, I think you called out, you know, just continued headwinds from from churn. Can you quantify where the churn rates have been in recent quarters, whether on like a percentage basis or revenue basis, and also when you think that might bottom out? and then also on the competitive side. Have win rates in the mortgage business changed at all over the last year? you know, just any general trends in terms of competition. We don't share the broader sort of churn numbers. But what I'll say is that we've actually, in aggregate, we've kept our market share pretty steady based on our calculations throughout the year. And so while there is sometimes churn, I think the market share being steady and the revenue per funded loan going up, the combination of those two things, it's just setting us up for the future.

Ryan John Tomasello: And some of the customers that churned, who churned to lower cost and free solutions, some of them are already starting to plan and come back to us. Those kinds of things become indicative of, I think, where the market needs to be in the future, which is being able to scale. As far as the competitive environment, I would say in the top, Unknown Attendee, Michael Ng, Amir Jafari, Winnie Ling, Bryan Michaleski, Sebastian Joll, When we're brought into a process and we are competing head-to-head...

Ryan John Tomasello: I haven't seen any notable changes in our win rates in that work, so. If anything, like I said earlier on the prior question, as the market is stabilized and people are starting to look towards the future again, it's really benefited us. Great, thanks for that, Keller. And then another follow-up for Amir.

Ryan John Tomasello: The share count guidance looks like it implies incremental growth of around 2 million shares in one queue. Is that a reasonable run rate for share count growth going forward? And then just broadly, if you can discuss your approach to managing dilution from StockCom.

Ryan John Tomasello: If that's a focus as you think about managing the business to profitability inclusive of that. It is. And yeah, to the point that you shared in terms of what you've seen from the 249 to the 251, we continue to leverage, obviously, equity because of the way we want to, in essence, incentivize top talent. But we do it just within the confines of being very, very focused with regards to our overall dilution levels. You could see it with regards to the Q4 performance. I think, again, as you think about this on a perspective basis, the best way for me to describe it is just know that it's an area that we spend a lot of time, we focus on it. And while we will continue to ensure that our employee population and base is incentivized, given that, Just we build this on their backs, we will continue to focus on dilution. You'll see those numbers kind of be a priority for us, right? Okay, great. Thanks for taking the follow up. All right, seeing no further questions, this concludes today's call. Thank you all for joining.

Operator: Have a great day. Cataracts are a leading cause of preventable blindness around the world, there just aren't enough trained surgeons. I've been working with a team to develop a VR training platform to help train new surgeons more quickly and efficiently. Practicing in virtual reality gives surgeons the muscle memory and confidence they need to restore their patient's sight.

This is not the Apple Car, because officially, it never existed. And now, it never will. Ten years after starting work on a car, Apple has given up. The company had some wild ideas about the future of the car, as we're about to tell you. The vehicle was supposed to be as revolutionary as the iPhone. Car makers were running scared.

The iPhone had eviscerated massive businesses like Nokia and Motorola. What if Apple did the same to the car industry? They really felt this strong confidence they could take out General Motors, they could make a better Tesla. And they had this ambition to do something that really had not been done before. It was never going to work.

This is a tale of grandiose plans to invent a new kind of car, undone by strategic mistakes. The rise, fall, rise, and then death of what was codenamed Project Titan. Apple is incredibly secretive. The company doesn't talk about new products until they're ready. So never publicly admitted to working on a car.

In fact, the closest that Apple CEO Tim Cook ever got to doing so was in this interview with me in 2017. There is a major disruption looming. He proceeded to lay out three innovations that he predicted would upturn the car industry. The first was electric vehicles. If you've driven an all electric car, it's it's actually a marvelous experience.

Plus, you have ride sharing on top of that. So services like Uber and Lyft and finally, self-driving cars. We're focusing on autonomous systems. Clearly, one purpose of autonomous systems is self-driving cars. We sort of see it as the mother of all AI projects. Each of those technologies seem to present an opportunity to disrupt the two trillion dollar car industry.

Initially, for the rationale behind the car was what Apple does, delivering a piece of hardware. And the car is that piece of hardware and then built on top of that hardware that becomes a platform to deliver services and experiences. So in that respect, the car followed the Apple strategy. Let's scroll back to 2014 when it all started, three years before my interview with Cook. The beginning of the Apple Car Project was actually the company exploring if it should buy Tesla. They ended up not doing that and instead decided to start exploring what it would take to build their own car on their own. They put some of the brightest minds at the company on this. The hardware division was granted billions of dollars in funding to hire anyone it needed inside Apple or outside Apple. They hired people from Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, you name it, to come over there and build a car. Johnny Ive, Apple's design chief at the time, had this idea to recreate the old school Volkswagen bus from the 1950s and the 1960s.

But the idea was not to build a car for people who love cars today, but build the future of the car. And safer for all of us to drive. All sorts of ideas are thrown around. They consider only selling the car in white. There would be no steering wheel or front facing seats and passengers would control everything with touchscreens and Siri.

For all the big ideas and blue sky thinking, however, the project soon starts to hit problems. And there's confusion over whether the priority should be to compete with Tesla in electric cars or Google, which was making big leaps in self-driving vehicles. By 2016, there was a ton of disagreement on the Apple executive team.

There were difficulties figuring out a way to actually produce the vehicle. There were concerns over profits. Enter Bob Mansfield, a semi-retired executive who had developed products such as the MacBook Air.

It's the first of many leadership and direction changes to hit the project, and it'll entail laying off hundreds of engineers. Mansfield tells them that rather than building a car, Apple will focus on developing the most advanced driverless technology, level five autonomy. By building the self-driving brain, they really gave themselves options. On one hand, they were able to partner. They talked partnerships with Tesla, with Mercedes-Benz, with BMW. But it also gave them opportunity to later go back to build their own car and have this Apple-like experience. Apple also invests in Didi, the Chinese equivalent of Uber. So it might one day put its self-driving technology into Didi's ride sharing service. The company plows ahead with testing, and reports start coming in of Lexus test cars kitted out with Apple's driverless technology appearing on the roads of California in 2017.

Fast forward two years to 2019. Uber goes public, and it's a big disappointment that shows ride sharing isn't a great business with no prospect of Apple-like profits. So one of Cook's three pillars starts to look a little bit less revolutionary. At the same time, Tesla goes from a $50 billion valuation to a trillion-dollar company in less than two years. Electric vehicles suddenly seem more appealing. I think the early success of Tesla led people to believe that maybe there was opportunity in the car industry to work with bigger margins. That helps give Apple the confidence to make another pivot. Around that time, Doug Fields, the Tesla executive who developed the Model 3 and took over the Apple Car Project in 2017, calls a meeting to show off what his team has been able to pull together.

Apple has this secretive, several-hundred-acre test facility in the heart of the Arizona desert outside of Phoenix. They've gathered a bunch of senior people on the Apple Car team alongside Tim Cook and others. Cook is impressed by what he sees, according to people who were present, and says he'll finally throw his full weight behind the project. Apple will build an electric car that has full driverless technology. But even that decision doesn't last long. Field leaves to join Ford in 2021 and is replaced by Kevin Lynch, a longtime Apple manager who worked on the watch. What's your plan, car?

It's becoming clear that autonomous cars are a long way away, maybe even a decade or more. So there's another flip-flop away from self-driving tech. It's the least ambitious version of the project yet, make an electric car that competes directly with Tesla. But by 2023, the outside world is changing. Artificial intelligence starts consuming the tech industry. And after Tesla's early successes, electric vehicles are facing a reality check. November 2022 saw the release of chat GPT.

As the world goes crazy, Google has its own big AI division. And Microsoft is the biggest investor in open AI, the developer of chat GPT. And while there's plenty of innovation under the hood of Apple's product, it's still unclear what Tim Cook's big generative AI play will be. Where Apple needs to catch up is in that interface between the consumer and the generative AI engine that has a name like Copilot or Gemini. And the electric vehicle market is starting to lose its luster with sales growth slowing for three reasons. These are expensive and high interest rates mean they're even harder to afford.

The first generation of EVs are now hitting the second hand market and they're not holding their values as well as combustion engine cars. Established car makers are starting to release their EV models, meaning competition is tougher and profits are lower. One specific part of Apple's success is that on the hardware side, they have by and large between 25 and 30 percent margin. That is impossible on a car.

All of this provokes another final rethink at Apple. The three megatrends that Cook highlighted in 2017 have all lost their appeal. Self-driving isn't happening anytime soon.

Ride sharing isn't a great business. And electric vehicles probably can't deliver the kinds of profits that Apple shareholders expect. They have some of the world's best minds on artificial intelligence working on this system that may never come to light because it is so difficult. On the other hand, they have this separate A.I. team trying to catch up to open A.I.

and Microsoft and Google on generative A.I. So Tim Cook makes a big decision. On February 26th, after most people have left work, the car team gets an e-mail announcing an all hands meeting the next day.

And people started to realize something is up. Then 10 a.m. the next morning, they all gathered into conference rooms and around their desks and they tuned in to a video announcement. It was a 12-minute presentation. They were pretty succinct.

Thank you for all your efforts. We're immediately winding down Project Titan. The Apple car is dead. Those working on self driving technology will join Apple's main AI group. The rest have to find new jobs inside or outside the company. Repurposing the people that were working on project Titan to AI makes sense given the opportunity in AI.

It solves a lot of problems for Apple. It gets a bunch of top AI minds working on its main AI goals, and it can reallocate the billions of dollars a year it's spending on the car towards developing AI. That tech could be essential to the future success of the iPhone, the device that still accounts for the majority of Apple's revenue. Look at this chart. After years of massive growth, Apple is struggling to grow revenue. Without the car, investors are wondering where the next leg of growth will come from. Some think that could be the Vision Pro. The problem is that if that device achieves everything Apple wants over the next few years, it could end up replacing the iPhone. You may not own both.

It's something that has the real potential in the next half decade to replace your iPhone, to be the future of that product. But Apple needs supplementary revenue. They need wholly new product categories that don't take away from others. And as carmakers start to question just how profitable the electric vehicle market can be, the fact that Apple has given up is hardly a vote of confidence.

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Click the link to learn more and take the first step towards a healthier future. France imports a billion dollars of butter a year. Its citizens eat so much of it that it's led to shortages. In Asia, sales for durian fruits are booming. China alone spends billions on them each year.

We traveled the world to see how billion-dollar food industries work and meet some of the people powering them. Our first stop is the Dominican Republic, where the world's largest aloe vera farm harvests and juices the thorny weeds. Universal Aloe's farm covers 5,000 acres here in the Dominican Republic. While there are hundreds of types of aloe plants, this farm chose aloe barbadensis Miller because it has 20 amino acids. Minerals, vitamins, carbohydrates, hormones, and other bioactive substances. Once the baby plants are in the ground, it takes about eight months for them to mature.

About 750 people harvest these fields. They're dispatched in groups, harvesting section by section. The cut leaves won't grow back, but the plants will grow new ones.

It will take them about a week to harvest just this one area. The heat, the sun is too strong because of how difficult this job is, but you are already used to it because these are things that you need. One by one, workers pick up all the harvested leaves and toss them into a truck. Those leaves head to a processing plant two miles up the road. The leaves go through a bath of chlorinated saltwater to kill off any little critters from the field that may be hanging around. Then they get trimmed. This jiggly fillet is the gel inside the aloe leaf.

That's what's used in real aloe vera juice, gel, or skin care products. We use the human hand to remove the fillet from the fillet knife. To do it, they need a really good knife. I call it the lightning knife, because when I hold it, I feel that I go very fast with it. It works by itself for me.

They might make it look easy, but filleting takes precision. It also has to be exactly in the center to be able to remove the crystal from the aloe well and perfectly. There is a lot of difference. When the big blades come, you feel good because you give more. But when the small blades come, you spend a lot of work filleting it and you feel weak. You see the desire to work, and they have to move fast, filleting 3,500 leaves a day. We filleters are very fast. There are many, and sometimes we put ourselves in competition to see who is the fastest.

And we are many of the fastest. Many aloe companies use machines for filleting. The production process that we carry out here is very artisanal. About 80% of our entire process is by hand.

Because there is much less waste. And because our plant, the leaf, is very irregular in its morphology. The leftover leaf bits go back out into the field as compost, and the buckets of fillets, those get weighed, then poured onto this big table. Workers here will inspect them for any leftover leaf bits, which they'll then slice off. Once it's all clear, the fillets head to the shredder, which grinds them into a pure aloe gel. At this point, ascorbic acid is added to extend the shelf life. The gel flows into this spill proof bag.

This bag is then vacuum sealed and put into a bigger metal box. The whole process from leaf to this container takes only about three hours. But before the shipment can leave the factory, its contents have to be tested for quality assurance. Redefine web hosting with Bluehost Cloud, the new platform made in partnership with WordPress.

Find out more at Bluehost.com. Only when a container passes the lab test can it be released for shipment. These ones are bound for Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. There, the gel will be pumped into bottles for forever living products. But not every bottle of aloe is made like this. In 2015, ConsumerLab.com tested 10 aloe products for ingredients. Half of them failed our tests. A 2016 Bloomberg investigation found that Walmart, CVS and Target's aloe products contain no evidence of aloe at all.

It's so easy to put out a fake aloe product. So there are all kinds of synthetic gels. Often you'll see the word like carbomer is a synthetic gel.

And if you see a clear gel, you have no idea if it's really aloe or carbomer. Most aloe products aren't closely regulated by the FDA. That's because they're considered supplements or cosmetics, not drugs.

So a product can say it contains aloe, but it could mean a range of things. It really does contain aloe filet, or it's the whole leaf ground up and not just that inner filet. Or it's a synthetic gel, and there's actually no aloe, which won't hurt you but doesn't have any of the supposed benefits of aloe.

There's not a lot of regulation or oversight of aloe products. It's also hard to regulate because aloe grows naturally all over the Americas. And its gel has been used for thousands of years to heal burns and reduce inflammation. The challenge is translating that history to our current rigorous medical examination. Another problem is there isn't clear scientific proof of aloe's healing powers. Some studies have shown it helps soothe burns and speed up healing, while others show no effect on burns.

So it's not that aloe doesn't help. The evidence isn't there right now. The outer rind of the leaf has been found to have a laxative compound called aloin. One study found that it caused cancer in rats, while another found it helped with constipation. But the FDA has banned aloe from being sold as an over-the-counter laxative drug. There's no patent on aloe, and so there isn't a lot of incentive for companies to be putting lots of money into clinical studies. They don't really need to do those studies to get these products on the shelf. Still, consumers worldwide are flocking to aloe, as they embrace more natural products. Universal Aloe saw a 30% increase in demand in 2020. As consumers navigate this growing market, how can we identify the products made with real aloe vera? Well, Todd says it's actually really tricky, but he did have a few suggestions.

First, you should always check the ingredient list. You want to see aloe, you want to see it first. You really need to be super careful on the wording, because if it just says leaf, it could be any part of the leaf. You could be getting the latex, which you don't want, unless you want a laxative effect.

Look out for tricky wording, like 100% gel. That could mean there is 100% gel, but not all of it is aloe filet. So you really need to know what part of the leaf is being made. When they say aloe gel, is it a gel that's made from blending up the whole leaf, or is it truly just pure aloe gel?

Despite these uncertainties, experts don't expect the demand for aloe to dip anytime soon. All of mushroom life starts here, with compost. Mushrooms here are very picky eaters. The mushrooms eat a strict diet of recycled mulch, hay, wheat, straw, poultry litter, and corn cob. So this is the material near the end of the composting process. It's dark, caramelized, it's soft, it has a lot of water.

The mushroom spores, or seeds, are added in. Then it's aged, pasteurized, and trucked to farms across the county, like this one. I'm Chris, and I'm a third-generation mushroom farmer.

Chris' family has been growing white button and cremini mushrooms since 1938. Mushrooms are grown indoors so that we can control the environment. It all happens on vertical shelves. Workers use this machine to lay the compost down.

Then comes a layer called casing, with peat moss, limestone, and water. This equipment allows us to have the machine do the heavy work. It helps get a perfect one-and-three-quarter-inch layer, so the mushrooms don't grow unevenly or come up dirty. This panel controls the growing conditions. They want a perfect combination of carbon dioxide, humidity, and temperature.

After 16 days, we're ready to harvest. But it's harvesters who are hardest to find. We're always harvesting. The only day we don't work is Christmas.

That did not come back because of COVID. [inaudible] The mushrooms are grown and harvested in three breaks, or phases, meaning each room will get picked from three times, starting with the biggest mushrooms, then they'll wait for the little ones to mature. Mushrooms double in size every 24 hours, so pickers have to move quickly, each armed with a knife, a cart, and tons of boxes. They harvest every mushroom by hand. You're going to twist the mushrooms, you're going to put them in the jars. 220 mushrooms to fill up a 10-pound box. 10 in an hour. Does that give you a good prospect?

Some people, they do more than 15, 16 in an hour. They're fast. Daniel Beltran and his daughter, Sonia, run Mazda Farms just up the road. I'm the second Mexican to grow mushrooms in the whole United States. Daniel worked as a mushroom picker for over 12 years. And I was thinking in my mind, I said, I hope one day I get a farm. Today, he and Sonia own 25 mushroom houses. We probably need close to what 80 private chairs every day, and we have 60.

Today, harvesters work up to 12-hour days to pick as many mushrooms as they can. But they still can't keep up. We should be harvesting 10 rooms of mushrooms every day, and we usually only can get to 7 or 8 rooms. In the leftover rooms, the mushrooms will be steamed off, meaning they'll be destroyed. It's a race against time, because mushrooms grow so quickly. Waiting even one day means... And customers don't like that, so the value decreases. About 35 cents a pound instead of a dollar a pound. There's nowhere that you can probably flip it, and there really isn't. There's nothing you can do.

It gets even worse for specialty mushrooms that require even more labor, like these shiitakes at Phillips Mushroom Farms. It usually takes three days to pick the whole house. It's still all done by hand, so it's still labor intensive. Or these maitakes. Each one of these logs has to be moved by hand. Put them on a shelf to spawn run, then we take them off the shelf and bring them down here, put them on this shelf to pick, and then we have to pick them. And then we also have to throw it away. There's six touches in the course of this thing's life cycle. Every touch is a person, which are hard to come by nowadays.

But the labor issues don't just stop at harvest. They can also be felt at the packing level. Megan is the third generation of her family to run Mother Earth Organic Mushrooms. This pallet of mushrooms was just brought in from our farm, and then we get it into one of our two coolers. Everything is labeled so that we know exactly what farm it came from, the date it came in, and how many pounds were brought in, and it's all in our system so we can easily trace back all of our products. Megan has machines to wash and cut the mushrooms, and even to wrap and label the boxes. But everything in between, from topping off a box to tracking and weighing, is done by hand.

And then it'll get put in a flat at the end and get palletized to go out to the customer. Mother Earth delivers mushrooms as far as Denver, Texas, and Boston. But getting them there is tough, with so few workers.

So it used to just be harvesters that were harder to get. Now it's at our harvesting level, at our supervisor level, at our quality assurance level, even our office staff level. Truck drivers have been really hard to find as well.

The problem is, is if they can't get them harvested at the farm, that means we don't have the mushrooms for the packing facility. It's a complete ripple effect. So how did the industry's labor problem become so dire? Well, it starts with Kennett Square's history of immigration. Quakers, a Protestant Christian group, were the first to grow mushrooms here in 1885. As the story goes...

Originally, a Quaker farmer who grew carnations tried to grow mushrooms under the beds of the carnations and he was successful. The Quakers then hired Italian immigrants to do the hard manual labor. The Italians then started hundreds of mushroom farms of their own in the area. From the 1950s to the 70s, former sugarcane workers from Puerto Rico settled into Kennett Square and took over picking the mushrooms. But when they began asking for higher wages and better working conditions, farm owners fired them and hired Mexican immigrants instead. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed an immigration bill that gave legal status to certain undocumented agricultural workers who came into the country before 1982.

That really, really helped for all the Mexican workers. Most Mexicans work on the mushroom industry for, I would say, at least 40 years. They built Kennett Square into America's mushroom capital. It now produces 60% of the country's product. But that population of Mexican immigrants is aging out of this work, and their kids have chosen other career paths. We started getting people from Central America now. Even before the pandemic, these new workers began leaving for other industries. There's people that say, Oh, like you go to construction or you go to landscaping, make more money.

To make things worse, strict immigration laws in the US have suffocated the legal flow of Central and Latin American workers. Because mushrooms are a year round crop, the industry doesn't qualify for the H2A temporary worker program, which allows immigrants to come into the US and work in seasonal agriculture. The labor crunch is affecting every mushroom farm, both small and large. To entice the few pickers left, farm owners are offering perks, higher pay, housing and transportation to and from work. Our harvesters work on a piece rate. We pay them per box. My average harvester earns over $14 an hour, but I have some harvesters that make over $20 an hour. I would like to pay them more, the company just can't afford to yet.

Agriculture in general and mushroom farms specifically work on very thin margins. So when we can't harvest 10% of our product, we're definitely losing money. Chris is losing $40,000 in revenue a week.

For this current year, we probably have lost somewhere in the middle of $250,000. It's meaningless without us. There's no doubt, it's meaningless.

It is painful. If this happens, farms will either have to reduce their scale and fill less growing rooms or they'll eventually would have to shut down. Altogether, Chester County's mushroom farmers lost $168 million in 2020. And that has a significant effect on the market, which is booming in popularity. For the last 10 years, we're seeing a demand increase of 3 to 5% every year. Sales in grocery stores have gone up by 15% in 2021.

Customers are asking every day to fill their orders and we just don't have enough mushrooms to do that. So it's difficult to want to expand, want to provide all the orders that they want and then see mushrooms just go to waste. The solution for the labor issue isn't an easy one.

Farmers have already automated much of the process. Some have turned to growing bigger mushrooms. If you grow a larger mushroom, it actually makes it a lot faster for the harvesters to pick them so we can get them quicker here and get them out to our customers and do it with less labor. The American Mushroom Institute is pushing the Senate to pass the Farm Workforce Modernization Act.

The bill would extend the H-2A Temporary Worker Program to the mushroom industry. That way immigrants could get an agricultural worker visa to pick mushrooms. We need more migrant workers. We need more ability to bring people up to the country. Just like our grandparents did, they came up and worked two jobs and worked hard to make a better life for ourselves. And we need to continue to have America do that for new immigrant populations. Others in the industry are considering robot pickups, though not everyone thinks they're the best option.

You can't really get a machine to be as delicate as a person's hand to choose exactly which mushroom. You also have to have like the eye to see which one is ready to pick. Robots like this are still three years away.

Until then, farmers will keep putting out the call for anybody to come help pick mushrooms. Next we head to Thailand, where farmers harvest a million metric tons of the world's most expensive durian fruit each year. Durian is native to several tropical climates around the world, including Thailand.

Thailand alone grows over 300 varieties, but the most expensive durians are grown in Nantaburi province. They're known as Nant durian. Nant makes up the highest grade of durian in Thailand and is often given as a token of respect.

But even among Nant durians, two varieties stand out. The most expensive, Kanyao durian, and the slightly more affordable Mantong durian. Fruit is like any other product, but it's not the same. The taste is different for each fruit. Non-durian is described as having refined and sweet pulp with a mild fragrance and creamy texture, whereas other lesser-grade durians are said to have a stronger smell and a watery texture.

Knot thurian has a distinct taste and smell for two main reasons, Namibri's environment and the growing practices of its farmers. Nonthaburi province has been a center for durian farming in Thailand for over 300 years. Farmers in this region have been honing their technique for generations, using their resources and skill to grow the highest quality durians possible. One of the resources they depend on is the Chao Phraya River, which flows through Nongburi and fertilizes the soil.

But the river water isn't used to water the durian trees themselves. Farmers in Nongburi prefer to buy fresh water, which they believe improves the final quality of the durian. After planting, it takes about six years for a healthy durian tree to bear fruit. Once the trees start to flower, farmers count the days until the fruits are ripe. Depending on the breed, this can span 90 to 150 days.

But it's not only the time and labor that make Nont durian so pricey. The costs to provide this kind of care add up. Just the water costs about $2,200 per year.

Farmers have to constantly check the trees and look for any infections or insects, and they wrap each durian in plastic to protect it. They must harvest the durians one by one when each fruit is perfectly ripe. These time-consuming and labor-intensive techniques have a major impact on the flavor and final value of non-durian. A two and a half kilogram montong durian from Apidanya Farm can cost over $100. That's about a third of the price of Kanyao, making it a more popular and affordable option for customers.

And if it's delicious, it has to be crispy on the outside and sweet on the inside. That's how it's going to be delicious. That's what I like.

Kanyao, on the other hand, is the most expensive nut durian you can buy. Depending on its size, Kanyao durians from Apia Anya Farm can range from about $380 to $530 per fruit. But despite Kanyao's steep price, demand for this variety is growing, and supply can't keep up. I still don't know if I'll be able to get a job next year.

One of the main challenges is the climate crisis. The tropical climate required to grow durian also makes the farms susceptible to floods, storms, and other extreme weather. In 1995 and 2011, floods destroyed almost all of the durian trees in Nanda Bari.

In 2011, about 1,100 acres of durian trees were leveled, and only 17 acres survived. After this, Benjamot had to start the six-year process over. The global market for durian is expected to reach over $28 billion by 2025. And that means Apiranya and other Nandaburi farms will likely continue selling out of not-durian in the years to come. Larry's a fifth generation farmer in Fort Meade, Florida.

We've been growing citrus in my family since the 1850s. When I first started in the industry, citrus occupied over 900,000 acres in the state of Florida. In fact, some years we had too much fruit and market prices were depressed. Just 15 years ago, his family packed a million orange cartons a year, mostly Valencia oranges, the big sweet juicy kind. You planted a grove expecting that to last for multiple generations. The first case of citrus screening was reported in China back in 1919. It quickly spread across the continent, devastating citrus groves in India and Saudi Arabia as well. No one knows exactly how the Asian citrus psyllid made it to Florida.

But in 1998, it showed up on an orange jasmine plant in a backyard in Palm Beach County. And it quickly spread throughout the state on infected rootstock. But it would take another seven years before Florida's orange tree showed signs of greening. It spreads throughout the state before you even know it's present. And in 2005, Larry found his first infected tree. It was a real challenge and an eye-opening for us.

We knew what a threat it could be to our operation, and we were fearful there were more infected trees that just had not been detected. At first, Larry tried removing all the sick trees, but the insect moved faster, soon infecting too many to control. When a psyllid munches on a citrus tree, it leaves behind the bacteria that causes greening, here in the vascular tissue. The bacteria replicates and blocks this important highway for moving nutrients. Underground, the root systems thin and die out. Above ground, you notice the yellow pattern, the dark green spots. If you can see me through the canopy of this tree, that means this tree is really, really sick.

While the trees do keep bearing oranges for a few years, the fruit essentially never ripens. You see it's small in size, it remains green. And when I cut this fruit, you see an odd shape. You can still eat the fruit. It's just not as sweet.

The orange juice from this fruit has lower sugar content or bricks than normal fruit. But there's nothing wrong with the juice. It's awful.

And 40 percent of those oranges polish the trees sooner than usual. The bacteria is actually starving and kills the tree over time. Today, researchers estimate 90 percent of all orange trees in the state have the bacteria. No longer do you see citrus trees abundant in the landscape.

Larry has kept his trees alive and producing for 15 years using a combination of horticultural techniques developed by scientists at the University of Florida. Some of our work that is going on right now is finding ways to keep those trees that do have the disease still producing fruit that are usable. You guys want to see what some pilos look like?

All right. They're very small. Oh, there's an escapee, actually.

They're small. They kind of jump around a little bit. So we use this thing called an aspirator, or the more fun term we use with children is pooter. We just suck them up. It's basically a little vacuum in my hand.

Here, Lauren Diepenbrock can study the psyllids' movement to learn what might keep them off a citrus tree. Using the aspirator is actually a really efficient way to collect psyllids. She's figured out a few things that detract psyllids.

First, this pink clay. It's sprayed on the trees to hide the leaves from the insects, which uses light wavelengths to see. One study showed the clay was more effective than insecticides. The second thing Lauren is researching is these eight-foot-wide sheets of plastic, called reflective mulch. The idea is that it should make it where the psyllid can't find the host plant. It could be that it blinds them or causes a visual deterrent. Uh, someone?

We do get silly. We do get them, but we do get them at a reduced rate. A few years ago, farmers discovered that putting plastic bags around baby trees could help them grow stronger before infection. Lauren's now studying how effective these individual protective covers, or IPCs, actually can be.

So this is IPC mesh. And as you can see, there's little holes in it. You can see my hand very clearly.

Wind, sun, rain, it all gets through here. The goal is to really keep that Asian citrus psyllid off the tree. And then if you look underneath. This is our irrigation. The baby trees will grow in the IPCs for two years. You can see that the trees aren't perfect. They're still going to have some stuff on them.

We do have some pest issues in here, but they look really good compared to what's in the open field, and this will actually give our trees a fighting chance when they're out in the environment and they could potentially get infected with sea lice. Scientist Tripti Vashish thinks the key is in the soil. We have been learning that the trees need these nutrients to fight infection. The citrus trees, because of this disease, have very small roots or fewer roots, so they are not very efficient in picking up the nutrients. It's like a job of ten people needs to be done by one person, same with the roots.

She figured out that giving smaller doses of fertilizer and water more frequently helps the thick roots absorb nutrients better. And it's similar like us at six small meals each day rather than three big meals are better. Same as with the fertilizer and irrigation, smaller doses are better than big doses.

Larry uses fertilizer custom designed for his trees. He's also planting more young ones. One of our strategies for dealing with greening is to plant the groves at higher densities. We're planting 300 trees per acre compared to 140 to 150 trees per acre before we were dealing with the disease.

So if he knows all the trees will get infected, with more planted, hopefully some will survive. Growers have also tried releasing predator wasps and spraying insecticides. While there's no silver bullet, in combination, these short-term solutions have sort of worked.

You can slow down the decline. We've been battling citrus greening for 15 years, and while the industry's not thriving, we're definitely surviving. But the problem is, all these approaches tack on an extra $600 per acre onto production costs for growers. Our revenues are down by more than half on an individual growth basis.

Growers are losing money. And many couldn't swallow the losses. By early 2022, half of Florida's orange growers have left the industry. So while he waits for a long-term solution, Larry's taking the hit so he can keep harvesting the same way his family always has. Workers quickly pick the oranges and drop them into bags. Once they've got a good batch, pickers dump them into baskets in the grove. Workers then truck the oranges to the packing facility just down the road. We have eight digital cameras that take the picture of each piece of fruit as it travels through the packing line. We use an electronic sorter to divide the crop by color.

If they're orange enough, the fruit gets cleaned and hit with a layer of natural wax. It preserves the fruit. It extends its shelf life. Today, because of HLB, Larry packs half as many boxes as he did 17 years ago.

If the oranges are a bit too green, Larry knows they'll be hard to sell on the fresh side. So he sends them to get juiced at the Florida's natural plant in Lake Wales. Larry owns the juicing plant along with other local growers as part of the company's cooperative. About 90% of the fruit grown in the state goes to orange juice. But just like growers, the factory has been getting fewer oranges. So less efficiency in the plant. With a lower fruit volume, the factory had to shut down one of its three processing lines. Nowadays, 60,000 boxes of oranges arrive at the plant from cooperative farms across central Florida. That's about 30,000 fewer than before HLB.

Within 24 hours of harvesting, we juice the fruit. This machine squeezes the juice out of every orange. We pull out any seeds and we also collect the pulp where we can add that back to whatever degree we want to do that. The juice gets pasteurized and then pumped into cartons. But remember, greening affects oranges' natural sugar content. So Florida's natural has to blend infected oranges with sweeter ones from different regions or even seasons. It still tastes like orange juice, it's just not quite as sweet.

Today the factory pumps out about a third less than pre-greening. They need a home for their fruit where they can get maximum value that hopefully can sustain their operations until a solution to greening is found. Many scientists believe the long-term solution lies with re-engineering nature, either genetically changing the bug itself or naturally breeding citrus trees. Ultimately a tree that's resistant or tolerant to the disease will be key. That's the project Fred Gemitter and his team are working on at the University of Florida.

They're trying to breed for an HLB-resistant orange variety, meaning even if the disease shows up, the tree won't get sick. To do that, he takes two different types of trees, maybe one with yummy oranges, and one that's resistant and essentially has them mate, and their kid will hopefully still taste good but won't get HLBed. That's really the holy grail of citrus greening research. But that's not easy.

Finding a resistant orange is like looking for a genetic needle in a haystack. It's extremely difficult to breed new oranges. We know of some kinds of trees related to oranges that are resistant, and we're trying to access the genetics of those resistant types by making crosses. Fred says it could take more than a decade. So it's long-term. There's always an element of serendipity in this.

But armed with that miracle-resistant tree, they could be better prepared to tackle future diseases. It's a global, interconnected world we live in. People and plant diseases move about pretty freely. And so there will be another problem, another disease come along. I believe science will continue to deliver new tools that will make growing citrus easier over time. I look forward to those days.

I'm sure we'll have other challenges that we'll face in time, but today citrus greening is here to stay. Frank's family has been making cheese in the town of Zoetervalde for over 150 years. Every day he starts by warming over 600 gallons of milk, pumped in from the milking barn. Milk, floating in now, is like 37 degrees, just the body temperature of a cow. For every batch of cheese, he adds rennet, enzymes that make the proteins in the milk clump together into solid curds, leaving behind the liquid whey. Rennet is like a pair of scissors cutting through the milk. After 30 minutes, a giant curd has formed. It should break open like that.

This machine starts cutting it into pieces. And we cut it real small in order to have very little moisture in the cheese, in order to make a cheese which can age for years. Frank's parents taught him how to make cheese when he was 22 years old.

My brother and I are the seventh generation Kapteijns producing cheese and milking cows. And, well, there will be at least seven generations of cows walking on this farm as well. He took over the family business with his brother in January of 2022.

I think 50% of Dutch people has a great grandfather who's been a farmer. Farmers shaped the landscape in the Netherlands. In the 13th century, nearly a fifth of what is now the Netherlands was underwater.

Over the centuries, the Dutch built dikes to hold back the sea. Farmers drained large portions of the reclaimed land to plant crops. But one of the only things that would grow on the wet soil was grass. So raising cattle for meat, milk, and cheese became big business. The dairy industry eventually became a symbol of the Netherlands, as much as tulips and windmills. Milk and cows graced Dutch masterpieces by Vermeer and Van Gogh.

By the 20th century, the Netherlands was producing so much cheese, it was a valuable export. Today, almost all Dutch dairy farms sell their milk to big factories that pasteurize it and use machines to make cheese on a large scale. But Frank only works with raw milk.

Just 4% of Dutch dairy farms make gouda in-house like he does. We still produce it on the way like my great-grandfather did. And I don't know if it's extra good, but I like it. And what machines do at factories, he still prefers doing by hand, like checking the consistency of the curds himself. It's just a warm wave. It's like almost 30 degrees.

And the curd is real soft now. And now the curd over here is just like this deep under the wave. And over there, there's no curd anymore. But I'm just checking if the curd is a bit equally divided. If it's equally spread.

He can start draining out some of that liquid whey, but nothing goes to waste. He skims the fat to make butter and feeds the whey to his pigs. The pigs are already happy with just whey. And I like butter on my sandwich in the mornings. He slices the leftover curd into sections large enough for a wheel of cheese. He gauges the rent amount by field.

Meanwhile, Frank's employee, Savannah, prepares the old buckets, most of which were Frank's grandfathers. There are only a handful of farmers in the Netherlands who still use wooden buckets. Frank drifts the cloth below the surface and piles the curds on top.

The cloth will help the last bit of whey drain out. They repeat the process for 12 wheels of cheese. There's a lot of whey in, so I think about 25, 30 kilograms, something like that. And it's cozy.

These presses squeeze out the remaining liquid. All this cheese comes from the milk of Franck's 200 female cows. The Netherlands has nearly 1.6 million of them, and they produce lots of nitrogens because of what they eat. Fertilizer grown grass in the summer and imported grain and soy year round. Their pee is full of nitrogen, too, and when it mixes with their poop, it creates a gas called ammonia. The plumes of ammonia drop down onto nature reserves and acidify the soil.

Some nitrogen-loving plants like grass take over, while other native plants can't absorb proper nutrients. From there, it's a domino effect. Many native plants grow weak or die out. Snails can't get enough nutrients to build their shells. The birds that eat the snails can't develop eggs, or their chicks are born with frail bones. Inside one of the Netherlands' largest national parks, rangers like Annemieke Visser-Vindering say oak and pine trees are dying out.

They're all sick. There's none, not one, that I would say, oh, you know, that's very, very fit or very, a healthy tree. You can say that the trees are starving, it's not getting all the nutrients that it needs to be a very healthy, full-grown oak tree that it can be. Environmentalists say 14 habitats in the country are on the brink of collapse.

The dairy sector is one of the drivers of biodiversity loss in the Netherlands. Back in 1992, what is now the European Union adopted a law known as the Habitats Directive, requiring countries to designate nature areas for conservation. In order to comply, the Netherlands introduced policies to cut nitrogen on these protected lands. Back then, Dutch farms had one of the highest ammonia emission rates in Europe. By 2019, the industry had cut its emissions by almost two thirds. Covered manure storage, like below this slatted floor, has helped. If it stays sealed underground for enough time, the ammonia won't evaporate as much. Everywhere we are standing there's two meters deep basement full of manure and pee. But these efforts alone weren't enough. The farms releasing the most ammonia sat near those protected nature reserves. The nation's highest court said the Netherlands needed to do more.

The government scrambled to comply. Some lawmakers suggested cutting the number of animals in the country in half. Farmers were outraged. They protested for weeks, dumping manure on streets and blocking roads with tractors. This is a right of existence for us. I hope to implement it, but the rules have to work with it. Otherwise, it won't be possible.

By early 2023, the government lowered the goal to a 50% cut. But by then, a pro-farmer political party named the Farmer Citizen Movement had swept provincial elections. Rick Luders is a party leader in this area. We have a nitrogen law, which is rigid and is fully focused on dairy farming. And we want that this law is gone. Soon after, the government announced a $1.6 billion plan to buy out and close up to 3,000 high-emitting farms near nature reserves. A farmer can voluntarily take the buyout and possibly get more than their farm is worth. But for Franck, selling his seven-generation farm isn't an option. He says his cows are like family. This is Gina. She's the highest ranking.

She's the leader of the herd. She just bosses other cows away, with her head, mainly. So, when she wants to drink and there's another cow, boink, move aside. I'm Gina, here I am, and I want a drink.

He even got married on this farm, surrounded by his cows. And it's tradition in his family to name cows after relatives. And I named the cow after my daughter as well. Frank and his brother milk the cows twice a day. First we clean the teeth, starting at left front, right front, front, right rear and left rear.

And then we connect the milking claw. There's a little bit of vacuum underneath so it sucks the milk away. Frong gets about 8 gallons of milk a day from each cow. What he can milk in 15 minutes would have taken his grandfather an entire day.

New technology helped dairy and livestock farms consolidate, beginning in the mid-20th century. To this day, between 70 and 80 percent of the country's dairy is sent abroad, mainly to other European countries. The Netherlands is also the EU's largest exporter of meat. It trades about $9 billion worth of pork, beef and poultry internationally every year. And it does it all on land not much bigger than the U.S. state of Maryland. For much of the world, the Netherlands became a roadmap for how to farm efficiently at scale. But environmentalists like Natasha Orlemans from the World Wildlife Fund see it differently.

I see the Netherlands as an example of where everything went wrong, exporting the meat and dairy and having a huge amount of manure here in the Netherlands, causing all this environmental and societal problems. The farmers we spoke to said saving the environment should go hand in hand with preserving their centuries old traditions. Traditions like flipping the cheese. In the first 24 hours of cheese, we turn it like six times. Flipping ensures both sides of the wheel will be round, like the curve of the bucket.

See, it's already turning yellow. So, it's a good sign. Then he moves the cheese wheels into a salty brine. The salt bath is mainly for making a crust around the cheese. A little bit of salt will get deeper into the cheese for a little bit of taste. Franck ages his specialty gouda for up to 10 years at a consistent 59 degrees Fahrenheit. This is one is from 2013. So 10 years old now. Still looking shiny.

Here he stores hundreds of wheels over $100,000 worth of cheese. Every day we turn them, put an extra layer of coating on top of it, that liquid plastic coating seals in the moisture and of course to keep mold away. You hear it when I lift it, it gets stuck on the shelf. So that's why you flip it as well.

As it ages, friendly bacteria build up amino acids, these crystals. It's where the flavor of the cheese comes from. Frank can tell it's aging well from the sound. Nice flat in here. You hear it?

Frank is one of over 45,000 people working in the Dutch dairy industry. If you just take out half of the farmers, and half of the jobs, and half of the income, where are these people going to work? They go to the cities, probably, and the whole. Villages at the countryside will become ghost cities.

Within 10 or 15 years, I'm worried who's going to produce our food. And where is it coming from? Many farmers now face a tough decision, take the buyout, decrease their herds, move their farms, or make pricey upgrades to try to cut nitrogen emissions. But not everyone can afford costly innovations.

Many farmers are working on narrow margins or are already in debt. Farmers don't get a loan from from the bank, because they say, Oh, we don't know if you can still farm after this regular Q2DC regulation. Plus, farmers don't even know yet if innovations could actually save their farm from closure. Researchers at Wacheningen University are hoping they can.

This is not a commercial dairy farm. It's a research, That's Kees de Kooning. He runs the university's dairy campus. His team is testing different iterations of the slatted floor from CAS.

We can run trials where we separate the urine and the solid. They're also studying the effect of robotic scrapers and poop vacuums. By quickly moving waste into closed storage, vacuums reduce methane and ammonia loss. But Keyes estimates one like this could cost over $20,000.

And a farm of 120 cows would need two. He says changing cows' diets is a cheaper option. His team feeds the cows different combinations of food. Then they use these troughs to test how much the animals eat and their emissions. The electronic ID system is identified so we know exactly which cow is in the box. So if innovations can't help, farmers still have the option of the buyout. As of November 2023, nearly 1000 livestock farms had registered for it. Almost a quarter were dairy farms. But the government won't pay them out for a while. [inaudible] That same month, a new right-wing party, PVV, won the most seats in the country's parliamentary elections.

Herdvelders, the party's leader, spoke at farmer protests earlier in the year. They are killing our farmers for some idiotic leftist liberal or so-called nitrogen problem in the Netherlands. The party has signaled it wants to stop government spending on initiatives to curb nitrogen, including the fund for the Buyout Plan.

Vic hopes the PVV will form a coalition with other pro-farmer parties. We can make new laws, quite simple. But a coalition could take months. The World Wildlife Fund says this delay will only lead to further deterioration of nature.

Meanwhile, farmers are in limbo. It's the limbo that paralyzes the agricultural sector. And that limbo is very dangerous for nature as well, because it's still suffering. It's horrible.

And I can feel for them. This problem isn't unique to the Netherlands. Dairy farmers in Ireland might have to decrease the size of their herds because of unsafe nitrogen levels in rivers, which are causing algae blooms. New Zealand has some of the most polluted waterways in the world. Dairy farming is one of the biggest sources of these dangerous nitrate levels in drinking water. And in the U.S. state of California, agriculture has contributed to hazardous air pollution. All of these countries will have to contend with the same questions the Netherlands faces today.

How do we feed ourselves, preserve tradition, keep economies running, and protect our planet? I don't see myself as being opposing to farmers. I'm opposed to the system the way it is now.

It's ecologically a disaster, and it's also not bringing farmers a proper income. So basically, it's a system that's being broken, and that system needs to be fixed. Pronk seems open to a fix too.

If it helps nature or climate, bring it on. Maybe then his family can continue making cheese for another seven generations. I hope that dairy farmers have a future in the Netherlands. I think we're really connected to the landscape. I hope the farms won't grow too big so it can be run on a family scale. I think that's a beautiful way of living.

You probably know the Cavendish banana. You can find this type of banana in every supermarket around the world. They're so popular because they're yummy.

They look nice and they ripen as they transport. It's high yielding, so it's got quite a thick skin and so it travels well and tastes pretty good. Comes in its own package. But there's a problem.

They are sterile. They don't have seeds. No seeds means Cavendish bananas are clones of each other. So the only way to propagate them is in vitro or by taking new growth called suckers from the base of an older plant. But since they're all genetic copies, Cavendish are really vulnerable to disease. The domino effect.

If you have everything wrong with just one clone, one disease can kill everything plant by plant. That's exactly what's happening with TR4, one of the deadliest plant diseases out there. The fungus doesn't spread to humans, but it does eventually kill the banana plant so no more fruit grows. Scientists guess the fungus probably started somewhere in Southeast Asia in the 90s and quickly spread across the globe. Then in 2019, it hit Latin America.

Combined with the Caribbean, that area grows 75 percent of the world's bananas. To make sure the fungus doesn't spread, farms across Colombia have implemented biosecurity measures. Evanorte 2 was one of the first farms in the country to detect TR4. Workers wash down and disinfect the underside of any car that comes in, just in case there's infected soil hiding in the tread. So any part of our clothing that comes in contact with the ground can become a dispersion factor. The shoes are placed in this area, they are turned around, the overall is put on, and the rubber boots are placed so that they can enter our area.

The shoes are considered a dirty area, and this is a clean area, a clean area because it is the one that is under the control of the dispersion that is from the exit to the end. Antonio's team built cement paths throughout the farm, so on their way to harvest, workers are walking on open soil. Once they've reached the area ready to be harvested, workers walk through a sanitizing footbath made of ammonium. Out in the field, workers measure the banana fingers to make sure they're ready to harvest. They're usually ready about 12 to 13 weeks after the fruit stem shows up. One worker cuts down a 65-pound bundle, while the other catches it and carries it to the cableway.

That cableway system brings all those banana bunches to the packaging plant. First, workers sanitize the bunches with chlorine. Then they check the bananas for quality and any signs of fusarium damage. They cut off and throw bushels into a huge tank. That bath not only preserves the bananas, but washes off any of the latex that naturally occurs on the peel. The bananas get cut into smaller bunches of five to seven. Next come those famous stickers.

Workers wrap the banana carefully so they don't bruise. That wrapping has holes in it so the bananas can ripen as they travel. No more than four hours after the bananas are harvested, those boxes end up on pallets loaded onto trucks. The bananas are trucked to the nearby port, where they're moved onto ships. This shipment's headed to the U.S. With equipment, bananas and people moving along this global supply chain, it's easy to see how the fungus could spread. If TR Ford does sneak into a farm, the Colombian government has laid out strict guidelines for containing the fungus. That means they've found symptoms like... Once TR Ford is identified in a plant, you can't just kill that one plant.

The fungus goes about 10 feet deep into the soil. So you have to kill off all the plants in that area. To keep operating the rest of the farm, Evan Norte II followed the government's three-zone plan. The injected herbicide kills all the plants in Zone A.

That tarps so birds won't land on the fungus and spread it around. There are also canals around the zone to keep any water away from the infected area. In Zone B, called the buffer zone, Finally, in Zone C, plants are allowed to grow, but they're constantly monitored for signs of TR4.

Jose estimates biosecurity has cost this farm as much as $5 million since 2019. So they're pricey. But the measures are working at keeping the fungus at bay. In terms of containment, Magdalena and Cesar are free departments of Fusarium Rasa 4 Topical at the moment. There is no decrease in productivity to date.

These biosecurity measures have contained the fungus in Colombia, and kept it from spreading to Ecuador, the largest exporter of bananas in the world. But fungus can wipe out an entire fruit variety if not stopped. We know because it's happened before.

In the early 1900s, a banana called Gros Michel was the most popular. But by the 1950s... Luckily, Cavendish was resistant to that first strain, so it took over as the banana of choice. The problem was, banana companies built their entire supply chains around this one Cavendish variety. In 2019, they exported 20 million bananas, and supported millions of jobs globally. But now, the Cavendish is also vulnerable.

History repeats itself now, with the Tropical Rasa 4 and the Cavendish. Cooking bananas like plantains are also at risk for TR4. A risk for food security, because the plantains are a staple food in Latin America, in Africa, and many other countries. They are part of our daily diet. So yeah, the newest race of Fusarium is scary, for both Cavendish and plantains. But this time around, we have advanced science. Researchers across the globe are working toward one goal.

We're looking for materials that are resistant to tropical water. This guy actually invented a banana that did just that. Back in 2019, Dr. James Dale announced that his team had successfully injected the DNA from a resistant banana into a Cavendish. And it worked.

We found the solution. We have a line of Cavendish, which appears to be completely resistant to TR4. The thing we haven't done yet is a taste test. And that's because they look, smell, feel exactly the same as every other banana. We've only changed one gene.

But no one would buy his miracle banana, because it was genetically modified. At an international level, genetically modified varieties are not a solution, neither by the consumer nor by the buyer. Those who buy the fruit don't accept it. In the EU, most member countries have either partly or fully banned GMOs. In the US, they're allowed, but feared.

One argument against GMOs is that these modified plants would quickly spread their genes and kill out biodiversity. But with bananas, that's not a problem. The genes don't move because they are sterile. You can grow a GM banana next to a non-GM banana for 50 years and the gene will not move from one to the other. Incredibly frustrating. There's a solution, but it's a scientific solution, but not a political solution.

So scientists had to go back to the drawing board, using what they learned from James to play the non-GMO game. Fernando is a breeder for Kijine, a genetics company in the Netherlands. And he thinks the best way to get around GMO regulations is through traditional breeding. Meaning you take two different types of bananas, the Cavendish and one that is resistant, and you essentially have them mate. And their kid is hopefully resistant to Panama disease, but still tastes good, like Cavendish. Crossbreeding or traditional breeding is something that happens every day in nature. So the bees are pollinating the different flowers with other flowers. So that's what we are doing here.

We are acting as bees. Fernando has found a few resistant bananas to cross with Cavendish, but... Most of them are not even edible bananas, are the bananas that are full of seeds, like this one. And to cross those with a Cavendish is hard. They are sterile, very difficult to breed. It's not impossible.

So you can try to cross, but you need to do it many, many, many times to get only a few seeds. For James to make that first GMO banana, it took him... Nearly 10 years since our first field trial. For those future bananas that are traditionally bred, it'll take just as long. It will take lots of years because the life cycle of the banana is quite slow. But the longer it takes to traditionally breed a resistant Cavendish, the more the disease spreads. And the more strains of Fusarium could be released. Fernando says there's a bigger-picture way to attack this problem.

Diversity. Take tomatoes, for example. You go to the grocery store, and there may be 10 or more different types of tomatoes. Cherry, vine, beef, Roma. That's diversity.

So if one tomato gets in trouble, it won't be a huge loss. Fernando and his colleagues have the same vision for bananas. We have red bananas, pink bananas, why not try to incorporate that into the market so that you can go to the supermarket and have a complete bench of different options of bananas that you can choose. There are hundreds of different banana varieties around the world. A friend of mine collected one up in Papua New Guinea that he said, if you didn't know it, you'd think you're eating a strawberry. So amazingly different flavors. And diversity would also help farms. But if you have different types of bananas grown together, probably one banana will be more resistant than the next one. So that one can stop the spreading of the disease to the next plant. So why haven't companies diversified?

Because it's too expensive and complicated to change a $25 billion industry built around a monoculture. So until a solution is found, these biosecurity measures will have to be the short term fix for keeping the big business of bananas alive. Making the batter begins off-site. To make a metric ton of batter, Van Zandt fills this churn with 2,400 liters of cream. As the churn spins, the fat collides and sticks together, forming batter grains. After 30 minutes of spinning, the churn is open and inspected. Van Zandt then cleans the batter grains with the filtered batter milk, and the churn is left to run for another 15 to 30 minutes until all of the grains become a single mound of batter.

But before the batter can be kneaded, it's left to rest for a couple of days to develop flavor. At the Maison du Beurre, or Butter House, 50 kilogram blocks of butter are unwrapped and sliced into smaller pieces. The butter is kneaded with a wooden roller on a rotating table, using a 19th century technique known as malaxage. This removes the excess buttermilk and creates a silky smooth texture. It was introduced into the process by Maison Bordier's founder, Yannick Bordier.

At larger workshops, centrifuges are typically used to remove the remaining buttermilk, but This process requires so much skill that Bordier requires people to apprentice for a year. In order to understand the butter of today, we need to go back to last week. What did the cows eat? What kind of weather did they have? How did they feel?

During this process, the butter will lose 1 to 2 liters of water. When the butter has reached the right level of flexibility, it's shaped into a block, cut and checked for color. When the butter reaches the ideal consistency, it's ready to be shaped. The kneaded butter is placed into this machine, called the pusher.

The pusher squeezes the butter through a cylinder and onto a table, where it's sliced with a guitar string cutter nicknamed Marie Antoinette. The cut butter is shaped with titanium paddles by a team that works up to 5 tons of butter a day. Bordier makes around 13 different butter recipes throughout the year. Some of the most popular flavors Bordier makes are seaweed butter, smoked salt butter, vanilla butter, and espelette pepper butter, but through the form, each of these butters can be slightly adapted depending on the request. Maison Bordier has also been busy creating new recipes, like this packed with infused butter. Behind this passion is the previous owner, Jean-Yves, who retired a few years ago. And while he may no longer work in the shop, his philosophy for making a top-tier product remains a powerful tenet. It's a team effort, and it's true that when I got to work with Jean-Yves Gordier, I was 22 years old, and I spent more time with him than with my own family. So we have relationships already at that time, as we can say, where it's family, where we can take advice from a father, an uncle, a trainer, a teacher.

And at the end of the day, it's the pleasure that customers get buying the batter that motivates Bordier to continue. Our next stop is Spain, which produces the world's costliest ham. Black Iberian pigs descend from wild boars and have been considered a delicacy since long before our times. In the year 77, Roman writer Pliny the Elder praised their superior quality.

In 1493, when he sailed across the Atlantic for the second time, Christopher Columbus had Iberian pigs aboard his caravel. The most expensive of them all sells for €4,100, which is over $4,500. But despite the high price, this ham remains a local favorite. Black Iberian pigs can be found in the southern and western regions of the Iberian Peninsula, which comprises Spain and Portugal.

In Spain, Iberian ham production is confined to the provinces of Salamanca, Huelva, Córdoba, Cáceres and Badajoz. Portugal also produces it under the name Presunto Ibérico. Spanish Iberian ham is protected by the EU's Protected Destination of Origin. The five Spanish provinces where it is produced are split into four different protected destinations of origin.

Out of the total production of Iberian ham, only 6% comes with a black label, indicating it's the 100% Iberian pure breed. Iberian pigs are raised in an ecosystem known as the Dehesa. The pigs live in the wild, roaming freely in the Dehesa.

Per regulations, there shouldn't be more than two pigs per hectare of grassland. The Dehesa is rich in olives, nuts, and berries, but especially in acorns, called bellotas in Spanish, which are rich in nutrients and fatty acids. Basically, a superfood for pigs. The Iberian pig comes directly from the wild boar. So they are pigs that have a lot more muscle mass and less fat. When released, all that fat is inside the muscle and it doesn't stay on the outside of the meat. So after learning all about the black Iberian pig and why it's such a special pig and different from any other breed, we are at a local company here in Cortegana, Lazo, to find out about the making process of the hamster. Ham comes from the rear leg of the pig. Most companies will also cure the front leg, called paleta, and use the rest of the meat for other products, like chorizo. Lazlo stores over 150,000 legs in its cellars.

Some of the hams made here come from an even-rated breed of the Iberian pig, the Manchado de Jabugo, which has black patches on its skin and can only be found in the Sierra de Huelva. The pigs are killed when they're 15 months old. The hams and paletas are then buried in salt for 15 to 20 days, depending on weight. That's what makes the meat dry and keep it in its preservation, so that the meat doesn't rot. After salting, the process starts to gradually slow down. The legs spend about two months in a temperature-controlled room.

Then they're moved to an airy room for six to nine months, where in a natural way, in the Sierra de Huelva, with temperatures and climatological conditions different from other places, naturally, the ham sweats, the fat melts, and makes it absorb the aromas, the bouquets, the airs of the sierra. That, transformed later, goes all the way to the mackerel, which is the meat. The meat has an ointment, it has characteristics, characteristics completely different from other species, from other nutrition, from other food. The final stage of curing, and also the longest, is the one in cellars. On average, an Iberian ham needs a couple of years to reach its peak flavor, but some legs can cure for much longer. They are more or less in time depending on their weight, but two years, three years, four years pass here.

To get a better understanding of how Iberian ham is labelled on the market, we visited Productos de la Sierra, a shop in Seville that sources local products from Andalusia, and not farted their 250km. For Iberian ham, there are four types of quality, which are represented by four colors. The highest quality is the black color, which is 100% Iberian ham, made of acorn. This means that the mother and the father of the pig have been 100% Iberian acorn, and they have been raised in freedom, fed with acorn. Then, the next quality is the red color, which means that the mother is 100% Iberian, but the father is Druk, which is another breed of pig. Pigs that have been raised in freedom, but have not been fed with acorn, are the green pig, the green ham, which is the field pig.

And then there is another quality standard, which is the lowest, which comes from intensive livestock, which is the white ham. How do we know if it's a good ham? needs to be, you know, and the fat needs to melt with a little bit of temperature, so it's a good one. As with its origin and environment, Iberian Ham is carved using a specific technique which can take a lot of time to learn. The Iberian ham is cut with a long, short and very flexible knife. It is very important to always cut in the direction of the muscle so that the taste of the fat and the meat always remains in the same direction. What are the challenges of this process? Unknown Speaker 0, the maximum number of slices every time you cut a ham and there is also the possibility of making beautiful designs with the fat and the different slices. So this one is our Home Run Iberico.

This one is 100% Iberico, which is the highest grade. It's cut in, like, such a divine shape. I've never seen a ham cut like this. You know, you're used to those, like, very long, just a bit sad slices. This one looks, like, kind of royal.

And the room smells so nice. Smells so nice. And actually, before I try it, I just want to point out how shiny it's this fat. So good. So good. I have no words. My voice is gone.

It's so good. It's not salty. Like, that's the thing that astonishes me every time that I have, like, good quality ham or meat in general, that it doesn't taste like salt, even though it's the main stage of the production, of course. It's just nice and flavorful. Tastes nutty. Like, you can taste the corn in here. It really traces back to the actual pig that made this. It's really nice.

And especially the fat, you should keep it. It's very nice and greasy. Adds a bit more of a buttery texture, and the marbling as well, because these pigs are smaller than the usual pigs we're used to, and there is more muscles in their legs rather than fat. It's very, very tender, and it really has a different flavor compared to other hams. In Switzerland, we see how they produce authentic Swiss cheese. One of the five most eaten cheeses in the U.S. I'm actually in the village of Affolten in Emmental, which is in a region just east of Bern.

80% of all Emmentaler production comes from this. And its name comes from here. There's the nearby river Eme and Tal, meaning valley in German.

In the U.S., it's known as Swiss cheese. Emmentaler has iconic holes in it, and it's also the world's largest cheese. Emmentaler AOP can only be produced in these regions in Switzerland. It was granted AOP protection from the EU in 2002. Meaning that these areas are the protected designation of origin. But there are few qualifications.

The milk has to be from dairy farms no fewer than 20 kilometres away, and it must be produced using raw material. 17,700 tonnes of Emmentaler are produced each year in this region by 150 family dairies. Cheese production started in this area over 200 years ago. It's a hilly region, so good for cattle grazing. The Emmentaler Schaukäserei, Schöderi, was opened in 1989.

The process of cheese starts, at the farmer. So we need a high quality raw milk. Then we heat up the milk on 32 degrees. We put inside the bacteria, the rennet. We have to wait because the rennet make a relationship between the fat and protein. You are cutting the curds down to a size of four up to six millimeters. And then you're heating up another time to 53 degrees, pumping up to the forms and then you are pressing that for 12.

Cheese is pressed under hydraulic pressure for up to 12 hours. It then spends eight weeks in the warm fermentation cellar at 22 degrees Celsius. It then goes into a storage cellar for up to two months before it's collected by the wholesaler. This makes the famous sweet taste and smooth texture of... The world famous holes, they're created by a reaction in the bacteria. After one month of storage, a strain of bacteria, Propionibacterium schermini, consumes lactic acid and releases carbon dioxide. These bubbles become trapped in a cheese rind and form holes, also known as eyes. But why are the cheeses so large? The size of Anantara wheels is heavily regulated, as most have a diameter of 80 to 100 centimetres.

They need to be a minimum of 75 kilograms. The cheese produced here, a kilogram costs 19 Swiss francs, for $19. So one wheel could cost over $1,900. We have to pay taxes also in Switzerland and 200 years ago they have the regulmentation that you have to pay taxes on a piece and not on kilogram so they make a big cheese wheel and they have to pay only once the taxes and still 200 years we producing this minimum 75 kilogram wheels. The cheese has matured into a four-month classic, eight-month reserve. 12 Months AOP Expo, and the 24-month Loire D'Hermitage.

The taste of the Emmentaler AOP is unique, I mean compared to copies, I mean it's comparing if you take a red wine and a good red wine. And we visited the Shao Kayserai restaurant to try the cheese. And we go for the classic, four month age, what you can see is the springy kind of rubbery texture to it. Let's give this a try.

It's so much more flavoursome than other Emmentaler that I've had. It has a really full flavour to it because it's made with raw milk, not pasturised milk that you might get in the States. It's just a very, very kind of full, rich, milky flavour that's very tasty. But how does this differ to the 12-month...

It's a lot less kind of springy and bouncy to the touch, but that rich, nutty flavour is really starting to come through. This room downstairs when we went in here in the dairy, was the room that the minute you walk in, there's this beautiful nutty aroma that hits you, and that is exactly what you can get in the cheese now. It's gone from sort of like a fruity, mild cheese to something which has this texture to it and it's very nutty, to be an authentic Emmentaler. It needs to have the Emmentaler logo and a bespoke cheese number. On the rind, we put our brand on top before we press the cheese and this is something like a tea bag, and this is growing directly into the rain. So if you are cutting the cheese wheel into pieces on each rind, you should find a part of this Emmentaler Switzerland logo, and you find also a little number on it.

And with this number, our customers can go on our website, mntoler.ch, and give this number insight and Google Maps shows you where this product was produced and which dairy. And the dairies need to have this protection. Emmentaler is the world's most coffeed cheese.

So 95% of that, what is said as a Swiss cheese or a cheese with holes called Emmentaler, are fake Emmentaler. So the Emmentaler Switzerland, the brand is protected by the AOP label. And we have also a bacteria inside our cheese. We are the only brand, cheese brand, who are using this one. So we can not only look on the package, if it's an original Emmentaler AOP, we can also analyze this product. And so these are our activities.

And the brand itself, we have people who are working only for searching the region between the copies. So it's a big work behind here. Ramirez hauls in its catch from private fishermen in the bustling Matoginhos Harbor. But with warming ocean temperatures, sardine populations have dropped by more than 80%. It got so bad that in 2004, regulators banned fishing during the spring spawning season. In the years that followed, the government shortened the entire fishing season to just six months.

And set a fishing quota. Last year, fishermen caught only 30,000 tons. Compare that to the 1980s, when they hauled in over 100,000 tons a year. It's caused recent sardine prices to double. During the season, the fish arrive fresh at the factory and go directly to get cleaned. We know that the good quality of sardine, for example, is in the summertime. And during this time, we intensify the activity to do as much as possible.

But to keep producing year-round when fishing's banned, Ramirez introduced this freezing system in 2015. First, the fish go into a brine for 30 minutes, and then into the freezer, held at about 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Fatema's in charge of quality control and food safety. If we only had sardines, we would have about 200,000 tons of sardines. They'll remain in the freezer for up to six months, but Fátima says it doesn't affect the fish much, because sardines are naturally so fatty. At 4 p.m., workers pull the fish out of the freezer, so they can defrost overnight. Around 7 a.m., the first people to arrive remove the pallets from the sardines.

From here on out, the defrosted fish go through the same machines as the fresh ones. It removes the head and cuts off the tail. This used to all be done by hand, but this machine has tripled the speed of guts removal. But some of the products, like the fillets, are too delicate for the machines. Workers on these specialty lines still hand-cut them using century-old techniques. Once packed, they add on a lid and group them into batches. They get cooked for 30 minutes, first in hot steam and then dry heat.

Once done, the workers add in other natural ingredients, like spicy sauce, peppers or carrots. Next, the cans get weighed. Then this machine splashes in a bit of either water, tomato sauce or olive oil. The cans drop into baskets in this pool of recycled rainwater.

Workers then push the cans into this sterilizing machine to kill off any bacteria on the outside. That's where the longevity of the conserve comes from. And in 1853, Manuel's great-great-grandfather opened the world's first fish cannery in Villa Real de Santo Antonio.

By the 1920s, there were hundreds of competing factories along the coast, and during World War II, there was room for all of them. Portugal was neutral, so it exported cans to both sides. Some cans were found at the bunker of Hitler. Some of them were Portuguese and were from our company. And in 1940, the founder's grandson opened up a new factory, where it is now, in Montesinhos. By then, the sardine had become a cultural icon. But after World War II, the industry started declining. We had a revolution in 1974.

Lots of companies had no freezing area. They had tough times, of course, so no frozen facilities. Climate change and overfishing were also big contributors to the decline.

By 2013, there were only 20 canneries left. So how did Ramirez stay afloat? First, because of its loyal staff, spanning generations. Ramirez runs an on-site daycare, and many of its current employees graduated from it. The second reason?

The original cans opened with a key and were often made of tin, which rusted more easily. So Manuel's grandfather switched to aluminum cans in the 70s. We developed, together with our can supplier, an easy, open way of opening a can of sardines or tuna. Along with the freezing system, fish cutting and seaming machines, Ramirez also added this finishing line. First, we put inkjet, then we load, validate and identify the producer. Then we go through a X-ray machine to see if there are strange bodies.

Quality Lab pulls nearly 100 sample cans throughout the day. They test for pH levels and check that seaming and sterilization were done right. There are many more machines, new robotic lines, and I have more space to work too.

All these machines have tripled the company's production speed, from 100,000 cans every day in 2015 to 300,000 cans per day now. Finally, to stay competitive when sardine populations dropped, Ramirez added new products. Tuna salad, mackerel, salmon and codfish. So this difficulty became an opportunity to do other very interesting products. Today, the company sells 70 different products and has introduced an online shopping platform. We export almost to 50 countries, spread all over the world. Sardine populations could fall again, Manuel doesn't seem worried. You have been here for almost two centuries, so I think we will overcome.

These are sugar maple trees, and the Maple Guild has 460,000 of them spanning across the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont and into Canada. Starting in December each year, crews spend two months putting plastic taps into each one of these trees by hand, same tree can be tapped for decades. Next year we reuse everything and we tap 8 inches high or low and 8 inches over so that we never harm the tree. It always allows it to heal.

The sugaring season usually runs from February to April, but that's completely dependent on the weather forecast. Obviously, when the weather cooperates, and when Mother Nature gives us sap to pull, and that's when the temperature is above freezing during the day and below freezing at night, that's when the sap... When the sap is running, it's extracted either through vacuum tubing or gravity. 6,000 miles of plastic tubing carry the sap from the trees to pump stations. These are called reverse osmosis housing.

This is where the sap is collected and the water in the sap is filtered out, feeding a high sugar content concentrate. Sap has 2% sugar, concentrate has 20% sugar. So what we're doing in the reverse osmosis process is we're pulling water out of the sap and concentrating the maple syrup into another solution. Because so much water is removed during this process, it takes about 44 gallons of sap to make just one gallon of maple syrup.

That sugar concentrate is loaded up into trucks and brought to the sugar house, where it's finally turned into maple syrup. In traditional sugaring techniques, turning sap into syrup means boiling it over direct heat, so the water evaporates, but the Maple Guild pioneered a new method that speeds up the process. It's called STEAMcraft.

Instead of boiling the sap, it's steam heated at a lower temperature using coils. With this system, the Maple Guild can make 55 gallons of maple syrup in just 90 seconds. Well, in traditional boiling technique, it can take anywhere between 9 and 56 hours to produce just one gallon of syrup.

Not only is the steam crafting method quicker, but the company says it also produces a more nuanced maple flavor. Because sap can go bad quickly, it has to be transported to the sugar house within three hours of being tapped, and usually within six hours, it will become that golden maple syrup. When the sap is running, it can run for a day, it can run for a week, and then it can stop for two days, or three weeks.

And it's really whatever the weather gives us. But whenever that sap is running, we will have people at this plant 18-24 hours a day, non stop while that sap is running, because we can't afford to lose any, Once the sap's turned into syrup, it's tested to make sure the sugar levels are right. Next, it's sent through filters to remove impurities, and it's tested for grading. The lighter the color of syrup, the higher the grade. Because the Maple Guild syrup has a short cooking time, it's lighter in color, giving it a consistent grade A golden rating. The golden syrup is then pumped into stainless steel barrels, where it's stored until it's time to be bottled up. Each bottle is filled, capped, cleaned and labeled by hand here. The company expects to fill over a million bottles this year.

The Maple Guild is vertically integrated, meaning it owns every step of this process, from tree to table. The maple industry has been stagnant for decades upon decades upon decades. It's all small farmers doing their own thing on their own property, selling to the big agglomerated, and those guys making syrup, mostly mostly private labels, unbranded and selling it out to the industry until we came. And we're a vertically integrated, we own the trees right through the manufacturing, very capital intensive, which is probably the barriers to entry for anybody else. In the last five years, the maple syrup industry has undergone somewhat of a revolution, and at the forefront are companies like the Maple Guild. Canada has historically dominated this market, producing 70% of the world's maple syrup. And while it still owns the top spot, the U.S. is gaining ground.

United States production has doubled in the last decade, rising from 1.9 million gallons produced in 2008 to 4.16 million in 2018, and leading the charge is Vermont, dubbed the maple syrup capital of the U.S. The tiny state produces 40 percent of the maple syrup in the entire United States. In fact, Vermont's production has grown 254% since 2000. So the market was set for a large-scale production, but no one in the Vermont maple industry had taken on the unconventional sugaring model. Until the maple, It entered the scene as demand was taking off. Breweries across the state had started using maple syrup in their products. Overseas interest in pure maple syrup had spiked, and Americans on a health food kick were turning to maple syrup as a natural alternative to refined sugar. And the Maple Guild is still riding that wave, selling branded products across 50 states and infusing its syrups with flavors like coffee, pumpkin spice, and bourbon. Which is where it came from. Tastes like sugar. I'm in.

And while it all depends on what Mother Nature gives them, the Maple Guild does have an annual production goal. Our goals are 150,000 to 200,000 gallons of maple syrup, we'd be okay. The company's not only bottling it up as syrup, but using it in about 17 other maple-based products. First, there's the maple butter. Maple syrup is cooked down and then poured into this mixer until it becomes a luscious cream. That stuff is cooked and jarred by hand, and then hits the assembly line to be capped and labeled. This is what I've been waiting for this whole time.

I think. I think. That's so good. There's also naturally fermented maple vinegar, eight different maple sweetened teas, and seven unique maple sweetened waters. The Maple Guild hopes that by introducing maple into as many categories as possible, it can show the versatility of the product and bring attention to where the golden syrup comes from, here in a Vermont forest. Next we head to New Zealand, home to one of the world's priciest honeys. Manuka honey is known for being earthier, richer and more viscous than many other honeys. It comes from the nectar of the flower Leptospermum scoparium, also known as manuka, which is only native to New Zealand. And manuka, in fact, is a Maori word.

The fact that it comes from New Zealand, that gives it a premium, just to start with, because the bee travels up to about six kilometres to collect this honey. And so this honey is representative of the environment, and that environment is of New Zealand, Aotearoa. The plant itself in the honey is very, very rare. Out of all the honeys in the world, it probably represents 1% of all the world honeys. It's difficult to harvest. It's only a two to six week harvesting period, and the flower is only open for 12 days. And in New Zealand we have wind and we have rain and all the rest of it.

So there's a lot of luck involved in getting the bee, or a lot of effort from the beekeeper. And for some years there are no, there's no honey production for some beekeepers, and we have to go to the big extent also of using helicopters to collect this honey. Although manuka bushes can also be found in Australia, New Zealand accounts for almost all of the world's production, with exports worth $204 million and expected to quadruple to $800 million by 2028. New Zealand honey is protected by a quality standard that safeguards manuka's special properties. This honey is an expensive honey, and anything that is expensive, people will try and copy. People will try and mimic, or people will try and cheat.

So a lot of the cost here isn't actually in the protection of it, or the research, so we know it's unique, we know it's from New Zealand. We can identify it. We've put labs around the world to be able to do this identification. The New Zealand government has set up a standard to say what is manuka honey. So how does the grading system work, and what exactly are you looking for in manuka honey? We spoke to Dr Adrian Charlton from Vera Science, a lab in the north of England where manuka honey is tested to identify its unique compounds. As standard we will test for three compounds, dihydroxyacetone, which is known as DHA, methyl glyoxyl, known as MGO, and hydroxymethyl fluorophorel, HMF. These are the basic tests that we will undertake to make sure that manuka honey contains the antimicrobial characteristics that the consumer would expect. We can detect them, but we can also measure the concentration of them, and that's done using UV light to detect a particular wavelength in individual compounds.

Each compound has a slightly different wavelength. But because of the issues in the past with potential fraud, there's a suite of other tests including tests for compounds such as leptospirin, which is a marker that's unique to the nectar of leptospirin and scoparium. We can trace then the honey back to its botanical origin, the plant that it came from. When you pick up a jar of Manuka honey, the markers can be confusing. So how do you know that it's the real deal? So in some cases they're labelling for the concentration of a compound, so MgO 300 would indicate 300 mg of methylglyoxal in that particular pot of honey per kilogram. NdA, which is non-peroxide activity, that's related to the methylglyoxal concentration, but it's a more direct measure of the antimicrobial activity of the honey.

Other marks, such as UMF, a quality mark, that if you can see a particular stamp on a product that it's been tested and assured to a certain standard, so that's different to actually labelling it for the concentration of a particular compound. Another factor that's driving up the price is the use of Manuka honey in health and beauty products. Its antibacterial and anti-inflammatory properties are said to soothe and nourish the skin. And it's also said to help with blemishes and acne, but is that really the case? There have been a number of studies that have tried to determine the health benefits of Manuka honey and they have had some very positive results and certainly in terms of antimicrobial activity we can show that Manuka honey has antimicrobial activity in the laboratory. Those clinical trials over a long period of time have not been undertaken as of yet but there are lots of reports that indicate that Manuka honey has benefits but as yet unproven.

So the jury's still out on Manuka's medicinal properties, but that hasn't stopped its popularity, and Manuka honey is serious business. The prices and demand for the honey is so high that the New Zealand police have received hundreds of reports of beehives or honey being stolen, and even reports of bees being poisoned. So if you do manage to get your hands on the jar, does it actually taste different from normal honey? Oh my god.

That is delicious. The flavour's really strong. It's very, like, very thick compared to normal honey. It's got a kind of chestnut-y flavour. It's not as sweet as usual honey. It's really smooth.

And the taste is pretty similar to what I'm used to. The texture is really interesting. It's very, very thick, almost like creamy. Is Manuka honey really worth a hundred times more than other honey? That's for you to judge.

But what's for certain is that no other honey in the world is so rare and unique that it needs to pass by a lab before being sold. Oda is the oldest tofu factory in America. And at this shop, they're splicing up 3,000 pounds of it a day. And that's Jason, a former pro baseball player who took over Oda three years ago.

Jason learned how to hand mold tofu the traditional Japanese way from the original owners. It is very cheap to just buy a machine and just push buttons and out comes a block of tofu. But to actually handcraft it, it is definitely a lost art. But because of a growing tofu industry and a spike in soybean prices, Jason is juggling tradition with demand. I put in 11 and 12 hour days, you know, six days a week.

So does my mom. We visited the Portland factory to see how Jason's turning buckets of beans into this. Welcome to Oda Tofu. I get here at 230 in the morning, Monday through Saturday, make tofu and start the day.

The night before, workers pull out giant bags of soybeans sourced from Iowa. And they're dried soybeans, so they are very hard. You can hardly break it with a hammer.

When we soak them the night before, then they become really soft. It takes 10 hours of soaking. Depending on the temperature of the outside, we tend to soak them longer if it's colder, or shorter if it's hotter. We want that pure white in the soybeans. Yeah, these are still pretty good.

Cooks transfer the soft soybeans to one of two grinders. We grind the soybeans, make a, really a slush. Then we put it into our cookers, which cook to about 100 degrees Celsius.

Then the mixture flows through a giant pipe into a filtering bag in the pressing machine. This machine squeezes out the soy milk. The milk comes out the other end and drops into another filter. So we double filter it to get as pure of soy milk as we can. Okay, this is hot.

What's left is a by-product called okara, basically the leftover bits from the beans like the shells. So this nylon that catches the rest of the okada, people will use it in like baking recipes and stuff like that. But also we give it to farmers to feed their cows and pigs. Some of the soy milk gets bottled by hand. It's sold across Portland, but the rest gets turned into tofu. Our tofu is made out of three ingredients. Soybeans, water, and coagulant. The mixture first gets a splash of coagulant.

So we use our nigari, traditional Japanese coagulant. We can adjust the amount of coagulant that we use to make the firmness that we want. I will actually make a firm, so I'm going to add some more coagulant because it could be separated from the curds in the water a little bit more. It's kind of like making cheese, right? Like in cheese, the coagulant separates the whey, or liquid, from the proteins, which clump up into curds. That takes about 15 minutes.

So this is what it looks like after it's curded. So these curds are actually nice and like fluffy and soft. That scrambled egg looking mixture is spooned into molds. Jason hand shapes it using a cheesecloth. And now we just got to press them into the firmness that we want. It's pretty soft, almost like a waterbed.

We make medium, firm and extra firm. It depends on how much water we squeeze out. The curds on the firm and the extra firm are finer and harder. So it's easier to get water out. The medium is nice and soft.

A hydraulic press then helps squeeze out the water. After it's pressed, Jason carefully flips the tofu into a giant bath. He slices it along the lines from the molds. Tofu headed to restaurants is placed in buckets. Some of it gets fried into what's called age.

So he is a master at chopsticks. Yeah, that is not easy to do with the flimsy tofu. Blocks bound for stores get fished from the water and put in boxes. From soaked soybeans to the final product, probably about an hour. Everything else is really controlled by hand.

Although tofu originates from China, using nigari to coagulate is uniquely Japanese. Oda's recipe and hand molding techniques come from Japan, and date back to the founding of the company. So Oda Tofu started in 1911. Saizo Oda immigrated to Portland from Okayama, Japan.

Shortly after, Saizo and his wife, Sheena, opened a tofu shop using the same three ingredients Jason uses. Back then, Oda was one of many tofu factories serving the Japanese and Chinese American communities in East Portland. But then Pearl Harbor happened, and 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps. Sheena and Saizo were sent to a camp in Idaho.

There, Saizo died a year after arriving. In the three years of internment, all Japanese owned tofu shops were closed. Many were seized, looted or sold off. But the Oda's landlord honored their lease. And when Sheena returned to Portland alone in 1945, the shop and all its equipment was waiting for her.

That they came back and wanted to start the company again shows testament to the Oda family for wanting to do that. And then also the customers that wanted to buy the tofu and really kept the business alive. Jason bought the business from Sheena's grandson, Ko, and his wife, Eileen, in 2019.

Because I heard that they were closing and I thought it would be such a shame that a business like this would close their doors, especially with all their history. Co-OTA and Eileen OTA really taught me everything there is to know about making tofu. This is their equipment. I inherited all of this.

Jason's continued the handmade OTA tradition. There's a reason why people or businesses don't make tofu the way that we do right now. Long hours, hard work.

Everything that has to do with tofu, I am involved with the whole entire process. You are the tofu genius, Jason. Yeah, I feel like I am the tofu master now. Because Jason's production process is slower, it's hard to compete with big factories, mass manufacturing tofu. All they have to do is push a button and out comes tofu. From the soaked beans, to packaging, to pressing, everything is very automated. It is very different than our process.

Really, I mean, that's what we're competing against because they're low cost. And the competition is getting harder as soybean prices soar. China is usually one of America's biggest soybean buyers. But in 2019, tariffs on soybeans cornered China out of the market. It helped prices for our soybeans go down because the demand wasn't there. But when tariffs were dropped in 2021, China re-entered the market, scooping up soybeans and causing prices to skyrocket.

Soybean prices haven't been this high in seven years. Soybean prices have gone up drastically, 40% in the past couple months. So I've had to increase pricing. And I think every tofu manufacturer had to increase pricing that you just can't eat that much of the cost. But Jason's customers don't seem bothered.

We don't mind to spend more because we want high quality food. We do business with them 20 years and the customers love it. We can never change to other brands.

To keep up with competition and supply costs, Jason has made small changes. First, he redesigned the package. Then he bought that packaging machine. He also launched Ota on social media, and his strategy has worked.

Attracting new young restaurant owners like chef Ty. He's gotten a lot of buzz for his sandos made with Oda tofu. I'm from Japan.

When I had their tofu, I feel like I was in Japan. So I'm gonna make miso tofu katsu, which is vegan. They're catchy for Instagram, you know, people love it.

Jason now sells Oda tofu and soy milk in over 150 restaurants around Portland. We are making about 80% more. And tofu is expected to keep getting more popular. In 2020, the global market was worth $746 million. And it's projected to grow by more than 5% in the next six years. Nutritionists say that's because it's rich in protein, amino acids and nutrients. People are I think starting to be aware of that. Jason thinks he has two options to face growing demand, moving to a bigger space or opening up factories in other cities. But his biggest goal?

Making sure tradition isn't sacrificed for innovation. In Miyazaki, Japan, we learn where farmers grow, harvest and auction the world's most expensive mangoes. Mangos farmed in Miyazaki are from the Erwin mango variety, a type often referred to as apple mango, as it turns red when ripe. Irwin mangoes are actually pretty common and are also grown in other parts of the world and sold at much lower prices. This is because the exclusivity of Tayo No Tamago is not tied to which type of mango it is, but rather to the care it receives. In order to generate buzz at the auctions.

A mango needs bees. To increase their odds of success, farmers like Takuya usually rent bees during the flowering season. These are flowering mango plants. These play a crucial role in the pollination of the plants, as without them, mangoes would not grow as big as desired. It depends on the number of bees, but if there are a lot of bees, there will be about 200 bees in one hive.

[inaudible] That's why as a mango farmer, you shouldn't make this. [inaudible] If a plant keeps flowering as the farmer wants, it can survive as long as 35 years. Takuya's plants are 20 years old. However, even if bees do pollinate the plants, it doesn't necessarily mean that all mangoes will qualify as Tayo no Tamazo this season. Only those that are in good shape, visibly contain pits, and are in good position will be given a chance. To successfully grow one, everything in the greenhouse needs to run smoothly. Temperature must be constant.

The room ventilated, the air dehumidified, and the mangoes protected from gravity. When everything else is in place, Takuya's priority becomes the sunshine. [inaudible] If a mango slumps into the shade, Takuya will tie it with a string to bring it back up. And to make sure that sunlight touches every part of the fruit equally, he develops these light reflectors out of milk cartons. The purple part of the fruit becomes red when it ripens, but if there is a lot of green, it will turn yellow when it ripens, so we put a reflector on it to make everything red as much as possible. I don't think there are any people who use a tub pack right now.

It's hard, so it's pretty horizontal. I used to recommend a softer paper, but that's like this. [inaudible] Regardless of how much it's worth, Takuya treats every mango with respect. In return, every mango repays him with a unique flavor. Amami to Sanmi. [inaudible] Pretty.

Takuya has been growing mangoes for 16 years, a craft he learned from his father. This year, he grew 9,500 mangoes in his greenhouse. They're now ready to be inspected to see how many of them have earned the coveted Tayo no Tamago title. The first inspection is done by human eye.

Inspectors closely analyze each mango's appearance to ensure they are red all throughout, with no hints of green at the bottom. Then, a machine sorts them according to sugar content, weight, and size. These inspections sort the mangoes into five grades, two of which are Tayo no Tamago. [inaudible] The mangoes will now make their way to Miyazaki Central Wholesale Market for the auction. All the care and hard work that Takuya and other farmers in the prefecture put into their fruit are leading up to this very moment. The hope is to match or exceed the previous figure of 500,000 yen. The auction has officially begun at the Miyazaki Central Wholesale Market.

This year's 500,000 Yen is 300,000 Yen higher than last year and matches the 2019 record. And the farmer who grew these mangoes is Takuya. It's the third year in a row his mangoes fetched the highest price at the auction. They have been bought by a department store in Fukuoka. Today's outcome was a successful one for Takuya.

But even in a country with a strong gift-giving culture like Japan, it's not always guaranteed that such a luxury fruit will find a buyer at auction. After flowering, fruiting, harvesting, and auctioning, Takuya's mango plants are ready for a new season. And the hard work isn't over yet. [inaudible] If I don't like it, I'll keep doing it. I wanted to make something better than others. I think that's a good thing.

Japan is also where an exclusive number of soy sauce makers still produce the famous seasoning the authentic way. What makes the soy sauce special is the wooden barrel, called Kiyoke. One can last for over a century.

Yasuo makes bamboo strips to wrap around the barrel, because the saltiness of the soy sauce can corrode metal. It takes at least three people to assemble one barrel, but not many do this anymore. After modern machinery took over the market, almost all Kyokei makers in Japan went out of business.

So Yasuo learned to make his own. [inaudible] Before these barrels are put to use, crushed wheat and steamed soybeans are mixed with koji, the fungus that will kick-start the fermentation process. This giant vat regulates temperature so the fungus can grow.

After two days, the mixture goes to the Maromi house. This is where the wooden barrels help create the breeding ground for the bacteria. Over one ton of the soybean mixture fills each barrel, along with salt water, while Yasuo and his team stir. The soybeans bump up against each other and create tiny tears so that other bacteria can get in and start to break them down. The workers pump air into the barrel to make the aerobic yeast more active. Even though Yasuo says the microbes do most of the work, His part of the job is still demanded. I am, Unknown Speaker 05.

I hand out the [inaudible] He checks on the soybeans every day to see if they need mixing. And based on their scent and appearance, he can tell where they are in the process. In my experience, the first thing that comes to mind is the smell of apples.

The soybeans will ferment here for at least a year and a half. Yeshua was 87 barrels in different phases. He believes a good barrel is one that will outlive, I've been in this orchard for about 150 years. These types of barrels have been in production in Japan since at least the 17th century. But everything changed during World War II, when materials became more scarce and expensive in Japan. The government knew its people couldn't live without their staple seasoning. So they ordered factories to make production cheaper and faster, cutting the process from years to months. So while many brewers expanded and modernized, small businesses like Yasuo's families could barely keep up. We can't afford to buy a tank or invest in a modernized factory.

Yesuo stepped in in 2003, just before his father suddenly became sick and had to retire. So we had to take over and pull a struggling business out of debt. He also had to teach himself a lot of the process. Like, how do you use the press?

After a year and a half of fermentation, Yusuko pipes the soybean mixture into this machine. He layers on a piece of traditional wrapping cloth. Then, the machine slowly squeezes out the soy sauce over 10 days. [inaudible] Some industrial factories press it all at once. But Yasuo says getting a quality product is all about patience. After this stage, some of the soy sauce goes back into the barrel with more soybeans and wheat for two more years to make Yesuo's main product, saish gomi, a darker, stronger tasting soy sauce. When the microbes have enough time to naturally ferment the soybeans, it gives the soy sauce a sweeter aftertaste. Some industrial brands mimic this by adding sweetener. In the case of our soy sauce, there is nothing in it, but at first there is a little bit of saltiness, but after a while the saltiness disappears and it becomes sweet.

That balanced umami flavor is what chefs like Itoshi Kishimoto are after. He's been running his restaurant, Koyomi, in Hiroshima for five years. For almost every dish, he cooks with naturally fermented soy sauce, including Yasuo's brand. The passion at that time is probably reflected in the taste.

This time, we're going to use five different kinds of soy sauce to get the right balance. [inaudible] 日本人にとって醤油というのが、とても身近で親しみやすい、昔からのなじみの味だということがなくなってもらっては困るのだし, In order for traditional soy sauce to continue, barrel production needs to keep up. That's why USUO holds barrel making workshops every year. He sells his authentic soy sauce to people all over the world. A bottle goes for $35 on Amazon, around triple the price of a commercial alternative.

For Yasuo, passing down the legacy of barrel-aged soy sauce is part of his life's mission. Kono kura to oke to kono kin no seitai kei to, I am the one who will hand over my son to the next generation. When I visited the graves of my great-grandchildren and great-grandchildren, I asked them what that old man was talking about. He said he was going to build a grave. We can build a grave, and we can also build a grave.

This is the silo of the Ito ranch. It is a 40-month-old silo. Hiroki Ito is a third-generation Matsusakawagi farmer. On his farm in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, you will find only virgin female cows. It's the primary requirement for any of the 80 Matsusakawagi farms here in the Mie Prefecture. Matsusaka beef has long been praised for its extremely low melting point, which is half that of other types of Wagyu. This means that when cooking, the fat melts in a shorter time.

To reach this intense marbling, old generations of farmers like Hideo, Hidoki's dad, used to feed cows with beer. Although there's no evidence that this practice increases a cow's appetite, many associate Matsusaka Wagyu with it. The fact that Matsusaka has kept a relatively low profile internationally has almost transformed this practice into a legend.

Hiroki doesn't practice this anymore. Instead, he has perfected the feed and is practicing, [inaudible] This is a mixture of fusuma, wheat, soybeans, and corn. The concentrated feed is used to feed the cattle. The concentrated feed is used to feed the cattle. The cost of feed is an important factor that drives the prices up.

To reach that soft marbling, Matsusaka cows need to eat a lot. They also need to eat for a much longer time than other cows. Matsusaka cows are raised for 30 to 32 months, six months longer than other Japanese black cattle. Everything adds up over time for Hiroki. The costs of feeding, temperature control, air circulation, and cleaning the enclosures regularly to avoid flies.

Farmers here call this raising period fattening. For the first three to four months, cattle eat grass to develop a strong digestive system. This is called the belly creation period.

Then comes the finishing period, where cattle gradually switch to concentrated feed and rice straw to fatten up. Hiroki is now experimenting with even longer periods of fattening, raising his cattle from 35 up to 40 months. But raising cows for such a long time can also be dangerous for Hiroki, as a cow could get sick and die. A cow at the end of its fattening period is a true treasure.

Every year Matsusaka cows get auctioned off and one gets crowned Queen of Matsusaka. While the highest ever price for one of these cows was 50 million yen in 2002, this auction has never really seen a low price, averaging around 20 million yen. Events like the auction have also fostered another legend, that farmers in Matsusaka massage their cows with alcohol. This time, it is not to improve their appetite, but their appearance. I only work with cattle that have passed the preliminary round. When it comes to winning cattle that are seen from the outside, I make sure to clean them up and take them out clean. But I do my farm as a clean-up job. Yes, if you do it like this, it will look like this.

I want to make it look flashy. It's not just adult cows that cost a lot, calves can be very expensive. Hiroki doesn't raise his cattle from birth. At 10 months old, calves are also sold at auctions throughout Japan. Hiroki spends almost half of his time at work buying calves, and he's very demanding. [inaudible] BMS-12 is the highest marbling grade for Wagyu in Japan. The more intense the marbling, the higher the price. For customers in Tokyo, 100 grams of sirloin costs 10,000 yen. But that's still much less than what Parisians are paying at Marriott Garnier, where the same cut is sold at 360 euros.

The most premium cut, tenderloin, sells for 5,000 euros per kilogram. The Paris restaurant was the first to successfully export Matsusaka Wagyu out of Japan and include it on its menu. Its most expensive tasting menu costs 520 euros.

Matsusaka Wagyu is heavily regulated. To include Matsusaka beef on the menu, the restaurant had to follow strict rules. The Paris restaurant needed to apply for a license, which took a year to be accredited.

To maintain it, the restaurant needs to have a high rating on Google Maps, and there can't be another restaurant serving Matsusaka Wagyu within an 840 metre radius. As of 2023, Hiroki has shipped only three cows to Mariacanea. Due to this limited supply, the €520 menu, with Ippo Ranch's premium tenderloin, is served to only one table per day. This exclusivity is set to get a little bit looser.

In the last 10 years, Japan has been a major importer of US beef, importing an average of $1.83 billion a year. Meanwhile, millions worth of Wagyu made the opposite journey as it reached international fame. A decline in tourism after the COVID-19 outbreak and a change in consumer behavior toward cheaper meats exacerbated this. And now, Japanese cattle farmers are looking outside the country's borders. The export quota for Matsusaka has jumped from 24 in 2022 to 700 in 2024.

Of those, it's the most premium cuts that are exported, going to high-end restaurants like Maria Kanea in Paris. This is pushing farmers who want to ship abroad to bet on those lucrative, but dangerous, long-battling periods. People across the Andes have been eating quinoa way before it hit the shelves at gourmet markets. Our grandparents have always taught us that we should eat this food first, because it is what will help us in the future, so that when we become grandparents, we won't get sick from health issues and all those things.

For centuries, Peruvians have ground the grain to make flour and ferment chicha, a popular drink. Quinoa was sacred to the Inca, who called it the mother grain. That's because it grew well under harsh conditions and flourished in areas where other crops struggled. Unknown Speaker, Unknown Speaker, The grain has adapted as weather patterns have changed in recent years, but growing it is still a struggle. Ignacio is one of around 68,000 quinoa producers in Peru. He's been out in the fields with his family since he was just 10 years old. The season to plant quinoa starts at the end of the summer. Workers gather early in the morning, and they pass around handfuls of coca leaves. Then they call to Pachamama, or Mother Earth, to help them get the job done quickly. Ignacio says the plant acts as a mild stimulant that gives them strength.

Good afternoon, and welcome to <unk> fourth quarter 2023 earnings Conference call. My name is Winnie Lang and I'm head of legal type of company joining us today, I mean, Mike I'm, sorry, co founder and head of flat and EMEA Jafari, our head of finance and administration, often reminding them you have to live in our prepared remarks, we'll open up the call for questions.

Moderated by our Investor Relations line, Brian any color.

You can find the supplemental slides on our Investor relations webpage at Investor topline Dotcom.

During the call, we'll refer to certain non-GAAP measures, which are reconciled to GAAP results in today's earnings release and in the appendix child supplemental flat non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for GAAP results.

Certain statements made during today's conference call regarding blend in its operations in particular its guidance for the first quarter of 2020 fall maybe considered forward looking statements under federal Securities laws.

The company cautions you that forward looking statements involve substantial risks and uncertainties and a number of factors many of which are beyond the company's control could cause actual results events or circumstances to differ materially from those described in these statements. Please see the risk factors with identified in our most recent 10-K 10-Qs and other SEC.

<unk> filings.

We're not undertaking any commitment to update these statements if conditions change except as required by law with that said I'll now turn the call over to Nemo.

Thank you Ed and Hello, everyone welcome to today's earnings call.

The past year was one our focus and execution for blend and the fourth quarter proved to be no exception, let me walk you through some of the highlights first.

To start with on the consumer banking side, we signed several major deals in Q4, including citizens Bank, a top 20 bank by retail customer base and.

And we had a solid slate of deployments to give us a high degree of visibility into our expected revenue growth for 2024.

At full rollout of all existing customers, including those signed but not yet deployed we expect our consumer banking suite to be approximately $50 million annual revenue run rate.

2023, it was an expansion here for US and 2024 has already started strong.

Our consumer banking business is well received by existing and net new customers driving growth with a robust pipeline of 70 opportunities.

On the mortgage side, we welcomed two new top 100 financial institutions by retail customer base to blend in Q4, we maintained our industry leading market share and we continued to see adoption of our value accretive add on products, expanding our economic value per funded loan and giving us even more leverage for revenue growth independent of the macro environment.

And on the cost side, we delivered significant efficiencies across our business, allowing us to report ahead of our guidance for non-GAAP net operating loss and keeping us on track for our profitability target in 2024.

Achieving this momentum despite 2023 being one of the worst years on record for mortgage industry origination volumes increases our confidence in our ability to navigate the year ahead as the market looks to stabilize.

And the Cherry on top we also signed to multi year eight figure deals in Q4, which validates the trend that our large stable customer base is continuing to expand their relationship with blend across multiple products.

More customers than ever treated as a critical software powering their enterprise and we're happy to see this continue into the new year.

Before I pass it onto Amir who will go into more detail on the financial results and 2024 guidance. Let me first dive deeper into the progress across these three focus areas.

Starting with our consumer banking business, we're seeing growing interest across our entire product suite.

This is starting to play out in a huge way for us.

At the end of 2023 with seven of the top 30 depository financial institutions by retail customer base.

Signed up for one or more of our core consumer banking products, excluding our traditional home equity product.

And I'm pleased to announce that in Q4, we signed yet another significant consumer banking deal and multiyear partnership with citizens Bank at current mortgage and home equity customer to help them deliver a more consistent frictionless application experience that our customers for their other consumer products.

Having one of the nations oldest and largest financial institutions choose blend as a key part of their digital lending strategy is a strong validation of our consumer banking capabilities and we are proud to partner with citizens to bring more value to their customers.

This adds to our already strong revenue base as I mentioned earlier at full rollout of our current signed customer base, we expect our consumer banking suite to be at approximately a $50 million annual revenue run rate.

Given that about half of this was signed in 2023, we have quite a number of active deployments.

While it takes time for these rollouts will be completed which has implications as to when we recognize revenue.

The market is starting to speak to the necessity of modern technology across all banking originations.

And just like in our Morgan suite, our early success, starting with the largest financial institutions matches. The playbook, we applied in the early is a blend with our mortgage products.

We started there and once we have proven the product could work at scale and for the most demanding institutions in the country. We took it to the rest of the market leading to our almost 20% market share in mortgage debt.

This is exactly how we approach the consumer suite for only just getting started and 2024 will be the first year, we cast a broader net and plan to serve customers have a variety of sizes.

And cash Metro Ethernet is already working our pipeline in consumer banking alone is 70 opportunities and we're only two months into the year.

We're very active in the market and expect 2024 to be another strong year in growth for our consumer banking business.

Moving on to mortgage let's start with the tough news eight.

8% interest rates in Q4 led to lower mortgage industry volumes and forecasters were expecting.

MBA was predicting $380 billion in volume in Q4 inside mortgage finance and Fannie Mae data leads us to believe the industry was closer to 300 to 330 billion in Q4.

Using an approximate loan size estimate this translate to somewhere between 825000 to 875000 units or approximately 15% to 20% below the forecast from the MDA.

Yeah.

We expect Q1 will be roughly similar unit volumes Q4 based on trends, we observed to date in the quarter.

Despite this we still achieved our platform guidance range, which you credit to the strength of our customers in this market and the growing unit economics were seeing even on lower loan volumes.

I've always said when the industry consolidates, our customers would benefit because they are more efficient compared to the rest of the market and we're seeing that in practice with many of our customers gaining market share and our overall share remaining very strong.

On top of that as I mentioned earlier, we signed two more of the top 100 financial institutions measured by retail customer base to our mortgage platform, including another top 10 credit Union.

We're seeing customers use this environment to setup, a scalable tech forward foundation for the future.

Already this year, we've seen a credit union sign away from a competitor and deploy our solution within 60 days to prepare for the future.

Adding to that we have approximately 30 other opportunities in our mortgage pipeline, including one of the largest financial institutions in the country.

Our key add ons like Glen close are also driving pipeline growth and improved unit economics and I'm encouraged that this trend will only continue in 2020 for some of our largest customers are currently in pilots to enable the defaulting of closings across their entire loan portfolio.

Digital closings have obvious benefits for consumer experience by shortening the timeline to close alone has meaningful financial benefits for our customers as well.

The growth and adoption of digital closings is helping grow our unit economics and setting the industry standard for a modern closing experience.

We're also feeling seeing tailwind on the adoption from state regulators as well with California proving out of state remote organizations as of January one this year.

These are encouraging trends that we believe will propel our Morgan suite economic value per funded loan even higher and a record $91. We saw in this quarter.

These advances highlight only some of the innovation we had in 2023.

We were early integrators of soft credit verification and deriving asset based income verification.

And also kicked off work on our Spanish language slow.

We also added early funnel features to help drive conversion as well as more features for loan officers to serve their customers better than ever.

On top of that was our announcement of blend co pilot regenerative AI products on our platform designed to turn every loan officer Angela Super loan Officer.

And all our customers expect us to drive innovation in this space in 2023 was no exception.

The combination of all these factors increased our confidence in the embedded leverage of our business to a recovery.

Not only do we have customers gaining share we're signing new customers and they are using more of our products.

There is of course, some churn in the tough environment as there's consolidation and some customers have gone to lower cost or free options to manage a low margin environment, but this is more than offset by the other vectors of our growth.

Lastly, as we prepare for a recovery we're investing ahead of it preparing our customers for scalability and what will likely be a very different market in 2025.

In particular, we are building a next generation refinance flow during a historically bad time for events volumes.

Hi.

The longer this high rate environment last the larger the backlog of customers, who will benefit by refinancing one rates ultimately come down.

To help support this we want to make sure our customers are set up to do this with their current teams without having to massively scale up resources when rates come down and streamlining timelines for consumers, who will desperately need the savings.

Achieving this is a monumentally complex task and one that our team and our platform are uniquely positioned to solve.

It involves combining existing customer data.

All of the verified third party data sources, we've worked on for over a decade to integrate with.

The ability to quote and approve alone in real time, and delivering an accurate actionable loan estimate so the consumer can lock in their improved mortgage rate and savings and prepare for their digital closing.

It's a culmination of every aspect of our software suite is a direct result of our focus on creating simple proactive and infant consumer experiences.

We believe this will mean, our customers can capture a greater share of refinances at a lower cost to them and to consumers during the recovery.

And for everyone and something that our customers can use to come out the other side stronger.

Switching gears lastly, I'd like to give an update on our final priority, which is to manage our business to non-GAAP profitability. This year.

This was a huge effort for the company in 2023 and I'm proud of the amount of progress we made.

We managed to reduce our operating expenses by over $90 million in 2023 and improved our net operating loss in every quarter of this past year.

We've taken out a significant amount of cost but to be clear we've done it in a way that strengthens a structurally and sets us up for more efficient growth.

That's where our blend builder platform becomes such a critical differentiator for us because of its built in functionality and configure ability. We believe we'll be able to innovate and scale at an order of magnitude faster and cheaper than before we had planned builder deployed.

And as the market eventually recovers we have significantly enhanced our operating leverage for each additional loan or consumer product that funds on our platform.

Continue to manage our expenses and revenue to ensure we will reach our target of non-GAAP operating profitability by the end of 2020 core regardless of the macroeconomic environment for this year and without sacrificing our commitment to innovation and supporting our customers.

Even if the fourth quarter of 2024 were to remain at historically low levels of origination from this past quarter our.

Our profitability target for this year would not change.

We're reassured that the continued growth in consumer banking, the improved economics in mortgage and continuing to drive efficiency give us sufficient insurance to achieve this goal regardless of the macro.

Overall, I'm encouraged by Q4 being another period of strong execution.

One we remained on track with our growth plans for our consumer banking business.

Two we've protected the most important parts of our mortgage business and are increasing the value we deliver to customers and three we're staying committed to achieving non-GAAP profitability. This year.

Now I'll pass it over to Amir who will go over our financial results in 2020 core outlook Amir over to you.

Thank you NEMA and good afternoon, everyone.

I'm pleased to be joining you today to discuss our financial results for the fourth quarter.

Our fourth quarter marks another period of strong execution.

I'm encouraged by the progress we made in 2023 and more importantly, the momentum we are building across the business.

We improved our operating loss in every quarter of 2023 were.

We are picking up pace as we move forward I'm encouraged by what's ahead for 2024.

Before I jump into the results. Let me just remind you that unless otherwise stated all results are non-GAAP.

Total company revenues in the fourth quarter were $36 1 million in line with our guidance range.

We reported platform revenue of $25 9 million, which also fell within our guidance range or.

Our mortgage suite revenue declined by 3% year over year to $17 2 million. Despite the origination environment declining approximately 20% to 25% over the same period by our own estimates.

Our mortgage suite economic value per funded loan rose by $10 over the same period last year, reaching $91. This puts US ahead of schedule on the targets. We shared with you at our Investor day with plenty of runway to expand this further as our value accretive solutions like Glen close are growing in adoption quickly.

Turning to consumer banking.

Our consumer banking suite revenue totaled $6 4 million in Q4, an increase of 15% as compared to the prior year period.

This growth reflects new deployments and ramp ups across our builder powered consumer suite of offerings over the past year.

As well as contribution from income rental platform fees.

As <unk> shared with you. These deployments and are already live customers give us a direct line of sight to $50 million of revenue run rate once fully ramped.

Keeping us well on pace to the 35% growth CAGR, we shared at Investor day.

We also generated $2 3 million of professional services revenue up 11% from last year due to fees associated with our ongoing slate of consumer banking and mortgage deployments.

We reported title revenue of $10 2 million near the high end of our guidance range and in line with our expectations amidst the challenging environment.

Moving on to gross profit.

Total company non-GAAP gross profit was $19 9 million, which was 33% above the same period last year. Despite a 16% decline in total revenue.

Our non-GAAP blend platform segment gross margins showed continued improvement, reaching 71% compared with 59% a year prior.

For software, we reported non-GAAP software gross margins of 79% up from 72% from the same period last year.

Our gross margin expansion reflects the benefit of increased high margin consumer banking suite revenues as our consumer banking segment now accounts for 27% of total software revenue compared to 24% from the same period last year.

Our margins are also benefiting from the vendor optimizations, we've implemented within our mortgage suite.

We continue to be optimistic regarding our gross margin performance and affirm our belief that 80% represents an achievable target for our non-GAAP software gross margins in 2024.

Our non-GAAP title margins came in at 15% for the fourth quarter, increasing meaningfully year over year from the fourth quarter. This time last year, when we reported negative gross margins for title.

This improvement reflects the ongoing cost optimization programs, we have undertaken and highlights our ability to align our costs to deliver this service with the current economic climate.

non-GAAP operating costs for the fourth quarter totaled $33 million.

Compared with $58 1 million in the previous year.

This improvement reflects the full realization of all cost savings initiatives, we started last year.

An additional programs we've identified to ultimately manage our cost per employee to more competitive market rates.

As we move forward. These initiatives are gaining momentum and we continue to identify more areas for efficiency without compromising sustainable growth and investment.

Our non-GAAP loss from operations was $13 1 million in Q4 coming in well ahead of the high end of our guidance range and finishing the year having improved this in every quarter of 2023.

We expect to continue this momentum into 2024 as we track towards our ultimate goal of reporting the first quarter of non-GAAP profitability in Q4 this year.

While we continue to take efficiency actions that we believe could accelerate this earlier in the year. The timing will ultimately remain dependent on the level of our origination activity.

Which is still uncertain.

With that we remain committed to this goal and have identified areas to adapt our operating model to achieve this profitability target should the market environment deteriorate further.

We saw strong renewals and new customer signings that incorporated committed fees.

This translated into growth in our remaining performance obligations this quarter, which reached $94 9 million in the fourth quarter.

We expanded our appeal by more than $35 million versus Q3, reflecting five new seven digit contracts and renewals in the quarter.

We expect to see continued expansion in our <unk> as we land new logos execute more renewals under our subscription model and as we enter into platform deals with longer and larger commitments.

Q4 marked another quarter of improvement in our cash burn.

As measured by our free cash flow we.

We continue to make improvements here, including the reduction of our interest burden following the opportunistic paydown of our term loan as a reminder, during the quarter, we prepaid $85 million of our term loan balance and amended the maturity date to provide for a one year extension to 2027 provided we meet certain conditions.

With our balance sheet and strong position, we made a decision to reduce our debt load to optimize our capital structure and add optionality around the maturity of this obligation.

Our actions to operate with efficiency in combination with our resilient top line and improved margins are having a significant impact as we reflect towards positive cash generation.

Now turning to the balance sheet.

Our cash cash equivalents marketable securities.

$44 million as at the end of the fourth quarter.

We are confident we are taking the appropriate measures to ensure our business remains well capitalized and that we have sufficient liquidity based on our current projections and in this macro environment.

Lastly, let me move on to our outlook for the first quarter of 2024.

We expect platform revenue to be between $22 million and $24 million in Q1 2024.

We expect our title business revenue to be between $10 5 million and $11 5 million.

Our total company revenue outlook is expected to be between $32 5 million and 30.

$5 5 million for Q1.

Our guidance is based on our internal assessment of customer level growth as well as our own outlook of Q1 origination activity based on the application volume observed to date through our own customer base, which we feel is representative of the broader market.

We see Q1 mortgage volume to be consistent or slightly below Q4, 2023, or approximately 800 to 875000 total originations.

Our total non-GAAP net operating loss is expected to be between 12 million and $14 million for Q1, with the midpoint, representing a greater than 50% improvement year over year.

We believe we have built the business and operating model to respond swiftly to the market fluctuations and we will continue to adapt as conditions evolve.

I wanted to reiterate that we remain confident in the long term targets. We have shared with you at Investor day and are encouraged by the strong set of opportunities we have in front of us.

As we continue to execute we are building resilience in our model against the short term fluctuations in the market.

Adding further diversification in our business that will service counter cyclical offsets in the future.

This is paramount to our strategy within our second phase and we look forward to continuing to update you on the progress here.

With that thank you again for joining Brian we're now ready for questions.

Thank you and even though our balance sheet.

Our cash cash equivalents.

Thank you and even in the air for your remarks.

With that we will begin the Q&A portion of this call.

Our first question comes from David <unk> with Wells Fargo. David You can go ahead and on mute. Please state your question.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Thanks for taking the question.

But covenant prepared remarks I appreciate it.

So I definitely want to get a better sense for blind stands relative to its 2026 forecast provided from the Investor day, obviously rates have been less favorable.

The base case is closer to the concern on the case today.

Just on the updated mortgage volumes that said I wonder if the lower volume impact your market share revenue per fundable and any good way I heard the comments on the big pipeline.

So wondering if a challenged macro can keep improving your market share given your strong footprint any any color there would be great.

Yeah. Good question. Thanks, David.

Couple of things one we definitely are seeing some of our our customers gaining market share in our numbers.

And taking and that's one piece and then we mentioned that earlier and that's how we've really maintained and plan to grow market share overtime on top of signing new customers. The other thing I would say that they are using this time to get more ready to scale.

And Thats doing things like digital closings, so youre not sending paper back and forth with title companies and there are a lot of those things not only help them, but help us not on the market share side, but help us on the.

Revenue per funded loan side.

So those kinds of things are the baseline and then some of the new logos I also mentioned that we had one of the largest banks in the country as a potential new logo for us that's in the pipeline and so we're seeing a lot of interest across the board and David just answer the first part of your question with regards to 2026 number we still feel good about what we've showed at Investor day across both.

Mortgage in terms of the long term outlook and to your point, we obviously gave those scenarios intentionally and then also with regards to consumer banking reiterated just by what we shared in our prepared remarks.

Our next question comes from Ryan Tomasello with Ww, Brian You can go ahead and Emil.

Hi, everyone. Thanks for taking the questions.

As we think through the components of the fully loaded revenue per funded loan opportunity in mortgage.

Are there certain areas you think are more actionable near term.

For example.

The income verification product seems pretty interesting relative to.

The incumbent solutions out there.

I'm just trying to think about what are some of the lower hanging fruit opportunities there to grow revenue per loan and just how youre thinking about the income verification opportunity in particular.

Well just just to call out we do have a really good near term pipeline of the blend income products.

And that's a nice product because it's very simple to turn on it's a flip of the switch and it pulls in.

New revenue for us in within a quarter of them signing that deal typically.

But I think where we see the most near term upside Ryan is on digital digital closing side and in particular.

Okay.

And remote online <unk>, becoming very important.

For our customers and we're seeing improvements around even states expanding their coverage of what they allow the California had a big change earlier this year.

And our customers are taking note because it drives real savings for them I kind of said this in the prepared remarks, but one of our biggest customers is doing a standard rollout around every single loan going towards a remote online notary by default and of course, there are exceptions and the consumer can opt out if they really don't want to do that but those are really good for the consumer it's really good.

For the banker lender and of course really good for blend as well.

Great. Thanks, Thanks for that color and then just as a follow up.

On the remaining performance obligations.

Clearly clearly strong growth in the RVO metric 36 million sequentially.

Just as the market market, maybe starts to focus more on that disclosure going forward can you just help us understand what is included in that metric given the different contract structures you have.

For example, how the success based pricing on the mortgage side is is factored in there versus platform fees, just as we think about.

The visibility we can get into your growth profile out of that metric going forward.

What youre seeing in it right and is exactly some of what you described with regards to is indicative of the customers that we're signing up whether it's renewals or net new logos. It illustrates.

Illustrates both what we're seeing from a commitment perspective, given our unit economic structure and our revenue model also platform piece of the point you mentioned and we've shared this historically, we obviously saw an incredible quarter. This last quarter in terms of what we shared we expect us to continue to grow as you see.

Continue to execute.

Our next question comes from Joseph <unk> from Canaccord. Please go ahead in EMEA.

Jeremy.

We can go ahead, Joe Alright, sorry about that sorry, we focus on the consumer banking sector a bit here.

For a second.

And kind of talk about what are some of the dynamics going on here with some of the strong recent signings.

Obviously, there is a continued kind of warfare deposits going on out there amongst financial institutions.

As consumers look for the best interest rate and.

And banks look not to have their customers churn those deposits.

If you could balance that versus product offering versus the competitive landscape there provide us a little more color on how you are winning some of these new clients.

Yes, good question and I think the hardest parts.

Opening a new deposit account I'll break into three different components. The first part is you have to be really good at fraud verification.

And we have connection to someone different broad providers to some of our partners were not a fraud engine ourselves we connect to some of the best ones in the market and we do quite a bit of orchestration around that.

So that's one piece the second piece is actually funding and making that your primary deposit account that something very very important to our customers.

And something that we help with we are we have the ability to fund and so many different ways now debit cards ECH direct bank connection wire transfer.

Those things are all built into the blend platform.

Now so to tell maximize deposits and then the last piece, which is probably the killer app for Glenn It is not just about getting that deposit relationship Joe it's about turning that deposit relationship into a deeper broader relationships, where we can do things like cross sell that deposit relationship as part of the mortgage offering or add a credit card to their deposit account opening.

Alongside their debit card opening and so that becomes a customer for life for that institution and that's something that's pretty unique to platinum and worthy. We're the only platform that solves for mortgage and deposit accounts, which are our two primary product offerings. We're most focused on this year.

But all the other products that they might have as well in credit cards and personal loans.

Auto earned et cetera, and so I think those those are the core differentiators of blend and where we're spending the most time as we go to market and where we're seeing us win deals with with customers who already been blend yet at all.

Our next question comes from Doug Becker with William Blair Bill and you can go ahead.

Hey, guys I appreciate the questions here maybe to <unk>.

Starting with you on mortgage you kind of talked about investing ahead of.

A potential inflection into 2025 and you guys have done a really good job of controlling what you can control there in gaining share in <unk>.

Increasing that take per funded loan right just a broader sense of kind of how youre thinking about that that landscape evolving over the next several years here.

Again, given it seems like Youre in a better position now and Youre starting to see kind of some of those originations start to stabilize certainly relative to the prior view.

Yes.

Thanks for the question Dylan I'd say, where we're ahead of schedule.

And you see this.

Revenue per funded loan ahead of our 2026 targets that we shared at Investor Day is on the revenue per funded loan. We're ahead of where we had planned to be and thats, because our add ons like the blend close out on are just getting really wide adoption from our customers.

And actually I would say, it's been very helpful to us that the market has stabilized in terms of volumes or haven't been going up a ton or down a ton now we were hoping never been coming back up slowly earlier and they haven't but eventually interest rates will go down and that will happen, but just the stability has allowed our customers to invest forward a little bit because they have visibility into that.

Revenue and visibility in what their budget is going to look like they're not worried about that changing is that stability has really helped us and helped our customers invest in things like digital closings as well as the next generation refinance product that I mentioned.

On the prepared remarks.

I think it can be so important for our customers to be ready for that refinance wave that's going to happen at some point.

Well before it comes into play so they can get their processes in order to get the right technology, which hopefully obviously is what I described in the call.

And also the right people in place they don't have to massively scale up their operations to support that.

Got it okay that makes perfect sense, and then maybe one other one too I know to build their solution, obviously pipeline seems pretty healthy here.

And it's early but as we think about Humira longterm opportunity there for both mortgage and consumer wonder how you're thinking about that partner ecosystem evolution in kind of the opportunity there to layer on configure ability, maybe again kind of validation.

Go to market capacity things of the like it seems like that could be something that's pretty interesting, but but how are you guys thinking about the partner angle and leveraging builder going forward as well. Thanks.

Yes.

I think of it as actually partners will probably be the next one is to really get going.

Glenn builder platform.

Hi.

And start to be able to build things that makes sense for a broader set of markets that we historically haven't been able to focus on I mean, we have blend have a limited capacity of not just building products, but the product marketing the marketing the sales and the deployment and being able to do that really really well we want to be really focused and why our focus is on the mortgage suite of deposit account opening products in particular.

<unk>.

But I do think that there is such a powerful platform and it has taken all of the components of origination and made them. These building blocks and it can be used not just within banking, but I think in other industries as well and so we're sort of I think taking a piece by piece, we're really hardening the platform with our existing customers. We've already started conversations with some partners.

In the context of specific customer deployments some of the big ones that we've signed in the last year to start to build out that muscle with them and I think it will take some time, but I do agree that it will open up a lot of doors for us.

Great. Thanks, Neil.

Our next question comes from Mike King with Goldman Sachs. Mike You can go ahead and on mute.

Hey, good afternoon. Thank you for the question I just have two.

First on the consumer banking suite opportunity you called out the potential to hit.

$50 million annual revenue run rate I was just wondering if you could talk about the visibility in.

Reaching that could we could we reach that annual revenue run rate at some point during.

2024, and then I just have a quick follow up.

Yes.

It's a good question the way that we.

<unk>.

Sort of calculate this is these are existing signed customers for rollouts that are already planned with them.

In terms of being of when that happens some of these things for what it's worth Michael R will sign a customer for two product lines and it's a big one maybe they roll out the first product line in 2024, and the second Big product line in 2025, and so I don't think it will all happen in 2024.

But these are sort of pre planned things that we've already started working on with our customers and a lot of cases to space out and so.

And I just also want to call out I sort of mentioned this in our prepared remarks.

About half of that was signed last year.

And so we're feeling really good about the growth in that business again, it's going to take time for that revenue to come to be because of the way that we recognize revenue.

But that business is really healthy and we're seeing a lot of interest in.

I don't know.

Give away too much on Q1, but that pipeline has been healthy and our customer list.

Is growing so something we're excited about.

Wonderful thank you.

Just on Opex, obviously, you guys have done a good job with Opex coming in.

Better than expected this quarter and it seems like you are already on track to hit that $130 million Opex number for 2024 that you gave at Investor day.

Are there opportunities to.

Reduce opex further and exceed that.

24 target and what factors might.

<unk> result in profitability coming sooner than the fourth quarter. If it does thank you.

Thanks, Mike I would say starting with the latter as we think about it obviously the macro has a component to that with regards to when could we potentially hit profitability faster. The piece that we're focused on is really what we can control and it's indicative of just what you've seen on the top line, but also to your point, where youre seeing with regards to our operating expenses.

State of this and I think we will continue to reiterate we're looking at everything that we do just through the lines of operational excellence.

And revamping a lot of our processes to ensure that there is a philosophy that theres efficiency.

These types of things in addition to kind of what builders expose which is the ability for us to do things more.

More efficiently ironically as well if these things that are allowing us to kind of get to the point that you're making which is we are we are performing quite well with regards to our expectations as it pertains to opex.

Great. Thank you.

Our next question is a follow up from Ryan Tomasello completely W. Bryan go ahead.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking the follow up just.

On mortgage.

You might think you called out as continued headwinds from churn.

Can you quantify where the churn rates have been in recent quarters, whether on a percentage basis or revenue basis and also when do you think that might bottom out.

And then also on the competitive side.

Have win rates in the mortgage business changed at all over the last year.

Just any general trends in terms of competition.

We don't have we don't share the broader sort of churn numbers, but what I will say is that we've actually in aggregate we've kept our market share.

Steady based on our calculations throughout the year.

And so while there is some times churn I think the market share being steady and the revenue per funded loan going up the combination of those two things, it's just setting us up for the future and some of the customers that churned, who churn to lower cost and free solutions. Some of them are already starting to plan and come back to us and those kinds of things become.

Indicative of I think where the market needs to be in the future, which is being able to scale as.

As far as the competitive environment I would say in the top.

50 to 100, and it's pretty similar to what we've always seen men wear.

With banks and credit unions at our sweet spot, that's where I think we do the best the biggest banks and credit unions, but we also have some of the biggest <unk> and.

When were brought into our process and we are competing head to head.

I haven't seen any notable changes in our win rates and in that work. So.

If anything like I said earlier on the prior question as the market has stabilized and people are starting to look towards the future again, it's really benefited us.

Great. Thanks for that color and then another follow ups for Amir.

The share count guidance, it looks like you didnt buy as incremental growth.

Around 2 million shares and once you bought it.

What a reasonable run rate for share count growth going forward.

And then just broadly if you can discuss your approach to managing dilution from stock comp.

Our focus as you think about managing the business to profitability inclusive of that of that burden.

Going forward it.

It is and yet at the point of view you shared in terms of what you're seeing from the 2% to 49% of the $2 51.

We continue to leverage obviously equity because of <unk>.

The way, we do we want to in essence incentivize top talent, but we do have just within the confines of being very.

Very focused with regards to our overall divisional levels you could see it with regards to the Q4 performance and I think again as you think about this on a perspective basis. The best way for me to describe it as just know that it's an area that we spend a lot of time, we focus on it and while we will continue to ensure that our employee population in basis.

<unk> given that.

So as we build this on their box, we will continue to focus on dilution and Youll see those numbers kind of be a.

Priority for us right.

Okay, great. Thanks for taking the follow ups.

All right seeing no further questions. This concludes today's earnings call. Thank you all for joining a great day.

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This is.

He is not be applecart, because officially never existed.

And now it never will.

10 years after starting work on a car Apple has given us.

The company had some wild ideas about the future of the car as we're about to Italian.

The vehicle was supposed to be as revolutionary as the iPhone carmakers, putting scared.

IPhone had is this theory and massive businesses like Nokia and Motorola what Apple did the same to the car industry.

He really felt the strong confidence they could take out with general motors, they could make a better Tesla and they have this ambition to do something that really had not been done before it was never going to work.

This is a tale of grandiose plans to invent a new kind of car undone by strategic mistakes.

The Ray.

Rise and then death of what was code named project Titan.

Yes.

Apple is incredibly secret the company doesn't talk about new products until they are ready so never publicly admitted to working on a car in fact, the closes that Apple's CEO, Tim Cook ever gotten good doing so within Mis interview with me in 2017 there is.

A major disruption looming he proceeded to lay out three innovation. Thank you predicted would upturn the car industry, but first start with electric vehicles, if you've driven.

An all electric car is it's actually a marvellous experience plus you have ride sharing on top of the show services like Uber and Lyft and finally self driving car, we're focusing on autonomous systems clearly one purpose of autonomous systems or self driving cars, we sort of see.

As the mother of all AI projects each of those technologies seem to present, an opportunity to disrupt the two trillion dollar car industry.

Initially for the rationale behind the car was what Apple does delivering a piece of hardware in the car is that piece of hardware and then build on top of that hardware or it becomes a platform to deliver services and experiences. So in that respect the car followed the app or throttle.

<unk>, let's go back to 2014 when it all started three years before my interview with Cook.

The beginning of the Applecart project was actually the company exploring if it should by Tesla. They ended up not doing that and instead decided to start exploring what it would take to build their own car on their own they put some of the brightest minds at the company on this the hardware division was granted billions of dollars in funding to hire anyone it needed insight.

Apple or outside Apple the hired people for Porsche Lamborghini Audi you name it to come over there and build a color Johnny I've apples design chief at the time had this idea to recreate the old school boats wagon box from the 19 fifties in the 19 sixties that the idea.

Was not to build a car for people, who love cars today, but build the future of the car and safer for all of us to drive all sorts of ideas were thrown around they consider only selling the car and light there'd be no steering wheel or front facing seat and passengers will control everything with pop screen from theory.

For all the big ideas and Blue Sky thinking however, the projects and starts to head problems and there's confusion over whether the priority should be to compete with Tesla in electric cars, or Google, which was making big leaps in self driving vehicles.

By 2016, there was a ton of disagreement on the Apple executive team there were difficulties figuring out a way to actually produce a vehicle there were concerned over profits enter Rob Mann scale. Our semi retired executive who had developed products such as the Macbook Air is the first of many leadership and direction changes can hit the project and it'll end.

<unk> laying off hundreds of engineers.

Mansfield tells them that rather than building a car copper will focus on developing the most advanced driverless technology level five autonomy.

By building the sulfur having brain they really gave themselves options.

On one hand, they were able to partner if they talked partnerships with Tesla with Mercedes Benz with BMW, but it also gave them opportunity to lead or go back to build their own car and have this apple like experience Apple also invests indeed, the Chinese equivalent of Uber. So it might one day put itself driving technology into <unk>.

During service.

The company Plaza had with testing and report start coming in of Lexis Cathcart Kitted out with Apple's driverless technology, appearing on the roads in California in 2017.

Forward two years to 2019, Uber goes public and its a big disappointment that shows ridesharing isn't a great business with no prospect of Apple like profit.

One of <unk> three pillars starts to look a little bit less revolutionary.

At the same time Catholic goes from 50 billion dollar valuation to a trillion dollar company in less than two years in electric vehicles suddenly seem more appealing.

The early success of Tesla led people to believe that maybe there was opportunity seemed the car industry to work with bigger margins that helps give apple the confidence to make another panic around that time, Doug field, the Tesla executive who developed a model three and took over the Apple card project in 2017 calls and meetings.

Michelle off when his team has been able to pull together Apple has this secretive several hundred acre test facility in the heart of the Arizona Desert outside of Phoenix, they've gathered a bunch of senior people in the Applecart team alongside Tim Cook and others cookies impressed by what.

According to people, who are present and says he'll finally throw his full weight behind the project Apple will build an electric car that has phone driverless technology, but even that decision doesn't last long field leaves to join for in 2021 and is replaced by Kevin Lynch, a longtime Apple manager who worked on the watch.

What's your plan.

Yes.

It's becoming clear that autonomous cars are a long way away, maybe even a decade or more so theres another flip flopped, a weight from self driving.

It's the least ambitious version of the project yet make an electric car that competes directly with Tesla, but by 2023. The outside world is changing artificial intelligence starts consuming the tech industry and after Tesla's early successes electric vehicles are facing a reality.

November 2022 saw the release of chat GPT as the World goes AI Crazy Google has its own big acquisition and Microsoft is the biggest investor in open AI the developer of chat GPT.

And while there's plenty of AI innovation under the Hood of apples products, it's still unclear what Tim Cook's Big generated AI play will be.

Where apple needs to catch up in that interface between the consumer and the journalist if AI engine that has a name like copilot <unk> Gemini and the electric vehicle market is starting to lose its luster with sales growth slowing for three reasons.

These are expensive and high interest rates mean that even harder to reform. The first generation of Evs are now hitting the secondhand market.

Not holding their values as well as combustion engine car.

Established carmakers are starting to really spur EV model, meaning competition is tougher and profits are lower in one specific fire sale of Apple's success based that on the hardware side. They have by and large are between 25% 30% margin.

Is it possible on a car.

Provokes another final rethink at Apple the three Megatrends that Cook highlighted in 2017 have all lost their appeal.

Self driving isn't happening anytime soon rideshare is even a great business and electric vehicles, probably can't deliver the kinds of profits and Apple shareholders expect they have some of the world's best mines on artificial intelligence working on this system that may never come to life because it is so difficult on the other hand they have this separate.

Team trying to catch up to open AI, and Microsoft and Google on General debate.

So Tim Cook make big decisions on February 26. After most people have left work the car team gets an email announcing an all hands meeting. The next day. Some people started to realize something is off then 10 am the next morning, they all gathered into conference rooms, and around their desks and they tuned into a <unk>.

<unk> announcement, there was a 12 minute presentation. They were pretty succinct. Thank you for all your efforts were immediately winding down project Titan the Apple car is that.

It was working on self driving technology will join apples main AI group.

<unk> have to find new jobs inside or outside the company are repurposing. The people that we're working on project Titan to AI.

Then given the opportunity in AI. It solves a lot of problems for Apple gets a bunch of top AI minds working on its main AI goals and it can reallocate the billions of dollars a year it spending on the car towards developing AI.

That could be essential to the future success of the iPhone the device it still accounts for the majority of Apple's revenue.

Look at this chart.

After years of massive growth Apple is struggling to grow revenue.

Without the car investors are wondering where the next leg of growth will come from something that could be division proud.

Is that if that device achieved everything Apple want over the next few years it could end up replacing the iPhone you may not own it.

It's something that has the real potential in the next half decade to replace your iPhone to be the future of that product, but apple needs supplementary revenue they need wholly new product categories that don't take away from others and as carmakers start to question just how profitable the electric vehicle market can be.

Apple has given up is hardly a vote of confidence.

Okay.

Yes.

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Our first stop is the Dominican Republic, where the world's largest aloe Vera fund harvest and juices the thorny leads.

Universal Allo farm covers 5000 acres here in the Dominican Republic, while there are hundreds of types of allo plants. This firm chose allo, Barbara Denzel Smeller because it has 20 amino acids minerals vitamin carbohydrate hormone and other bio active substances once the baby plants are in the ground it takes them.

Eight months for them to mature.

About 750 people harvest these fields theyre dispatched in groups harvesting section by section.

The Internet Keith end up being a guessing game.

Like what if I look even a boring bank.

There's been a bunch of advertising and in terms of moving out of <unk>.

<unk> I think I'm a little run.

I hope linkup with bank of melanoma a dilemma.

I came out of.

The cut leaves won't go back, but the plants will grow new ones.

It will take them about a week to harvest just this one area, Matt Galati anecdotally that must be allo fluidity.

Again, a little the <unk> isn't a off in Illinois that Goldman Bravo type outside of obligated some growth again.

That's a feed them one.

One by one workers pick up all the harvested leaves and toss them into a truck.

Those leaves head to a processing plant two miles up the road.

Our T V.

<unk>, thus citizens a min Li with bank of press testimonial to the Philippines, Yes, so as <unk> got the Hulu.

And of course this is a niche EKO Mila model here he is actually on the La Plaza.

We have to go through a bath of chlorinated saltwater to kill off any little critters from the field that may be hanging around.

Then they get trends.

Morning.

Florida product.

Please go ahead Sir.

Okay.

If any of that kind of thing that we were able to drill down soon.

This jiggly fillet is the gel inside the <unk>.

That's what's used in real aloe, Vera juice, Joe or skin care products.

Okay.

No.

Hi.

Correct.

Thank you.

To do it they need a really good nice Europe volatile a value.

On the other model, you'll see Enzo will end up doing some illuminate AAV that allows all of when they might make it look easy, but filling takes precision Duncan and I get that.

The only thing I'd.

Bye bye.

Thanks, Greg and Mike Macdonald for any further along in the last time. We ran this is Ian <unk>, Illinois in the math I hope on the OEM and travel up again with no lost time will does it allow you to dial up is at the end of <unk> all of the development.

And they have to move fast.

<unk> 3500 leads a day globally zero monetizing some of them are mostly Allison also on them, all I said, a little bit Dave.

Hey, Michael remains of what is manav, you'll be somewhere Luther mahaffey will get.

Sure.

Many companies use machines for flame resistant apparel, Joe could give I'm going to talk now a case.

Good morning.

The agenda for skin. So the total net proceeds of this month.

I won't go middle of the Middle East E. Okay.

Right.

That is the multiple here.

The leftover leaf bits go back out into the field as compost and the buckets of malaise those get weight then poured onto this big table workers here will inspect them for any leftover leases, which still then slice off.

Once it's all clear the Falaise head to the shredder, which grind them into a pure aloe gel.

Got that.

Bob and Todd.

As I said I mean, I just wanted to get people to aim for ASF Iraq Syria.

Hmm.

At this point ascorbic acid is added to extend the shelf life.

No it doesn't.

Atlanta for June.

Yes.

Total set of wounds both moving forward.

Puerto Rico to gel flows into the still prove bag.

So as a whole.

Yes, we've got it on today's format.

Bob.

So I believe.

But once again 90 days ago.

This bag is then vacuum sealed and put into a bigger metal box.

The whole process from leaf to this container takes only about three hours, but before the shipment can leave the factory its contents have to be tested for quality assurance redefine web hosting with blue host class and new platform made in partnership with Wordpress find out more I blew host dot com.

Got it.

Thanks, David Zynga.

You are not mitigated physical humans Bang in physical gaming primarily summer of <unk>.

And our recourse you that Puerto Rico, lower fifth board.

Our concern in the body ACO in the neural hormones that made a lot of that.

Now with that said as the people you have.

Only when a container passes the lab tests can be released for shipment.

These ones are bound for Rotterdam in the Netherlands, there the gel will be pumped into bottles for forever living products, but not every bottle of allo is made like this in 2015 consumer lab Dot com tested 10 allo products for ingredients half of them failed our test of 2016 Bloomberg investigation found at Walmart.

Cvs and targets allo products contain no evidence of allo at all it's so easy to put out a fake alloy products. So there are all kinds of synthetic gels, often you'll see that we're like car Boomer is a synthetic gel and if you see a clear gel you have no idea, if it's really aloe or cover most allo products arent closely regulated.

By the FDA, that's because they are considered supplements or cosmetics not drugs. So product can say it contains allo, but it could mean a range of things. It really does contain our fillet or it's the whole leaf ground up and not just that in your file or it's a synthetic gel and theres actually no allo, which won't hurt you.

But it doesn't have any of the supposedly benefits of allo theres not a lot of regulation or oversight of allo products. It's also hard to regularly because allo grows naturally all over the Americas and its Joe has been used for thousands of years to heal burns and reduce inflammation the challenges translating that history to our current rigorous medical examiner.

<unk>. Another problem is there isn't clear scientific proof of Aloos healing powers.

Some studies have shown it helps sooth burns and speed up healing, while others show no affect on Burns. So it's not that I know it doesn't help the evidence isn't there right now the outer range of the leaf has been found to have a laxative compound called allo in one study found that it cause cancer in rats, while another found it helped with constipation.

But the FDA has banned allo from being sold as an over the counter laxatives drug there is no patent on allo and so there is a lot of incentive for companies to be putting lots of money into clinical studies. They don't really need to do those studies to get these products on the shelf still consumers worldwide are flocking to allo as they embrace more natural products universal.

Allo saw a 30% increase in demand in 2020 as consumers navigate this growing market. How can we identify the products made with real Aloe Vera well Todd says, it's actually really tricky, but he did have a few suggestions first you should always check the ingredient list you want to see Allo you want to see is first you really need to see.

<unk> careful on the wording because if it just says leased it could be any part of the lease you could be getting the latex, which you don't want unless you want a laxative effect lookout for Turkey wording like 100% gel that could mean, there is 100% Joe but not all of it is allo fillet. So you really need to know what part of the elite is being made when they say aloe gel is it a gel that made.

Blending up the whole leaf or is it truly just pure aloe gel. Despite these uncertainties experts don't expect the demand for allo to dip anytime soon.

All of mushroom life starts here with compost mushrooms here are very picky eaters, the mushrooms in a strict diet, a recycled moats K wheat straw poultry litter and corncob close to the material near the end of the comp posting process at star Karma wise with soft that has a lot of water.

The mushroom spores or seeds are added in then it's aged pasteurized and trucks to farms across the county like this one.

Carcinoma third generation Mark requirement Christmas family has been growing white button and Cremini mushroom since 1938 mushrooms are grown indoors. So that we can control the environment. It all happens on vertical shelf.

Workers' use this machine to lay the compost down then comes the layer called Casey with Piedmont limestone and water. This equipment allows us to have the machine.

It helps get a perfect one in three quarter inch layer. So the mushrooms don't grow and evenly or come up dirty. This panel controls the growing conditions. They want a perfect combination of carbon dioxide humidity and temperature. After 16 days were ready to harvest, but its harvesters, who are hardest to find we're always harvesting the only they would do.

Artwork is Christmas that did not conduct mckesson.

Our workers will considered essential now that the economy has started to pick back up were down 20% on our workforce and it's been a major impact on our business. The mushrooms are grown and harvested in three breaks or phases, meaning each room will get picked from three times, starting with the biggest mushrooms than the weight for the little ones to mature.

Given it is somewhat lower than our capital is Tom will lateral gears you'd be at about when a visit.

The deal with memorial.

By late but when.

I gave it mushrooms double in size every 24 hours. So pickers have to move quickly each armed with a knife, a cart and tons of boxes.

Harvest every mushroom by hand, Uganda, Tuesday, Youre, putting your door.

Thanks, Ronny mushrooms fill up with him.

And then an hour so that'll give you a good prospect people. They don't wanted to 15 six in and out of their fan Danielle Beltran and his daughter Sonya run Mazda farms, just up the road I'm the second Mexican they grow margins in a courtyard Danielle worked as a mushroom picker for over 12 years and I was thinking on my mind is how I hope one day I get a farm today, he and <unk>.

Sonya owned 25 mushroom houses.

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Every day, we have Elias address a key of our mutual.

Musical Diana said almost.

These are funds that are left with the volume with many of the area use silica.

Today Harvesters work up to 12 hour days to pick as many mushrooms as they can and trial after that ammonia.

Yogurt, we'll get person profitability adhesive, but they still can't keep up with the Gila <unk> Miranda.

They were when we look at advanced disposal.

We should be harvesting 10 rooms of mushrooms everyday and we usually only can get to seven or eight.

The leftover rooms, the mushrooms will be steamed off meaning they'll be destroyed.

Race against time, because mushrooms grow so quickly waiting even one day means.

Anything more in English is open.

And with some we win when customers don't like that so the value decreases were about 35 cents a pound instead of a dollar a pound current Malone brands.

Dana.

Firstly, there's nowhere.

Probably limit.

It gets even worse for specialty mushrooms that require even more labor Lake These should hockey's at Philips mushroom Barnes.

It usually takes three days to pick the whole house, that's still although my hands. So it's still labor intensive or these my talkies. Each one of these logs has to be moved by have put them on a shelf to spa and run that we take them off the shelf and bring them down here put them on the shelf to pick and then we have to pick up and then we also have to throw it away.

There's six touches in the course of this things lifecycle every touches a person which are hard to come by nowadays, but the labor issues don't just stop at harvest. They can also be felt at the packing level.

Yes.

Megan is the third generation of her family to run mother Earth organic mushrooms. This power to mushrooms was just brought in from our farm and then we get it into one of our two coolers everything is labeled so that we know exactly what form it came from the data came in and how many pounds are brought in and it's all in our system. So we can easily trace back all of our product Megan have machines to wash.

<unk> cut the mushrooms and even to wrap and label the boxes, but everything in between from topping up a box to tracking and weighing is done by hand, and then it'll get put into Florida.

You go out to the customer mother Earth delivers mushrooms as far as Denver, Texas in Boston, but getting them. There is tough with so few workers. So it used to just be harvesters that were harder to get now is that our harvesting level at our supervisor level at our quality assurance level, even our office staff level truck drivers have been really hard to find as well.

The problem is if they can't get them harvested at the farm that means we don't have the market sort of hacking facility. It's a complete ripple effect. So how did the industry's labor problem becomes so dire well it starts with Kennett square his history of immigration Quakers a Protestant Christian group were the first to grow mushrooms here and 18 85 as the story goes originally.

Quaker farmer, who grew carnations tried to grow mushrooms under the beds of the carnations and he was successful the Quaker has been hired Italian immigrants to do the hard manual labor the Italians and started hundreds of mushroom farm of their own in the area from the 19 fifties to the seventies, former sugarcane workers from Puerto Rico settled into.

Kennett square and took over picking the mushrooms, but when they began asking for higher wages and better working conditions farm owners fired them and hired Mexican immigrants instead.

1986, President Ronald Reagan signed an immigration bill that gave legal status to certain undocumented agricultural workers, who came into the country before 1982 that really really help for their Mexican workers. Most Mexican work on the milestone industry for I would say at least 40 years, the build Kennett square into Americas mushroom cap.

<unk> is now produces 60% of the country's product, but that population of Mexican immigrants is aging out of this work in their kids have chosen other career paths, we started getting people from Central America.

Even before the pandemic. These new workers began leaving for other industries. There's people that say Oh like you go to construction or you go to landscaping and make more money to make things worse strict immigration laws in the U S have suffocated, the legal flow of central and Latin American workers, because mushrooms are year round crop the industry does.

<unk> qualify for the H two a temporary worker program, which allows immigrants to come into the U S and growth in seasonal agriculture. The labor Crunch is affecting every mushroom farm, both small and large.

To entice the few pickers left farm owners are offering perks higher pay housing and transportation to and from work our harvesters work on a piece rate we pay them per box my average harvester earns over $14 an hour, but I have some harvesters that make over $20 an hour I would like to pay them more of the company.

We just can't afford to yet agriculture in general and mushroom farm, specifically work on very thin margins. So when we can't harvest, 10% of our products were definitely losing months, Chris is losing $40000 in revenue a week for this current year with probably a wall somewhere in the middle of 250000.

Yes.

Thousands of maintenance as Robyn.

If this happens farms will either have to reduce their scale and fill less growing rooms for though eventually would have to shut down altogether Chester County, mushroom farmers lots of $168 million in 2020 and that has a significant effect on the market, which is booming in popularity for the last 10.

10 years, we're seeing a demand increase of 3% to 5% every year sales in grocery stores have gone up by 15% in 2021 customers are asking every day to fill their orders and we just don't have enough mushrooms to do that so it's difficult to want to expand want to provide all the board.

Others that they want and then see mushrooms just go to waste the solution for the labor issue isn't an easy one farmers have already automated much of the process. Some have turned to growing bigger mushrooms and you grow larger maharam. It actually makes it a lot faster for the harvesters to victims, though we can get them quicker here and get them out to our customers and do it with less labor the <unk>.

Oregon Mushroom Institute is pushing the Senate to pass this farm workforce modernization Act the bill would extend the age to a temporary worker program to the mushroom industry that way immigrants to get an agricultural worker visa to pick mushrooms, we need more migrant workers, we need more ability to bring people up to the country just like our grandparents did.

They came up and works two jobs and worked hard to make a better life for ourselves and we need to continue to have America do that for new immigrant populations others in the industry are considering robot takers, though not everyone things through the best option, you can't really get a machine to be as delicate as a person hand to choose <unk>.

Exactly which mushroom you also have to have like the eye to see which one is ready to pick robots. Like this are still three years away until then farmers will keep putting up the call for anybody to come help pick mushrooms.

Next we had the Thailand, where farmers harvest of 1 million metric tons of the world's most expensive durian fruit each year.

Darien is native to several tropical climates around the world, including Thailand, Thailand alone goes over 300 varieties with the most expensive <unk> are growing in number Barry province, they're known is not there in <unk>.

That makes up the highest grade of bearing and in Thailand and is often given as a token of respect even among not variance two varieties stand out the most expensive, Kenya, Algerian and the slightly more affordable montage Darien.

I'll I'll follow my phone calls that will come up a law my Mangala <unk> <unk>.

Put more back on mainland in Peru.

Plug power will get the best that Antelope, one mainland Pentagon row Gallagher.

Yes.

<unk> is described as having refined and sweet pulp with a mild fragrance and creamy texture, whereas other lesser grade <unk> are said to have a stronger smell and a watery texture.

<unk> has a distinct taste and smell for two main reasons, none libraries environment and the growing practices of its farmers.

<unk>, Barry Province has been a center for dairy and farming in Thailand for over 300 years.

Farmers in this region have been honing their technique for generation using their resources and skill to grow the highest quality dorians possible.

One of the resources they depend on is the child for Ya River, which flows through on the Berry and fertilizers the soil.

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We'll tally that back up.

But the river water isn't use the water the dairy entries themselves farmers in number Barry prefer to buy freshwater which they believe improves the final quality of the Darien.

No not widely known Ben-gurion P money, the gamboge human Cowen and powerful partner.

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So in terms of legal Nelson Mandela.

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The ball began with peak annual home phone couldn't lockup overnight bolt on my bike one Alan go ahead, one soon.

Now onto Guadalajara.

Paul.

After planting it takes about six years for healthy dairy entry to bear fruit.

Once the trees start to flower farmers count the days until the fruits are ripe.

Depending on the breed this can span 90 to 150 days.

But it's not only the time and labor that make not Darien so pricey.

To provide this kind of care add up.

Just the water cost about $2200 per year.

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Yes.

Yes.

Farmers have to constantly check the trees and look for any infections or insects, and the rapid <unk> and plastic to protect it.

They must harvest <unk>, one by one when each fruit is perfectly ripe.

<unk> <unk> hit on a little loud.

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This time consuming and labor intensive techniques have a major impact on the flavor and final value of not Darien.

A $2 five kilogram month Hungarian from App, Hey, Dona farm can close over $100.

That's about a third of the price of Kenya, making it a more popular and affordable option for customers.

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<unk> on the other hand is the most expensive not dirty and you can buy.

Depending on its size, Kenya, Darien from Appia on your farm can range from about 380 to $530 per fruit.

But despite danielle steep price demand for this variety is growing and supply can't keep up.

Yes.

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One of the main challenges is the climate crisis.

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The tropical climate required to grow dairy and also makes the farm susceptible to floods storms and other extreme weather.

In 1995 in 2011 floods destroyed almost all of the dairy entries and nonetheless already in.

In 2011 about 1100 acres of dairy entries were leveled.

Only 17 acres survive.

After this benchmark had to start the six year process over.

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The global market for <unk> is expected to reach over $28 billion by 2025.

And that means upper Anyang and other non the Berry farms will likely continue selling out of not darien in the years to come.

Larry's, a fifth generation farmer and Fort Meade, Florida, we've been growing citrus in my family since the 18 fifties when I first started in the industry citrus occupied over 900000 acres in the state of Florida. In fact, some years, we had too much fruit in market prices were depressed.

Just 15 years ago his family pack 1 million Orange cartons, a year, mostly Valencia oranges, the big Sweet Juicy kind, you're planning to grow or expecting that to last for multiple generations. The first cases center screening was reported in China back in 1918, it quickly spread across the continent devastating citrus groves, when India and Saudi.

Arabia as well.

Those exactly how the Asian, Citrus psyllid made it to Florida, but in 1998. It showed up on an orange Jasmine plant in our backyard in Palm Beach County.

And it quickly spread throughout the state uninfected route stocks, but.

But it would take another seven years before Florida's orange trees showed signs of green.

It spreads throughout the state before you, even though its presence and in 2005, Larry found his first infected tree. It was a real challenge in an eye opening for US we knew what a threat it could beat our operation and we were fearful there were more infected trees that just had not been detected at first Larry tried removing all of the sector.

Yes.

In fact move faster soon infecting too many to control.

When a solid munchies on the citrus tree it leaves behind the bacteria that causes screening here in the vascular tissue the bacteria replicate and blocks. This important highway for moving nutrients.

Underground the route system spin and die out.

Above ground you noticed the yellow pattern, the dark Green Sparks and you can see me through the canopy of this three that means the tree is really really sick, while the trees do keep bearing oranges for a few years. The fruit essentially never rabies do you see it's small in size it remains green and when I cut this route.

You see an odd shape.

Still eat the fruit its just not as sweet.

But the worst news from this fruit.

Has lower sugar content or bricks, the normal fruit, but theres nothing wrong with the juice.

It's awful.

40% of those oranges fall off the trees sooner than usual the bacteria is actually starving and kills the tree overtime today, researchers estimate 90% of all orange trees in the state have the bacteria no longer do you see citrus trees abundant in the landscape Larry has kept his trees alive and producing for 15 years using a combination of political.

This rule techniques developed by scientists at the University of Florida. Some of our work that is going on right now is finding ways to keep those trees that do have the disease still producing fruit that are usable and he is going to stay with some flows look like.

Alright.

So theyre very small theres, an escapee excellent.

There are small the kind of jump around a little bit. So is this thing called an aspirator or at the more fund term Luisa children is tutor and you suck.

Suck them up at basically a little vacuum in my hand here.

Here Lauren deepened Brock can studied the silhouettes movement to learn what might keep them off of citrus trees, using aspirator is actually a really efficient way to collect phyllid she's figured out a few things that detract silly.

This concludes its spread on the trees to high believes from Ian sacks with uses Lightwave links to see one study showed the clay was more effective than insecticides. The second thing Loren is researching is these eight foot wide sheets of plastic called reflective mulch. The idea is that it should make it where the store find the host.

Plant it could be that applying them or.

Visual deterrent how does it work.

Somewhat.

We do get fill it we do get them, but we do get them at a reduced rate.

Years ago farmers discovered that putting plastic bags around baby trees, but help them grow stronger before infection Laurens now setting how effective these individual protective covers or ipc's actually can be.

So this is the IPC mesh and as you can see they put a hold on it you can see my hand, very clearly when Sun rain. It all get through here. The goal is to really keep the agents that you still had off the tree and then if you look underneath.

This is our irrigation the baby trees will grow in the Ipc's for two years.

300, perfect Youre still going to have some stuff on them. We do have some past issues in here, but yeah. They look really good compared to what the open field and this will actually give our tree the fighting chance ones are out in the environment and they could potentially get infected with <unk>.

Scientists tripped Ive Ashish. Thanks, the key is in the soil, we have been learning that the trees need these nutrients to fight infection. That's interesting because of this disease have a small group.

So they are not very efficient and picking up the nutrients. It's like a job of 10 people needs to be done by one person, saying the Duluth, she figured out by giving smaller doses of fertilizer and water more frequently helps the sick routes absorb nutrients better and it's similar like us.

Malls built meals each day, rather than three big meals are better same is with the fertilizer and litigation.

Mahler doses are better than big doses.

Larry uses fertilizer custom designed for history.

Also planning more young ones, one of our strategies for dealing with greening as the plant.

Groves at higher densities were planning 300 trees per acre compared to 140 to 150 <unk> per acre before we were dealing with the disease. So if he knows all the trees will get infected with more planted hopefully some will survive.

<unk> also tried releasing predator wasps and spring insecticides, while theres no silver bullet in combination. These short term solutions have sort of works you can slow down the decline we've been battling citrus screening for 15 years and while the industry is not thriving we're definitely surviving.

Problem is all of these approaches tack on an extra $600 per acre underproduction cost for growers are revenues are down by more than half on an individual growth basis growers are losing money and many couldnt swallow the losses by early 2022 half of Florida's Orange growers have left the industry so well.

He waits for a long term solution Larry is taking the hit so he can keep harvesting the same way his family always has.

Workers quickly pick the oranges and drop them into bags once they've got a good batch fingers dumped them into baskets in the grove workers than truck the oranges to the packing facility just down the road.

We have eight digital cameras that take the picture of each piece of fruit as it travels through the packing line, we used in electronics order divide the crop back color if theyre orange enough. The fruit gets cleaned and hit with a layer of natural wax and preserve the fruits.

Shelf life.

Because of H L. B, Larry packs have as many boxes as he did 17 years ago. If the orders are a bit too green Larry knows will be hard to sell on the fresh side. So we send them to get used at the Florida Natural plant in Lake Wales, Larry owns inducing plant along with other local growers as part of the company's cooperative about 90% of the.

<unk> grown in the state goes to Orange juice, but just like growers. The factory has been getting fewer oranges, so less efficiency in the plant with a lower fruit volume the factory had to shut down one of its three processing lines. Nowadays 60000 boxes of oranges arrive at the plant through cooperative farms across Central Florida, that's about 30000 fewer than before.

Each lb within 24 hours of harvesting the we use the fruit this machine squeezes the juice out of every orange, we pull out any seeds and we also collect the pulp where we can add that back to whatever degree we want to do that the Jews gets pasteurized and then pumped into cartons, but remember greening effects oranges natural sugar content.

So Florida is natural have to blend infected oranges with sweeter ones from different regions or even seasons. It still tastes like orange juice, it's just not quite a suite.

Today, the factory pumps out about a third less than pre greening they need a home for their fruit, where they can get maximum value that hopefully can sustain their operations until a solution. The greening Israel. Many scientists believe the long term solution lies with reengineering nature, either genetically changing the bug itself, we're naturally breeding citrus trees.

Similarly, a tree that's resistant or intolerant to the disease will be key that's the project spread <unk> and his team are working on at the University of Florida, They're trying to breed for an <unk> resistant orange variety, meaning even if the disease shows up the tree will get sick.

To do that he takes two different types of trees, maybe one with yummy oranges and one that is resistant and essentially has the meat and their kid will hopefully still tastes, good but won't get H L. B.

Really the Holy Grail of Citrus screening research, but that's not easy finding a resistant wound is like looking for a genetic needle in a haystack its extremely difficult to bring new warnings. We know of some kinds of trees related to orange is that are resistant and we're trying to access the genetics of those rigs.

Just been types by making crosses Fred says it could take more than a decade. So it's long term, there's always an element of serendipity in this but armed with that miracle resistant trees, they could be better prepared to tackle future diseases. It's a global interconnected world, we live in people and plant diseases move.

Pretty freely and so there will be another problem. Another disease come along I believe science will continue to deliver new tools that will make growing citrus easier over time I'll look forward to those days I'm sure will have other challenges that we'll face in time, but today citrus screening is here to stay.

Sure.

Franck family has been making cheese in the town of Luther of all day for over 150 years.

Every day he starts by warming over 600 gallons of milk pumped in from the milking barn.

Okay.

Okay.

Neil floating and now is like a 37 degrees.

Body temperature of about.

For every batch of cheese, he adds rennet enzymes that make the proteins in the milk clumped together into solid current leaving behind the liquid way.

Okay.

Okay.

Brendan.

Like apheresis spreading through the mail.

Okay.

After 30 minutes, a giant Curt has formed.

Sure.

Break open.

Sure.

Yes.

Thanks.

This machine start cutting it into pieces.

We could is real small in order to have very little moisture entities in order to make it to use which again eight four years.

France parents taught them how to make cheese when he was 22 years old.

And I on the seventh generation.

Producing teeth, and milking cows, and while there will be at least seven generations of Calgary walking on the farm as well.

He took over the family business with his brother in January of 2022, I think 50% of people has a great grandfather.

When a farmer.

Farmers shape the landscape in the Netherlands.

In the 13th century newly a fifth of what is now the Netherlands was under water over the centuries, the Dutch build dikes to hold back the seat farmers drained large portions of the reclaimed land to plant crops, but one of the only things that would grow on the wet soil with grass.

So raising hurdle for meat milk and cheese became big business.

The dairy industry eventually became a symbol of the Netherlands as much as tulips and windmills.

Milligan cows grades Dutch masterpieces by Vermeer, and then go by the 20th century, the Netherlands was producing so much cheez it was a valuable export.

Today, almost all Dutch dairy farms sell their milk to big factories that pasteurize, it and used machines to make tease on a large scale.

Yes.

Yes.

But Frank only works with raw milk, just 4% of Dutch dairy farms make how the in house like he does you still produce it on the way like my Great grandfather, Nik and I don't know of an extra goods, but highlighted.

And what machines do at factories, he's still prefers doing by hand like checking the consistency of the current himself.

It's just the way, it's like almost 30 degrees.

And the curve is real soft now.

Yes.

And now.

Oh here. It is like this is another way in over there there is no good anymore.

But I'm just checking.

Third is a bit.

Equally divided.

Really spread.

He can start draining out some of that liquid way, but nothing goes to waste.

These skins of that to make butter and leads the way to his pigs.

These are already happy with just the way.

And I like better on my Sandwich in the morning.

These slices the leftover occurred in this section is large enough for wheel of cheese.

He gauges the right amount by field.

Meanwhile, France employee Savannah prepares the old buckets, most of which were Frank screen fathers their olean for farmers in the Netherlands, who still use a word in buckets.

Frank drift the cloth below the surface.

And piles the Kurds on top.

Mcauliffe will help the last bit of way drain out.

They repeat the process for 12 wheels of tea.

There is a lot of way and so I think about $25 30 feet of rent something like that.

And it's cozy.

These presses squeeze out the remaining liquid.

All of this to US comes from the milk of Bronx, 200 female cows then.

<unk> has nearly one 6 million of them.

And they produce lots of nitrogen.

What they eat fertilizer grown grass in the summer and imported grain and soy year round.

Their P is full of nitrogen to and when it mixes with their poop it creates a gas called ammonia.

The booms of ammonia dropdown onto nature reserves and acidify the soil some nitrogen loving plants like grass take over while other native plants can absorb proper nutrients.

From there, it's a domino effect.

Many native plants grow week or die out snails can't get enough nutrients to build their shelves.

The birds that eat the snails can't develop egg whether it ticks are born with rail boats.

Inside one of the Netherlands largest national Parks Rangers like <unk> Fisher vendor, Inc, say oak and pine trees are dying out they are all sick, they're non not one that I would say Oh, you know thats very very fit or very.

A healthy three.

You can say that the three user starving its not getting all the nutrients that it needs to be a very healthy full growing oaktree that it can be.

Environmentalists' say 14 habitats in the country are on the brink of collapse. The dairy sector is one of the drivers of biodiversity loss in the Netherlands back in 1990 to what is now the European Union adopted a law known as the habitats directive requiring countries to designate nature are.

He has for conservation.

In order to comply the Netherlands introduced policies to cut nitrogen on these protected lands.

Back then that's farms had one of the highest ammonia emission rates in Europe by 2019, the industry had cut its emissions by almost two thirds covered manure storage like below this slatted floor has helped a.

If it stays sealed underground for enough time, the ammonia will evaporate as much.

Our understanding is two meters deep basement for manure and B.

But these efforts alone weren't enough.

The farms, releasing the most ammonia sat near those protected nature reserves, the nation's highest court said, the Netherlands needed to do more.

The government's scramble to comply.

Some lawmakers suggested cutting the number of animals in the country in half.

Yes.

Farmers were outraged.

Protested for weeks dumping manure on streets, and blocking roads with tractor.

Yes.

This was historically.

Oh go forward with anthem, along with that the Haynesville Fayetteville may have Vega.

Most of the time.

By early 2023, the government lowered the goal to a 50% cut.

But by then our pro forma political party named to the farmers citizen movement had swept provincial elections.

Yes.

Rick Looters is a party leader in this area, we haven't nitrogen law, which is rigid and is fully focused on dairy farming.

Everyone that this law is gone.

Soon after the government announced a $1 6 billion dollar plan to buyout and close up to 3000 high emitting farms near nature reserves.

A farmer can voluntarily take the buyout and possibly get more than their farm is worth.

Okay.

But for Franck selling his seven generation farm isn't an option.

Says as cows are like family.

As Gina is the highest ranking and she's the leader of the Earth.

Just the buses other cows away waiver had mainly so when she walks in zinc and Theres one other gout boring.

Move aside I'm, Gina, who I am and I want to drink <unk>.

He even got married on this farm surrounded by his cows.

And its tradition and his family to named cows after relatives.

And then they go off.

The other as well.

Alright.

Frank and his brother milk, the cows twice a day.

Perfect clean the data.

At left from right from from <unk> and leverage.

And then we.

Yes.

Connect.

The milking.

Galore compares a little bit of a vacuum underneath so it sucks the melt away.

Frank it's about E gallons and Milka day from each cow.

What he can milk in 15 minutes would have taken his grandfather, an entire day.

Yes.

Yes.

New technology helped dairy and livestock farms consolidate beginning in the mid 20th century.

A little pharma cheesemakers they quit.

And Invega <unk>.

Grow bigger to this day between 70 and 80% of the country's dairy is sent abroad, mainly to other European countries. That's all in the region of between let's say, London, Paris, and Berlin within the area of 800 kilometers in the USA you would call that a local product the Netherlands is also the <unk>.

<unk> largest exporter of meat it trades about $9 billion worth of pork beef and poultry internationally every year and it does it all on land now much bigger than the U S state of Maryland.

For much of the world the Netherlands became a roadmap for how to farm efficiently at scale.

But environmentalists' like Natasha Orla moms from the World Wildlife Fund see it differently.

I see the Netherlands, as an example of where everything went wrong exporting.

Meat and dairy and having the huge amount of manure.

In the Netherlands, causing all these environmental and societal problems.

The farmers, we spoke to said saving the environment should go hand in hand with preserving their centuries old traditions.

Okay.

Traditions like flipping the cheese in the first 24 hours is weaker and it like six times.

Okay.

Yes.

Flipping insurers both sides of the wheel will be round like the curve of the bucket.

It already turning yellow.

So.

It's a good sign.

Then he moves the Ts wheels into a salty brine.

So that is mainly for making a crush around the cheese, a little bit of salt. So we'll get deeper into the case for a little bit of faith.

Frank Ages as specialty how the for up to 10 years and a consistent 59 degrees Fahrenheit.

This is juan.

2013, so a 10 years old now.

Okay.

And still looking shiny.

Yes.

Here he stores hundreds of wheels over $100000 worth of cheese.

Every day, we turn them put an extra layer of clothing on top of it.

That liquid plastic coating seals in the moisture and of course to keep.

<unk> moved away.

So Eric when I lifted.

If you get stuck on the shale.

So that's why you flip it as well.

As it ages friendly bacteria buildup amino acids, these crystals to where the flavor of the case come from.

Frank can tell its aging well from the sound.

Flat.

Yes.

Frank is one of over 45000 people working in the Dutch dairy industry.

You just take out there from the farmers.

Jobs and income.

These people going to work they go to the Sydney probably.

And the Ole.

Villages at the countryside will be.

Become ghosts, Sydney I think.

Within 10, or 15 years, I'm worried who is going to produce our food.

And where is it coming from.

Many farmers now face a tough decision.

Take the buyout decrease their herds move their farms or make pricey upgrades to try to cut nitrogen emissions.

But not everyone can afford costly innovations. Many farmers are working on narrow margins or are already in that.

Farmers don't get them.

Loan from from the bank because they say we don't know if you can still farm. After this Q2 be deregulation plus farmers don't even know yet if innovations could actually save their farm from closure.

Okay.

Researchers at <unk> University are hoping they can.

This is not a commercial day for <unk>.

He said simple.

<unk> Kees de Koning he runs the university's dairy campus.

His team is testing different iterations of the slotted for Frank as we can.

Dwells Ravi satellite the Yoy, then the solids.

They're also studying the effect of robotic scrapers and poop vacuums by quickly moving waste into closed storage vacuums reduce methane and ammonia loss, but he's estimates one like this could cost over $20000 and a farm of 120 cows would need to.

He says changing cows diets is a cheaper option. So January feed gazans saturate that we have less ammonia mission are less nausea losses.

His team leads the cows different combinations of food than they use these trough to test how much the animals eat and their mission.

This system is identified so we know exactly which Dol.

The bulks.

Okay.

So with innovations can't help farmers still have the option of the buyout.

As of November 2023, nearly 1000 livestock farms had registered for it.

Almost a quarter where dairy farms.

But the government would pay them out for a while.

Take at least another six months to a year before that.

Finalized.

That same month, our new right wing Party P. VB one the most seats in the country's parliamentary elections.

Cared builders the parties leader spoken farmer protests earlier in the year.

Scaling our farmers.

And the other investors.

Total microchip problem in the Netherlands.

The party has signaled that wants to stop government spending on initiatives to curb nitrogen, including the funding for the buyout plan.

They called the <unk> will form a coalition with other pro farmer parties, and we can make new laws.

It's quite simple, but a coalition could take months the World Wildlife Fund says this delay will only lead to further deterioration of nature. Meanwhile, farmers are in limbo.

Limbo to sterilize, the agricultural sector and that limbo is very dangerous when nature as well because it still suffering.

At La <unk>.

I can feel for them.

This problem isn't unique to the Netherlands.

Dairy farmers in Ireland might have to decrease the size of their herds because of unsafe nitrogen levels in rivers, which are causing algae blooms.

New Zealand has some of the most polluted water ways in the world.

Dairy farming is one of the biggest sources of these dangerous nitrate levels in drinking water.

And in the U S State of California, Agriculture has contributed to hazardous air pollution.

All of these countries will have to contend with the same questions the Netherlands spaces today.

How do we feed ourselves reserve tradition, keep economies running and protect our planet I don't see myself as being opposing to farmers.

Close to the system the way it is now ecologically a disaster and it's also about bringing pharmacy appropriate income. So basically it says a system, that's being broken and the system needs to be fixed.

Frank seems open two effects too if it helps.

Later, our climb and bring it on.

Maybe then his family can continue making Ts for another seven generations I hope that dairy farmers have a future in the Netherlands, I think we're really connected to the landscape I hope a farmer won't grow too big so it can be run on a family scale.

I think that's a beautiful way of living.

You probably know the cabin ish banana you can find these type of banana in every supermarket around the world. There are so popular because they're yummy, they look nice and the Raven as a transport is high yielding Scott fixed scheme since theyre traveling swell and tastes pretty good comes and assigned package, but theres a <unk>.

They are still they don't have no seeds means Cavendish bananas are clones of each other so the only way to propagate them is in vitro or by taking new growth called suckers from the base of an older plant, but since they're all genetic copies Cavendish are really vulnerable to disease the domino effect.

You have everything wrong with just one loan one disease can kill everything plan by plan.

Exactly what's happening with tier four one of the deadliest plant diseases out there.

The fungus doesn't spread to humans, but it does eventually killed a banana plant so no more fruit grows.

I just guess the fungus probably started somewhere in south East Asia in the nineties and quickly spread across the globe than in 2019, It hit Latin America combined with the Caribbean that area grow 75% of the world's bananas, but he made owner like young the module the impact obligate if was that even not on the niche are gone.

And convenient.

The point about is it inventory part of it and doing a live our values and our EDA and when all of it by the end of my important variables, you're Madonna EDA.

To make sure the fungus doesn't spread farms across Colombia have implemented bio security measures.

<unk> was one of the first firms in the country to detect tier four.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Workers' washed down in disinfect the underside of any car that comes in just in case theres infected soil hiding in the trends.

Critical care, but then with little incremental debt Anthony conductor.

We're going with these things.

So for potash global weakening for Soma, So heater cipla.

Cipla mental hurdle several available to the cultural joined the settlement.

So eloquently.

So let me let me so in Portugal as you consume.

Hey, Ravi.

Yes.

Yes.

Antonio's team built cement pass throughout the farm so on their way to harvest workers are walking on open soil ebay more than what we thought I think I might think almost zero. So yeah. This will obviously irrelevant.

Once they've reached the area ready to be harvested workers walked through with sanitizing Footbath made of ammonium and premiere quinoa heder food.

Food and paper and they think of oriented patio G&A forgone his thoughts on our cologuard, mostly luminaries and wireless products Liz Lange Lasalle Sofia, therefore out in the field workers measure the banana fingers to make sure. They are ready to harvest theyre, usually ready about 12 to 13 weeks after the fruits them shows up.

One worker cuts down to 65 pound bundle, while the other catches it and carries it to the cable way.

Yes.

Yes.

That table with system brings all of those banana bunches through the packaging plant.

First workers sanitize, the bunches with Corey.

Here He said okay Brian.

Controller.

Thanks, a lot and.

Let me check the bananas for quality and any signs of Fusari and damage.

They cut off and throw bushels into huge tank.

<unk> not only preserves the bananas the washes off any of the latex that naturally occurs in the appeal.

He and his deep cut into smaller bunches of five to seven four terawatt hours will email about who we are.

Corona for the same April of this year.

Yes.

Next come those famous sticker parcel of Alibaba is <unk>.

But it was the most impacted workers wrap the banana carefully really don't Bruce.

Robin has holes in it the bananas can ripen as they travel no more than four hours. After the bananas are harvested those boxes and up on pallets loaded onto trucks and if it doesn't what on the Ericsson and Huawei synthesis and God there on their happened o'meara synthesis.

In fact, the Walmart.

Okay.

The bananas are truck to the nearby port where they moved onto ships. This shipments headed to the U S.

With equipment bananas and people moving along this global supply chain, it's easy to see how the fungus could spread if tier four does sneak into a farm. The Colombian government has laid out strict guidelines for containing the fungus cause. He then this time why you link advance Yonkers at really swollen seminar empty say that on your own.

So if let's say window castle and laughing go on all of the laws that means they've found symptoms like the yellow.

The lease is fleeting.

Once tier four as identified in a plant you can't just kill that one plant and the fungus goes about 10 feet deep into the soil was the pathogenic <unk> seen the soil is almost impossible to eradicate so you have to kill off all the plants in that area.

Our growth in <unk>.

Pro DRAM or chemo, then youll get about you got a final Royal Bliss handle there anything here that barrier for Lucky and some momentum here for long alumina pull up a sense yet.

Desktop windows with Atlanta, passing through our powerful data.

To keep operating the rest of the farm <unk>, followed the government's three zone plan or not.

Uh Huh, that's one lateral hub gain and last one I must say the canola plants I've only seen two months assessing mellowed everything gets you must be injected herbicide kills all the plants in zone, a notional mendes isn't how bleak or not all of them.

<unk> equals afford a comparable that TARP, so birds won't land on the fungus and spread it around there also can now is around the zone to keep any water away from the infected area.

In don't be called the buffer zone, Japan being thing get them to a lot Blanca pattern.

This will never waver in today, so I'll need us.

Finally in zone six plants are allowed to grow but they're constantly monitored for signs of tier four.

Jose estimates bio security has caused this farm as much as $5 million since 2019, so they're pricey, but the measures are working keeping the fungus.

So they might a content genre Magdalena is this out of some the BARDA mental leeway there was ideal drugs out of the vehicle and the woman <unk>.

These bio security measures have contained the fungus in Colombia and kept it from spreading to Ecuador, the largest exporter of bananas in the world, but as long as can wipe out an entire fruit variety is not stopped we know because it's happened before in.

In the early 19 hundreds of banana called growth Michelle with the most popular but by the 19 fifties. One is strained on the Panama disease bypass and help reduction of growth Michelle Luckily Cavendish was resistant to that first stream. So it took over as the banana of choice. The problem was banana companies build their entire supply chains are.

Around this one cavendish variety in 2019, they exported 20 million bananas and supported millions of jobs globally.

Now the Cavendish is also vulnerable history repeats itself.

So because of the slowdown the covenant cooking bananas like planned teams are also at risk for tier four.

For a few security because the plant. These are a staple for Latin America in Africa in many other countries. They are part of our daily data.

So yeah, the newest rates of who cerium is scary for both Cavendish and plantings, but this time around we have advanced science.

Researchers across the globe are working toward one goal Carromata reallocate fan favorite three centers I don't know whether that will be done this guidance actually invented a banana that did just that back in 2019, Dr. James Dale announced that his team had successfully injected the DNA from a resistant banana into a cabin dish and <unk>.

It worked we found deceleration away from the line of Cavendish, which appears to be completely resistant to Apple. The thing we haven't done yet is a taste test and that's because PJM look smell feel exactly the same as every other banana, we've only change one gene.

But no one would buy his miracle banana because it was genetically modified well on your way.

In international body I'm, only if a guy had become integral zone when I saw it needs to get out and about and of course, when the argument Borrego Brower Komodo comparing approval in the EU. Most member countries have either partly or fully band gmos in the U S. They're allowed but feared one argument against Gmos is that these modified <unk>.

<unk> would quickly spread their genes and kill out biodiversity, but with bananas, that's not a problem. The Jamestown route because they are steroid you can grow at GM banana next to a non jam banana for 50 years and the Jane will not move from one to be incredibly frustrating. This a solution, but it's it's a scientific solution.

But not a political solution. So scientists had to go back to the drawing board using what they learned from James to play the non GMO game Fernando is a breeder for key gene genetics company in the Netherlands anything it's the best way to get around GMO regulations is through traditional breeding, meaning you take two different types of bananas.

The cabin niche and one that is resistant and you essentially have the meat and their kid is hopefully resistant to Panama disease, but still tastes. Good Mike Cavendish Crossbreeding all traditional bidding is something that happens everyday nature. So the bees pollinating different flowers with other cloud. So that's what we're doing.

Here, we are acting as speed Fernando has found a few resistant bananas to cross with Cavendish, but most of them are not even edible bananas are the bananas that are full of seat. Thank you Scott.

And across those of the cabin dishes hard.

It's very difficult to compete in.

Not impossible.

Try to cross that you need to do it many many many times to get <unk> for James to make that first GMO banana. It took him nearly 10 years since our first field trial.

Are those future bananas that are traditionally bread it'll take just as long.

He will take lots of the year because the lifecycle of the banana is quite slow, but the longer it takes to traditionally brita resistant Cavendish the more of the disease spread and the more stranger for cerium could be released Fernando says, there's a bigger picture way to attack. This problem diversity take Tomatoes for example, you go to.

The grocery store in there, maybe 10 or more different types of tomatoes, cherry buying beef Roma that's diversity. So Glenn tomato gets in trouble it will be a huge loss Fernando and his colleagues have the same vision for bananas we.

We have ramped down as England, Diana why not try to incorporate that into the market. So that you can go to listen to the market you have a complete bench of different options of bananas that you can choose there are hundreds of different banana varieties around the world a friend of mine collective went up in Papua New Guinea that he said if you didn't know or do you think you'd rating a strawberry.

Sorry.

Seemingly different flavors and diversity would also help farms, but if you have different types of bananas grown together broadly one banana will be more resistant and the next one so the other one can stop the spread of the disease to the next slide so why haven't companies diversified because it's too expensive and complicated.

To change of $25 billion industry built around a monoculture. So until a solution is found these bio security measures will have to be the short term fix for keeping the big business of bananas alive.

And do you end up with in consortium with LNG.

He is already knows all sort of more just a this is the I mean, I think Oregon, Louisiana Zama.

Making the butter begins on site.

To make our metrics on a about the markdown sales must churn with 2400 liters of Queen.

As a chance beans, methodical lives and sticks together, forming battered green.

You may need thank you Aldo.

That was all done.

So I must say on our diversity by Veeva, they want a zama vignettes to foot antibodies that will go after.

After 30 minutes, so spinning the Chang is open.

<unk>.

Is it two figure around novella.

Zero is a bond guy blew me away.

No.

<unk> <unk> of loan that actually fulfill seltzer to surveil, you said gone back.

Non phone then cleans the about the grain the filter back to mute and the churn is left to run for another 15 to 30 minutes until all of the grain become a single mountain water.

Illinois, Selman not <unk> at all.

Sure.

<unk> said Massa sibelle, although like a yield on that.

<unk> says it is haphazard.

<unk>.

Before the market can be needed. It's left the rest for a couple of days to Nevada flavor, Oklahoma nudity or conditioning, whether this is a what was it 42 dyncorp bellagio immersion and Curtis have Ella.

And was that ducommun Samsung.

SaaS and young women.

And you commented on both the dermis.

Okay.

I'd be mezz onto the bought the house 50 kilogram blocks of butter umbrella and flights into smaller pieces.

But there is needed at a wooden roller on a rotating table using a 19th century technique known as Mike says this removes the excess buttermilk and creates a fluke is smooth texture.

It was introduced into the process by Muslims Nordea found there Jennifer.

Only insulin.

That's helpful Matt.

I will tell you it's all in is undeveloped.

Todd I assume a plateau and so on SEDAR Norwalk.

Paul This is Steve <unk>.

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Setup at Conatus.

Costs are up as al pointed this out of our league causes Leslie is more level does the quota clever yolanda.

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Perfect job Avast, Pablo detail Mayo clinic, often said if your Alt a sector of America.

At module workshop centrifuges are typically used to remove the remaining buttermilk, but here it is not entirely.

That's all I got.

Uh huh.

So I thought I'd to surplus nail find golf for well my legacy.

I like to say, it's also never yet.

<unk> developed <unk>.

Give us one.

The Tvs sold off.

Google Vangilder depicted can avail ill deal with <unk> on it through some elective.

As I said.

Paul.

The cooking sauce immediately upon them Alex asthma.

This process requires so much scale requires people to have printed on a year.

And I'm just using your <unk>.

Okay.

Resource sector, mainly our second Lauderdale separate it in February.

Well good job adapting our segment that does all of that is also well suited for pro forma <unk>.

Oklahoma Pls wind down here.

Jessica module.

Matthew Taylor.

I'm also hoping that it will evolve or the <unk> will fill a memorial day sizzle.

Our fundamental Stifel intro Omar for cohort two glasses for component <unk> has here.

Therefore.

Let's say it was done.

The server.

The final step is adding fine so.

They actually don't want instead of a day across it.

Sure.

Although volumes if they keep up with you about <unk>.

It's available.

Absolutely.

Setup neutral do anything with it.

Softgel just.

This development.

During this process the bathroom would lose one to two liters of water.

They will pay less LTV.

Yes, you bet that has two phases.

When the Butler has reached the right level of flexibility is shaped into a blocked.

And thanks for color.

Microbalance properly food article about Humana.

You may not have Apple <unk>.

<unk>.

I'll I'll tell you I'll do that.

Yes.

This you will know that Baidu Velupillai, Bob Gallagher sooner.

Well Glassman Zaffino Cooper.

For the retail Colo agile EMEA.

There's one or two player Honeywell.

Likewise that bill alluded to Belgium.

CEVA.

Yes.

I will present the group.

Sure enough other glasses demo.

Let's see what it was all the growth going there.

When the butter, which is the ideal consistency, it's ready to be shaped.

Yes.

The need in Butler is placed into this machine called the pusher.

The Bushehr squeezes the butter for cylinder onto a table with life with a guitar string copter nickname Marie Antoinette.

The top left there is shaped with Python you puzzled by a team that works up to five pounds of butter abate children Sanmina.

Sylvia on parcel I guess all his thoughts.

Is that fair.

Yes.

So comping off welfare.

They must provide our timely no vessel fulfill their newly built inside report I thought it would.

We also as you look towards that.

Another signature a broadly diffused stance.

Or should you cover in offshore Colombia.

So that is it almost all the there is a path.

California novella.

<unk> is initially so ourself.

Some of our not all of it.

The data is all about.

Little Volvo talking to owners.

David I can promise all goes out.

<unk> also fame and will you be doing well.

All of the work focused on <unk>.

One it makes around 13 different about the recipes throughout the year.

They built a sizzle.

I think one of our investments are more quality rework on the Wassa today say for next year.

Elisa clinical suite or they can do the math with you guys.

Now how about you.

They've also had developed T cell specific Walter Thank you Paul.

<unk> corporate and <unk>.

All sorts of relapse.

Some of the most popular flavors, both nee makes our seaweed boxer smoked salt butter, vanilla back, though and epilepsy.

Yes.

Through the form each of these factors can be slightly adapted depending on the request.

Now provides the archaean bill if you want to spread that make absolute demand, but advise amped up securities.

So all in all that was yesterday and it is up and sell it.

Hey, Judy Garland.

But if demand is spread by doing it like Hulu live load yeah. Okay.

First of all yes, those good your bill if you wanted to put it.

<unk> has also been busy creating recipes like this past week in few backing.

So, let's say they are volatile, but I've said also it won't.

So the Alco naturally.

I mean ochsner.

<unk> also.

Also built any setup.

After the electrically affect children.

Im wondering it looks like all multinationals.

Sure.

Our partner Isla <unk> <unk> in February.

That's good levels of a low double again.

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<unk>.

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Okay.

Behind this passion is the previous Ona journey, who retired a few years ago.

And while he may no longer working Michelle his philosophy for making a top tier product remains a powerful tenet.

Our new garlic empty.

E Mail.

Like recall.

Surely there how are you having going wrong.

So there's a little.

We're especially pleased at all.

Laughs amongst these adult I think getting a popular savi.

Local neighborhood as Joel dissolve or lack of open on this segment.

Really cool thing opened at home.

Jose downtown.

Daniel.

The format met for the fall 2000.

And at the end of the day, it's the pleasure that customers get bind about there that motivates bogey to continue.

I'm on the developers said Wallace who here.

And I think Mr Shaw, well I'll leave it at all and Ikea.

<unk> sure.

Can you be a Qualcomm <unk>.

Although <unk> was up only feel offers on their horses for Zika.

Yes.

Our next stop is Spain.

Which produces the worlds costly of Tam.

Black Iberian pigs, the stem from wild boars, and how do they consider that the legacy since long before our time in the year 77 Roman right. There plenty D. Elder place. This video quality in 14 93, when he sailed across the Atlantic for the second time, Christopher Columbus had library.

Think about this carve out the most expensive of the Moe SaaS for 4100 euros, which is over $4500, but despite the high price. This remains a local favorite.

Okay bear in pigs can be found in the southern and western regions of the Iberian Peninsula, which comprises Spain, and Portugal, and Spain Hum production is confined to the provinces of Salamanca, whoever Cordoba, Cathetus and buy the house.

<unk> also produces it under the name presumed to America.

In Asia Burnham is protected by the youth predicted designation of origin.

Five Spanish provinces, where it is produced a split into four different protected this nations of Oregon out of the total production of Birmingham, only 6% comes with a black label, indicating it's the 100% <unk>.

Pigs are raised in an ecosystem known as <unk>.

And we got out of that and we want to Sierra definitely less vessel Animality secret airline, So Missoula, Dan Kong lymphoma local motor for the recall.

Do you mean cellular O'hara, the Russell wisdom would support a pan inhibitor Mccartney Minto.

The pigs, leaving the wild roaming freely in that that has some very regulations. This shouldn't be more than two pigs per hectare or grassland that that has that is rich in olive nuts, embarrassed, but especially in acorn called bejar doesn't Spanish which are rich in nutrients and fatty acids basically a superfood for biggs.

At a fairly radical but at the end of the next time in there. They look I believe in both songs Tangibles Casino more Tomas must almost flat you may notice that Asa Alitalia and leave it above for salad Asa Southern most grew up in north.

Okay.

There are government.

After learning all about the Blackberry and pig and why is that.

Special pagan different from any on the brain. We are at a local company here in Corsicana Lazar to find out about the making process of them.

Pam confirm the rear leg of the pig most companies, but also to your the from leg called Pallotta and use the rest of the meat for other products like Jerusalem.

Lastly, all stores over 150000 legs and its sellers.

Some of the hands made here come from uneven rated breed of the Iberian pig the months' how do they how Google which has black patches on its skin and can only be found in the theater there whether the.

The pig that killed when they're 15 months old.

<unk> and collectors are then Boyd unsold for 15 to 20 days depending on weight.

As far as you look at the checkout allow pizza in humans.

Antonella into somewhat of a young kilowatt municipals.

After starting the process start to gradually slowdown the lag spend about two months in a temperature controlled room, then they're moved to in every room for six to nine months.

London uniform rental data.

The waiver gone up in pet owners, and it's indicative of a link between out of video and the hormonal propeller and how long for that and how long has a funding yes. It can kahala hydro Malibu gain loss.

Hydro theater.

It's within our firm other liquid buffer below other macro.

Lack of 19 at Wuxi that when a pathetic.

Convert them into the Kinder and I've got the right person.

Good film that other element of it.

The final stage of caring and also the longest is the one in salary.

On average on a barren ham needs a couple of years to reach its peak flavor with some lags skincare for much longer.

Mommy not important in this equation.

The high yield so Daniel quadrennial passing Ricky.

Okay.

Okay.

To get a better understanding of how Iberian Ham is labeled on the market. We visited predictors there last year that are shopping Seville, the sources local product for Monday, Lucia and no far did that 250 kilometers.

But how many radical what'll equals the calibre Cassandra represent bottled water call audits.

The maximal calibre is telco lot of <expletive>.

Hummel VM for CME vertical they're in Europe.

Okay.

Good Lamama, you'll provide affordable anesiva VM policy anyway, because they reopen and secondly, allo and levered above element double combo.

So last year in the calendar.

Russell.

Sylvia.

Lamar STM correct Antiradical ice block.

Ralph I'll refer to the last part of it because I'm going to leave it about hydro Nossa elements out of home video they sell favorable bareboat cracking to available cash in our favor to Campbell LOI auto has summed up the calendar months of Aqua capital at the end of it I'm already seeing banks Hela cell for <unk> Blanco.

How do we know if you cycled home.

We need to be.

So.

On the <unk> two miles.

A little bit of temperature.

It's a good one.

As with its origin in environment I Banham is carved using a specific technique, which can take a lot of time to learn.

Sure.

And how long the radical <unk> lot of Golar.

<unk> and reflects seamless.

As we embark on the CT RCM aimed at our film they'll move galore.

Product and solve all the lager Asa in la garments and prepare to Monica lung market issue fairly soon.

Yes.

Sure.

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Maximo and maximum room at all the long Charles Tavis Mccourt Hummel.

The <unk>, obviously, the other available Nikos <unk> con laggard Asa equal of different launches.

So this one is our how many vehicles. This one is on your percent <unk>, which is the highest grade it.

And like such a divine shave have never seen it like this you know you used to those like very long just a bit sad license with one it looks like kind of royall and the rooms.

So nice.

And actually before I try it I just wanted to point out our shiny.

Bob.

So good I have no words in my voice.

Okay.

So good.

So.

That's the thing they are sons as me every time that I have like good quantity or meat in general that it doesn't take like so even though if the main stages of production of course.

Nice and flavorful.

There's nothing you can say, they're calling in here is really traces back to the actual fake that made this.

Really nice and especially that you should keep it is very nice greasy added a bit more of a battery texture and the modeling as well because this begs a smaller than usual piggeries too and there is more muscles in her legs rather than spot.

And it really has a different flavor compared to all of them.

In Switzerland, we see how they produce authentic with teeth.

One of the five most Eden cheeses in the U S.

Well im actually in the village of Fulton and Omnichannel, which is in the region just east of bed.

80% of whole Emmenthaler production comes from this region with 150 participants.

And its name comes from her best enabled with MSG and Tao, meaning valley in German.

In the U S. It's known as with Chi.

<unk> has iconic home.

I'd say the worlds largest chi.

And until the AAP can only be produced in these regions in Switzerland.

It was granted a IP protection from the EU in 2010.

Meaning that these areas all the protected designation of origin.

But there are few qualifications for this.

Milk has to be from dairy farms, Nike within 20 kilometers away.

It must be produced using raw milk.

17700 tons of Emmenthaler are produced each year in this region by 150 family diaries.

Chief production started in this area over 200 years ago.

The Hilli region, so good for cattle grazing.

The Emmenthaler showcase right show diary, which opened in 1989.

The process of cheese starts at the farmers so need a high quality Rollman don't we hit up the milk on 32 degrees.

Put inside the bacteria. They ran it we have to wait because we wanted to make a relationship between the fat and protein you are cutting the cord.

Down to a size of four to six millimeters and then youre hitting up another time to 50 free degrees pump.

Pumping up two forms and then you are pressing that for 12 hours.

The cheapest priced under hydraulic pressure for up to 12 hours.

<unk> spent eight weeks in the womb fermentation seller at 22 degrees Celsius.

It then goes into a storage center for up to two months before its connected by the wholesaler.

This makes the famous sweet taste and smooth texture of boutiques.

The world famous homes that.

That created by a reaction in the bacteria.

After one month of storage.

<unk> of bacteria, Propionibacterium, Gemini confused lactic acid and releases carbon dioxide.

These bubbles become trapped and achieve Ryan and form home.

Also known as <unk>.

But while the cheese is so large.

As always if you have until the wheels is heavily regulated at night have a diameter of 80 to 100 centimeters.

They need to be a minimum of 75 Peter Graham.

The chief <unk> here.

Graham Cox 19, Swiss francs, COVID-19 delays.

So one way you could save a $1900.

We have to pay taxes also switch.

200 years ago. They have the regimentation did you have to pay taxes on that piece and note on kilogram. So they may.

Choose we and they have to pay for new ones with taxes and <unk>.

200 years, we producing.

Minimum 75 kilogram wins.

<unk> has matured into a full month classic eight months reserve.

12 months IOP extra and the 24 month Nagual dermatology.

The taste of the inventory P J.

It's unique.

Her two co piece makes comparing us to take.

A red wine and a good red wine.

We visited the showcase that ROI restaurant Detroit the cheese.

And the guys Mcarthur Goldman page, what you can see is the <unk> kind of rubbery texture to it.

Michelle.

If I Miss most latest <unk> and other <unk> iPad hasnt really full flavor to it because it Nathan raw milk not pulse Joyce notes that you might get in the state.

We anticipate Barry very kind of fun.

No can playback.

Thanks.

Yes.

How does this differ to the 12 month aged.

It's a lot less kind of free and bouncing to the touch.

But that rich nutty flavor, it's really starting to come through this room downstairs. When we went into here in the dairy with arena at the minute you Wilkin does it need for Naughty Raymond Steve and that is exactly what you can get in the team now.

Come from sort of like a free tier my old team see something which is.

This tactic to add it's Terry Duffy.

To be an authentic and mentality.

It needs to have the <unk> logo on it.

Cheese number.

On the range we put.

Our brands talk before we press the genes and is something like at Keybanc.

You're just growing directly into the ranks.

So if you are cutting the cheese wheel into pieces on each.

Each range you should find.

Part of this Emmenthaler, Switzerland, local and you find a solid number on top and refuse number our customers can go on our website emmenthaler prints GH and keep this number inside.

And Google map shows you, where this pro docs was produced and which date.

And the diaries need to have this protection.

And Taylor.

Well most coffee cheap.

So 95 persons of that work as <unk> said as a Swiss cheese or shoes with holes called inventory.

Our Frank Emmenthaler, So Yemen taller, Switzerland, and the brand is protected.

Label, and we have also a bacteria inside our teams we are the only brand T sprint who are using this one and so we can not only look on the package itself.

Original inventory IOP.

Can also annualize.

This production. So these are our activities and the brand.

It says we have people who are working only for searching the region between the Coke So it's big.

Work behind you.

Ramirez Holden its catch from private fishermen in the bustling months <unk> Harbor.

<unk> compressors began issuing new Zealand, new but with warming ocean temperatures starting populations have dropped by more than 80% I got so bad that in 2000 and for regulators ban fishing during the spring spawning season in the years that followed the government shortened the entire fishing season to just six months and set a fishing.

Last year, a fisherman card only 30000 tonnes compare that to the 19 eighties when they called in over 100000 tons a year.

It's caused recent soybean prices to double.

During the season, the fishery refresh of the factories and go directly to get cleaned we know that the good quality of service. For example is the summertime and then.

During this time, we intensified the activity to do that as much as possible, but to keep producing year round. When fishing is banned Ramirez introduced this breathing system in 2015 first the fish go into O'brien for 30 minutes and then into the freezer held at about zero degrees Fahrenheit.

Tim I was in charge of quality control and food safety.

Is divestments, such as Union city EMS capacity that the citizens.

There's Nielsen Atlantis.

It's serving you though remain in the freezer for up to six months, but Fatima says it doesn't affect the fish much because sardines are naturally so fatty.

At four P M workers pull the fish out of the freezer. So they can defrost overnight.

Dominion is pretty miniscule.

Scott.

It almost <unk>.

From here on out the Defrosted fish go through the same machines as the fresh one.

It removes the head end cuts off the tail.

These grant Bangalore to those requests.

It can easily Si.

Sorry, Matt.

As you say should I gotta Sylvia this used to all be done by hand, but this machine has tripled the speed of guts removal.

This boom in Houma vis bouvier xylene, but is it clear.

Okay.

Mr. <unk> says there is still good.

With me that but an email, but some of the products like the delays are too delicate for the machines workers on the specialty lines still hand cut them using century old techniques.

This newest round bundled into this theres a lot this one's packs they add on the lid and group them in batches Boise rounds that Oh crazy good.

They get cooked for 30 minutes first in hot steam and then dry heat once done the workers, adding other natural ingredients like spicy sauce peppers or carat next the cans get weighed then this machine splashes and a bit of either water tomato sauce or olive oil.

And then we were lacking at Semi-colon provider level.

Yes, other they can drop into baskets in this pool of recycled rainwater.

Workers, then pushed the cans into the sterilizing machine to kill off any bacteria on the outside.

<unk> five then alone.

The concert.

In theory, one kind of fish could last for more than a decade. It was actually a French guy who invented canning in the early 18, hundreds when Napoleon put out a call for a way to feed US Army and the method took off in popularity with its long stretch of coastline and abundance of fish, Portugal was prime to get in on the market.

And in 18 53 men wells great Great grandfather opened the world's first fish cannery and Villareal de Santo Antonio, but the 19 twenties there were hundreds of competing factories, along the coast and during World War. Two there was room for all of them, Portugal was neutral so it exported cans to both sides. Some cans were found at the back.

Carryover Hitler some of them were Portuguese and work from from our own company and in 1940. The founders' grants an opened up a new factory, where it is now and mountain genius by then the sardine had become a cultural icon, but after World War two the industry started declining we were the revolution in the 90 907.

Before that lots of companies at no raising area. They have a tough times of course, so no frozen facilities climate change and overfishing were also big contributors to the decline by 2013, there were only 20 canneries left so how did ramirez stay afloat first because of its loyal staff spanning generation.

<unk>.

Ramirez runs an onsite daycare and many of its current employees graduated.

Brian If you have anything to Amazon FX, FINMA and Jeff Feeler Senior notes for say the bond buyback rash oatmeal by standup Atlanta, Salma, you'll know more diesel demand up Atlanta.

<unk> four <unk> the second reason was doing.

Blaine Lasalle.

Original cans opened with a key and we're often made of tin which rested more easily.

<unk> wells grandfathers switch to aluminum cans in the seventies.

We develop together with our with our can supply easy open way of opening Kenneth Sarbanes or Q&A.

Along with the freezing system fish cutting and seeming machines Ramirez also added this finishing line.

Okay something said.

Lots of them believe that.

They then seek us out we will put up the preferred replacing <unk> with Synthes <unk> cartridge strength quality lab pulled nearly 100 sample can throughout the day, they test for ph levels and check that seeming and sterilization we're done right.

It does Mike Martinez.

Ling at Hawaii gas and all of us.

Ethan <unk> with or without selling all these machines have tripled the company's production speed from 100000 cans everyday in 2015 to 300000 cans per day now finally to stay competitive when starting populations dropped Ramirez added new products tuna salad mackerel salmon and cod fish.

So this difficulty became an opportunity to do other very interesting products today. The company sells 70 different products and has introduced an online shopping platform, we have spot almost to 50 countries. The spread is all over the world.

Thanks Sam.

Today's currency sneakers.

Pronto fluid thing Mohali that went through then a fast deal the transport that will.

Well starting populations could fall again Manuel doesn't seem worried you've been here for almost two centuries. So I think we will overcome.

These are sugar maple trees, and the Maple build has 460000 of them spanning across the northeast Kingdom of Vermont and indicator.

Starting in December each year cruise spend two months, putting plastic taps into each one of these trees by hand the.

The same tree can be kept for decades next.

Next year will you reuse everything and we tap eight inches high or low and eight inches over so that we never hometree. It always allows us to heal.

The sugaring season, usually runs from February to April, but that's completely dependent on the weather forecast.

Obviously, when the weather cooperates and when mother nature gives us.

To pull and that's when the temperatures above freezing during the day and below freezing at night, that's when the chaparral.

When this app is running its extracted either through vacuum tubing or gravity.

And miles of plastic tubing carry the stat from the trees to pump stations. These are called reverse osmosis houses. This is where the sop is collected and the water and the SAP is filtered out beating a high sugar content concentrate SAP has 2% sugar concentrate is 20% sugar. So what we're doing in the reverse osmosis processes were.

Pulling water out of the staff and concentrating the maple syrup into another solution.

Because so much water is removed during this process. It takes about 44 gallons of fab to make just one gallon of maple syrup that sugar concentrate is loaded up into trucks and brought to the sugar House, where it's finally turn into maple syrup.

In traditional sugaring techniques, turning SAP into syrup means boiling it over direct heat the water evaporates, but the Maple Guild pioneered a new method because it speeds up the process, it's called steam crafting <unk>.

Instead of boiling the fab it steam heated at a lower temperature using coiled.

With this system the Maple Guild can make 55 gallons of Maple syrup in just 90 seconds.

Mylan traditional boiling techniques that can take anywhere between nine and 56 hours to produce just one gallon of syrup not only has the same crafting method quicker, but the company says it also produces a more nuanced maple flavored.

Because that can go bad quickly it has to be transported to the sugar house within three hours of being tapped unusually within six hours it will become that Golden Maple syrup.

When the SAP is running it can run for a day it can run for a week and then it can stop for two days or three weeks and it's really whatever the weather gives us but whenever that SAP is running we will have people at this plant 18 24 hours a day non stop while that SAP is running because we can't afford to lose any.

Got it.

Once the saps turned into syrup, it's tested to make sure the sugar levels are right now.

It's done through filters to remove impurities and it's tested for grading the light of the color of Sara the higher the grade.

The Maple syrup has a short cooking time, it's lighter in colour, giving it a consistent great a golden rating. The Golden syrup is then pumped into stainless steel barrels where it's stored until it's time to be bottled up each bottle is filled capped.

Cleaned and labeled by hand here the company expects to fill over 1 million barrels this year.

The Maple Guild is vertically integrated meaning it owns every step of this process from tree to table. The maple industry has been stagnant for decades upon decades. Upon decades, it's all small farmers doing their own thing on their own property.

Selling to the biggest Guam areas and those guys, making syrup, mostly mostly private labels unbranded and selling it out of the industry until we came along and we're a vertically integrated we own the trees right through the manufacturing very capital intensive which is probably the barriers to entry.

For anybody else to do this.

In the last five years, the Maple syrup industry has undergone somewhat of a revolution and at the forefront are companies like the Maple Guild.

Canada has historically dominated this market producing 70% of the world's maple syrup, and while it's still owns a top spot the U S is gaining ground.

The United States production has doubled in the last decade rising from $1 9 million gallons produced in 2008 to $4, one 6 million in 2018.

And leading the charge as Vermont.

Doug the Maple syrup capital of the U S. The tiny state produces 40% of the Maple syrup in the entire United States in fact per months production has grown 254% since 2000.

So the market was set for large scale production, but no one in the Vermont Maple industry had taken on the unconventional sugaring model.

The Maple Guild at.

It entered the scene as demand was taking off breweries across the state has started using maple syrup in their products.

Oversee interest in pure Maple syrup had spiked and Americans on a health food kick, we're turning to maple syrup, as a natural alternative to refined sugar and the Naperville is still riding that wave selling branded products across 50 states and infusing a therapy with flavors like coffee pumpkin Spice and Bourbon, we had original vanilla.

Bourbon coffee and salted caramel smells like.

The world.

Which is where it came from.

Okay like sugar I'm in.

And while it all depends on what mother nature give them. The Maple go does have an annual production goal.

Our goal.

150 to 200000 gallons of Maple syrup.

We'd be okay with.

The company is not only bottling it up as syrup, but using it in about 17 other maple based products first there's the maple butter.

<unk> has come down and then poured into this mixer until it becomes a luscious screen that surface cooked and yard by hand, and then hits the assembly line to be capped and labeled.

This is what I've been waiting for this all done.

Hmm.

Like I say.

Yes.

Oh God, there's also naturally fermented maple vinegar eight different maple sweetened teas.

And seven unique Maple, Sweden waters.

The Maple Gill hopes that by introducing maple into as many categories as possible. It can show the versatility of the product and bring attention to where the Golden syrup comes from here in Vermont for it.

Next we had to New Zealand home to one of the world's pricy as honey.

Manuka Honey is known to being asked here richer and more viscous and many other honeys. It comes from the nectar of the flower Leptospermum Scoparius alternatives Manuka, which is only native to New Zealand and.

I'm a nuclear in fact is a mere word.

The fact that it comes from New Zealand that gives it a premium just to start with it because the base travels up to about six kilometers to collect this honey and sorry. This honey is representative of the environment and that environment is of New Zealand at.

The plant itself and the honey is very very rare out of all the <unk> in the world probably represents 1% of all the world earnings.

It's difficult to harvest at Sarnia, two to six weeks harvesting period and the flowers only open friendly for 12 days and in New Zealand, we had one and we have Ryan and all the rest of it. So there's a lot of luck involved and getting the Bay you were a lot of effort from the basic for some years the Iran.

There is no honey production for some big cases, and we have to go to the big extent also have using helicopters to collect this honey.

Well the ammonia cabooses can also be found in Australia, New Zealand accounts for almost all of the world's production with exports with $204 million unexpected to quadruple to $800 million by 2028.

New Zealand hunting is protected by a quality standard that safe gottesman, who because of special properties.

Does honey is an expansive honey.

And anything that is expensive people will try and coffee.

People will try and mimic will people will tranche eight so a lot of the cost here is in actually in the protection of that all the research. So we know it's unique we know it's from New Zealand. We can identify we've put labs around the world to be able to do this identification and museum and government has set up a standard have decided waters manuka honey.

So how does the grading system work and what exactly are you looking for in Manuka Honey.

We spoke to duct Adrian Charlton prefer assigns a lab in the north of England, where manuka honey is tested to identify unique compounds.

Our standards, we will test for three compounds.

Thanks Ashton.

So Thomas Mgo.

Thank you Matt.

These are the device taxes.

We will undertake to make sure.

China.

Oh good characteristics.

We would expect we can detect them, but we can also measure the concentration of them.

I'm using UV light.

Thanks for taking the Weizmann.

Could you talk about each competitor has slightly different processes.

Because of the issues in the past with potential broad suite of other tests, including the toughest comparison spirit, which is a market is unique.

Since we can choice then Tony back to.

China closed.

Thanks, Paul.

When you pick up a job manuka honey the markets can be confusing. So how do you know that is the real deal.

So in some cases are lengthening to the concentration of the comparison of MGM 300 would indicate 300 milligrams of <unk>.

So in that particular also honey.

NPA, which is known Brookside accuracy.

Absolutely.

So concentration and more direct.

Russia and the antimicrobial activity.

Honey.

All the other marks that you use.

Our call is tomorrow I think you can see a particular standpoint.

Test is in the short term so that's different.

Concentration in particular compound.

Okay.

Another factor, that's driving up the price as the use of manuka honey in health and beauty products.

Its antibacterial and anti inflammatory properties is set to suit and nourish the skin.

Also set to help with blemishes and acne is not really the case.

There's been a number of cities that have tried to deter.

Determine the health benefits.

And there's some very positive results and certainly in terms of our antimicrobial activity, we can show that.

Manuka Honey has antimicrobial activity in the laboratory.

This clinical trials over a long period of time have not been undertaken as of yet but.

There are also reports that indicate.

Johnny has benefits.

Gotcha.

So the jury's still out on the new cars medicinal properties, but that hasn't stopped its popularity and manuka honey is serious business.

The prices and demand for the hernia. So high that the New Zealand police have received hundreds of reports of beehives or honey being stolen and even reports of bees being poisoned.

Yes.

So if you do manage to get your hands on the jaw does it actually takes different from normal hunting.

Yeah.

All right.

Evansville leisure.

The flavors really strong it's very like very thick compared to normal hemi.

Let's go to kind of test multi flavor.

Suites as usual honey.

It's really smooth.

This is pretty similar to what Mr. <unk>.

Texas very interesting, it's very very thick always like creamy.

These manuka honey really with 100 times more than other honey.

That's for you to judge.

But what's the thought there is no other hunting in the world is a rare and unique that it needs to pass by a lap before being sold.

Yes.

Yes.

<unk> is the oldest tofu factory in America.

And at the shop, there's placing up 3000 pounds of it a day and Thats, Jason a formal pro baseball player who took over <unk> three years ago, Jason learned how to handle tofu the traditional Japanese weight from the original owners. It is very cheap just buy a machine and just push buttons and outcomes of block is help bill.

But to actually hand crafted it is definitely a lost art, but because of our growing tofu industry and a spike in soybean prices. Jason is juggling tradition with demand I put in 11 and 12 hours a day six days a week. So does my long we visited the Portland factory to see how Jason's turning buckets of beans into this.

Welcome to Otis Tofu I gave here at $2 30 in the morning Monday through Saturday make tofu and start the day.

The night before workers pull out giant bags of soybean source from Iowa, and Theyre dried soybeans. So theyre very hard again pardon me break it with a hammer and we sell from the night. Before then you can't really saw it takes 10 hours of soaking depending on the temperature.

Outside we tend to sell them longer if it's harder or shorter if it's hotter, we want that pure white and the soybean. Yes. These are still pretty good cooks transferred the soft soybeans to one of two grinders, we grind the soybeans make a really a slush then we put it into our cookers, which comes to about 100 degree.

With Celsius.

And then the mixture flows through a giant pipe into a filtering bag in the pressing machine. This machine squeezes out the soy milk. The mill comes out the other end and drops into another filter. So we double filter it to get a tier of soy milk as we can.

Hi. This is hot what's left is a byproduct called Okada basically the leftover bits from the beans like the shelf.

So theres nylon that catches the rest of the Ocado people will use it in like Bacon recipes and stuff like that but also we give it to farmers to feed their cows and pigs. Some of the soy milk gets bottled by hand.

Hold across Portland, but the rest gets turned into tofu.

Our tofu is made out of three ingredients soybean water and why do you win the mixture first gets a splash of coagulant. So we use our.

Traditional Japanese coagulate, we can adjust the amount of acquired that we use to make the firmness that we won I will actually make a firm so I'm going to add some more coagulant because it can be separated from the herds in the water a little bit more it's kind of like making cheese and.

And cheese, the coagulants separates the way or liquid from the proteins, which comped up into Curt that takes about 15 minutes.

So this is what it looks like after it's hurting. So this further actually nice and like fluffy and Pos that scrambled egg looking mixture is spooned into molds, Jason hand sheets, it using a cheesecloth, but now we just got a pressed them into the firmness that we won almost like a water bed.

We make medium firm an extra firm it depends on how much water, we squeeze out occurred on the firm and the extra for our finer and harder so it's easier to get water out of medium license are high.

The hydraulic press then helps squeeze out the water.

After its pressed Jason carefully flips the tofu into a giant back Keith slices. It along the lines from the molds tofu had into restaurants is placed in buckets.

Some of it gets fried into what's called Huggy, though he is a master at chop.

Yes that is not easy to do with a flimsy tofu.

Blacks bound for stores get fish from the water and put in boxes.

<unk> soybeans for a final product probably about an hour everything else is really controlled by hand.

Although tofu originates from China using me got EG Coagulate is uniquely Japanese Buddha's recipe and hand molding techniques come from Japan and date back to the founding of the company. So OTA tofu started in 1911 say, though OTA immigrated to Portland from OCA Yamana, Japan.

Shortly after <unk> and his wife Sheena opened a tofu shop using the same three ingredients. Jason users back then Oda was one of many tofu factories, serving the Japanese and Chinese American communities in East Portland, But then Pearl Harbor happened and 120000 Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps gena.

<unk> were sent to a camp in Idaho their silo died a year after arriving in the three years of internment all Japanese owned tofu shops were closed many were seized looted or sold off but the oldest landlord honored their lease and when Ciena returned to Portland alone in 1945, the shop and all its.

Equipment was waiting for her.

That they came back and wanted to start the company again, Jos Testament to the OTA family for wanting to do that and then also the customers that wanted to buy the tougher really kept the business alive decent bought the business from Chinas grandson co and his wife Eileen in 2019, because I heard that they are closing and I thought it would be.

It's such a shame that business like this would close their doors, especially with all of our history.

Oh, OTA ni laying out I really taught me everything there is to know about making.

This is their equipment I inherited all of the Jason's continued the handmade OTA tradition Theres. A reason why people are businesses don't make tofu. The way that we can do right now long hours and hard work everything that has to do with tofu I am involved with the entire process.

Yes.

Okay.

Yes, I feel like I am let's.

Thats helpful Master now because jason's production process is slower its hard to compete with big factories mass manufacturing tofu. All they have to do is push a button and outcome Silva from <unk>.

<unk> suppressing everything is very automated it is very different that our process really I mean, that's what we're competing against because they are low cost and the competition is getting harder as soybean prices Soar, China is usually one of America's biggest soybean buyers, but in 2019 tariffs on soybeans.

Corner, China out of the market.

Helped prices for our soybeans go down because demand wasn't there, but when tariffs were dropped in 2021, China re entered the market scooping up soybeans, and causing prices to skyrocket soybean prices haven't been this high in seven years soybean prices have gone up.

Drastically 40% in the past couple of months. So I've had the increased pricing I think every tofu manufacturer.

Great.

You just can't eat that much of the cost.

Jason's customers don't seem bothered, we don't need to spend more because we want high quality food bid new business was down 20 year and the customers love. It we can they would tend to other brands to keep up with competition and supply costs. Jason have made small changes first T redesigns of package.

He bought that packaging machine. He also launched OTA on social media.

And this strategy has worked attracting new young restaurant owners like chef tie he's gotten a lot of buzz for his sandoz made with OTA tofu Zhang from Japan, given that had their tougher I'll tell you like I was in Japan, So I'm gonna make Nissan Tau Mccarthy, Richard vegan, the Cat's CFO Instagram people love it decent now sells out of tofu.

And soy milk and over 150 restaurants around Portland, we are making about 80% more and tofu is expected to keep getting more popular in 2020, the global market was worth $746 million and it's projected to grow by more than 5% in the next six years nutrition to say that's because.

It's rich in protein amino acids and nutrients.

I think it's starting to be aware of that Jason thinks he has two options to face growing demand moving to a bigger space or opening up factories in other cities.

But his biggest goal, making sure tradition isn't sacrificed for innovation.

EMEA Zaki, Japan, we learn where farmers grow harvest in auction the world's most expensive mangoes.

Mangoes farmed EMEA Zaki are from the Irwin mango variety of type often referred to as Apple mango as it turns red one right.

Irwin mangoes are actually pretty common and are also grown in other parts of the world and sold at much lower prices.

This is because the exclusivity of tire know tomorrow is not tied to which type of mango it is but rather to the care it receives.

In order to generate funds at the auction.

Ah mango needs be.

To increase the odds of success farmers like to Korea, usually rent these during the flowering season.

These are following mangled plants. These play a crucial role in the pollination of plants as without them mangles would not grow as big as desired.

So much anymore Youre doing miskito that's.

Let's continue on imported Coke right.

Yeah.

What are you doing more than that as the Hawaii at dinner than unless it is predominant without whom this equity.

And I've got Arnaud mango in Arcata here are quite good even with the demand.

So it's about <unk> 95 annual call your teeth.

Now turning his name qualities of ocular <unk>.

Yeah.

If a plant Keith flowering as the farmer wants it can survive as long as 35 years to Korea, France are 20 years old.

However, even if these do pollinate the plants it doesn't necessarily mean that all mangoes will qualify as Tayo know tomorrow. This season.

Only those that are in good shape visibly contain pits and are in good position will be given a chance.

To successfully grow one everything in the greenhouse needs to run smoothly tempur.

Temperature must be constant the room ventilated the air Dehumidified and the mangoes protected from gravity.

When everything else is in place <unk> priority becomes the Sunshine.

Scott I thought you've gotten your panel.

Okay, I'd say echo 19 months. Furthermore, alright.

Anthony Scaglione anthem, United in Nevada.

Furthermore, because we're not selling it.

To tell you on this call your doorstep.

Yes.

If a mango slumps into the shade, particularly I would tie it with the strength to bring it back up and to make sure that suddenly touches every part of the fruit equally he develop these late reflectors out of milk cartons.

How does that balance cater for growing your business.

Manuel in immuno external formally.

If net economic that's actually not the Cordova unknowns at Crystal Okaka narrowing this get all mirroring other than got OIBDA, if Nick I'll now hand over to Christian will keto. Thank.

Thank you, Dave I guess, a bit though our condensate etame.

Our scheduling method.

<unk> got that what you meant on the wall and deny this kind of cut out in the call.

Yeah, I'm, hoping I'll archive cameo assisting made at 80000 square foot ethical.

Thanks, I've got seven there.

And in the U S Senate.

Regardless of how much it's worth to Korea treats every mango with respect in return every mango replace him with a unique flavor.

Hi, Mommy store.

Scott can you give me.

Alrighty.

Foreign keys like.

Hi, Timothy Chan of Hormuz it.

Hi, How're you doing.

No no no.

Typically you have been growing mangoes for 16 years across he learned from his father.

This year he grew 9500 mangoes any greenhouse.

They are now ready to be inspected to see how many of them have earned the coveted title note the mazo title.

The first section is done by human eye and sectors closely analyzed each mangles appearance to ensure they are red all throughout with no hints of green at the bottom.

Then a machine sorts them according to sugar content weight and size.

So Nicola told of Opdivo to Israel.

Video of a pandemic was that unusual a truck with EMA for 20 years or more.

It gives you can work with you or someone else.

Arena.

These inspections sorts of mangoes into five grades two of which are Tayo no tomorrow.

Can you, maybe only Muscat Oman income the Monday.

They do some path into logical path and Paul will.

We'll have faded.

Recently at multiyear coincidentally utility cost season goes.

My name is <unk>.

When you get yourself can I hold on I'll come up and we move.

The mangoes will now make their way to mute zaki central wholesale market for the auction.

All the care and hard work that to Korea, and other farmers in the prefecture put into their fruit, our leading up to this very moment.

The hope is to match or exceed the previous figure of 500000 yet.

So nobody is getting <unk> Scott.

It doesn't have the keno and all about that.

I mean, they're called antibody.

Okay.

Kind of in that in that impact.

Okay can I not.

Good morning.

Okay.

Yes.

Okay.

No.

Hey, good morning.

Okay.

Yes.

The auction has officially begun at EMEA central wholesale market.

Okay.

[music].

This year's 500000 yen is 300000, yet higher than last year and matches the 2019 record.

Sure.

Yes.

And the farmer, who grew these mangoes is.

To Korea.

[laughter].

Yes, that's right.

Yeah.

It's the third year in a row his mangoes, that's the highest price at the auction. They have been bought by a department store in Fukuoka.

Spooky multi tenant talks at the most.

Dan.

So Scott question, you already talked about like I know, although we don't have any.

Got it.

That would be my thoughts.

Coca Cola, because I'll tell you on tomo.

Illinois, Zincograph, Steve I'd like to say Oh My God.

Today's outcome with a successful one for to Korea.

But even in a country with a strong gift, giving culture like Japan, it's not always guarantee that such a luxury fruit, we'll find a buyer at auction.

They'll go there.

That's one example, looking out at the high end up I Wonder if at all on a number of Asciano his devotion and.

Tom Meissner, our garage network optimized citizen in about mango hungry. This is another one.

On that don't get them all.

They'll go demo.

Published on it I don't see them all of them, what I really don't give out enough.

But given that we're hoping just illustrative of another.

After flowering fruiting harvesting and auctioning, particularly of mangled plants are ready for a new season.

And the hard work isn't over yet.

I never thought I'd say that this is what they are.

Tornado them at that.

Well listen I think it fits the model.

10 days ago.

The method of the Hudson clean there. Thank you.

Okay cool.

Yeah.

Oh I know.

Netflix.

Kind of got fantastically, it's a medical network.

Maintain adequate Nevada.

We'll set it on there in the.

Market with your unethical to vaccine candidate.

I didn't know.

No comments.

Japan is also where an exclusive number of soy sauce makers don't produce the famous seasoning the authentic way.

What makes <unk> special is the wooden barrel called key okay.

One can last for over a century.

You're still makes bamboo strips to wrap around the barrel because the saltiness of the soy sauce can corrode metal.

Before you picked.

Pocket at all.

Hum.

<unk> been able to.

It takes at least three people to assemble one barrel.

But not many do this anymore.

After modern machinery took over the market almost all key okay makers in Japan went out of business.

So you see what <unk> learned to make his own.

And look it up at all.

Today's call.

Okay, So I'll sort of causes.

Before these barrels are put to use crushed wheat and steam soybeans are mixed with koji the fungus that will kick start the fermentation process.

This giant that regulates temperatures the fungus can grow.

After two days the mixture goes to Moroni house.

This is where the wooden barrel help create the breeding ground for the bacteria.

So you all have taught us anything no.

Okay.

Over one ton of the soybean mixture for each barrel along with saltwater.

Yes.

While you Sue owners teamster.

The soybeans bump up against each other and create tiny tariffs so that other bacteria can get in and start to break them down.

The workers pump air into the barrel to make the aerobic east more active.

Yes.

Even though you'll see those system microbes do most of the work.

His part of the job is still demanding.

Titan.

Titled Please.

Thank you bye bye.

I ended up at the floor.

Q can ask Abbas.

The corner to head up the most of what we're modeling out the door.

He checks on the soybeans every day to see if they need mixing.

And based on their sent an appearance he can tell where they are in the process.

So that's OK kenzo till by hydro dingo oncology assets.

All of them balance.

The soybeans will format here for at least a year and a half.

<unk> was 87 barrels in different phases.

He believes the good barrel is one that will outlive him.

On coil colocate it.

But I think my uncle wasn't in great Scott.

These types of barrels have been in production in Japan since at least the 17th century.

But everything changed during World War, two raw materials became more scarce and expensive in Japan.

The government knew its people couldn't live without their staple seasoning.

So they ordered factories to make production cheaper and faster cutting the process from years two months.

So while many brewers expanded and modernized small businesses like you see those families could barely keep up.

Well be able to talk more client I E.

And of course on as soon as they can right.

You're still stepped in in 2003, just before his father suddenly became sick and had to retire.

So we have to takeover and Polish struggling business out of that.

He also had to teach themselves a lot of the process.

How to use the press.

After a year and a half of fermentation you sewer pipes, the soybean mixture into this machine.

He layers on a piece of traditional wrapping Clos.

Then the machine slowly squeezes out the soy sauce over 10 days.

Besides show up given.

<unk> one levels are there any shows that parity.

The main interest costs.

You talked about the win almost all quadrangular subordinate debt.

Some industrial factories press it all at once but <unk> is getting a quality product is all about patients.

After the stage some of the soy sauce goes back into the barrel with more soybeans and wheat for two more years to make you see those main product <unk>, a darker stronger tasting soy sauce.

When the microbes have enough time to naturally for Memphis soybeans. It gives the soy sauce sweeter aftertaste.

Some industrial brands mimic this by adding sweeteners.

And also on the buy up and what they've got and I, even heightened I ask at all.

Jackhammer assume knickerbocker door opens you up on assuming a kit armani.

That balanced umami flavor is what chefs like Hitachi Keisha, Mato or after he's been running as restaurant cleome insurer Shimon for five years.

For almost every dish he cooks with naturally fermented soy sauce, including yourselves brand.

So I'm thinking that's a couple.

I can't even with ideal high asset or nothing like that.

Yeah.

So when you look at the Nevada Northern Rockies.

Video Camila third quarter, the supplemental I think you have there.

Almost certainly I scanned at the moment on the boiler for the multifamily market.

The hunting soy.

So your thoughts.

Ms.

Stephanie I say gosh, I don't know I haven't gotten into that.

Well nothing that they might they'll come on and I see.

In order for traditional soy sauce to continue there.

Darryl production needs to keep up that's why you see low holds barrel, making workshops every year.

So just hoping you are assessing.

Hey, guys, let's start that's a homeowner housing authority.

He says his authentic soy sauce to people all over the world.

A bottle dose for $35 on Amazon.

Around triple the price of a commercial alternatives.

Hello, I place a law.

<unk>.

So God zero.

The home will overlap logos in high school.

For your soil passing down the legacy of barrel, aged soy sauce as part of his life's mission.

I see it.

Thank you David.

Hello, Corrado Kettle Latinos.

Oh.

Swinging almost call Daniel the floor is yours.

My way of hemoglobin combined 70.

Allergies are naive ethical or get scoop about okay, what could assume that's good enough.

Mrs.

Well thought out.

What is our Ito Guizhou alone.

<unk>.

They get to do.

Okay.

Okay.

The real key though is a third generation matsuzaka Rocky pharma.

On his farm into me a pre factor you will find only Virgin female town.

It's the primary requirement for any of the 18 months of soccer walk you phones here in EMEA Prefecture.

Also the early momentum.

Yes.

C C.

Nathan.

Cody.

See obviously useful.

Yes.

Okay.

Yes.

That's a soft copy has long been playing extremely low melting point, which is half that of other types of work you.

This means that when cutting the fat milk in a shorter time.

You would think right.

Through it all.

I know you've been vocal in our view.

Luckily you will recall Super had colleagues last night.

The last week or so.

One factory.

So anyway.

To reach this intense marbling almost generations of pharma like email his little keys that used to feed cows with bear.

Of course, you are on ore stockpile horsepower here.

So what would you stick with Allergan use xyrem in normal cycles at all but is there much there there's only overall what you saw in terms of that.

Gordon.

I know myself with audience Oh.

No.

Because of our continuous offering.

We refunded.

Who is your promotion of Archstone, Rob do you have a good day.

Well I don't want to cut it off.

Nausea with Hans Hi.

On a running a view on how Arsenal Noah Meru, I, especially want them all of them are knocking ourselves alternative at all although there's no evidence that this practice increases of cows appetite many associates matsuzaka walking with it.

Fact that Matsuzaka has kept a relatively low profile internationally is almost transformed this practice into a legend.

Yes.

Proposal.

Once you go to the North and also taking out sort of on their own or that no longer garage door.

No not at all I was hoping all of whom are simple enough.

It will keep doesn't practice anymore instead.

He has perfected the Cid is practicing so it cannot agriculture.

Okay. So we'll go for it.

Oh, My God, we got a lot of it.

You know what I'll call a total area of.

This high as you are in Colorado.

Colorado.

So no of course at all.

Most of them are Mcgee guys, who got memorial stone he goes how the demos.

And of course, you're an equal at scale.

Okay wish you all things considered on U S. I don't know what normal Sheila.

The cost of feed is an important factor that drives the prices up to reach that soft marbling matsuzaka cows nice to eat a lot.

Also need to meet for a much longer time than other cows single bodies right.

Hi, Bill.

Nazi soccer cows raised for 30 to 33 months six months longer than other Japanese black cattle.

Everything adds up overtime to hiroki, the costs to feeding temperature control and circulation and cleaning the enclosures regularly to avoid flies.

Oh come on Nicole's Yoshida it at all.

So quite a heck with the help of my.

Okay.

Martin you Hustle my ankle category.

Fathers here coldest waiting period.

For the first three to four months capital equal to develop a strong digestive system. This is called the belly creation period.

Then comes the finishing paying at black hat will gladly switch to concentrated feed and whitestone to fatten up.

<unk> is now experimenting with even longer periods are fattening, what do you think as cattle from 35 up to 40 months.

But raising cows for such a long time can also be dangerous for Hilton as a cow could get sick and die.

So Joel kimco or stable.

For the Ocean <unk> levels.

Scott.

Clothing and shoes.

Got you.

Youre walking in that study.

Marshal critical foreseen.

Okay, you can own yoga kanzi nickel went up.

But you'll be talking to you in a while you're doing them in Kazakhstan.

Right.

The count at the end of its Craftsman period is it true treasure every year Matsuzaka cows got auctioned off and one gets crowned queen of Matsuzaka, while the highest ever price, but one of these cows with 50 million yen in 2002. This auction has never really seen a low price averaging.

Around 20 million yen.

Events like the auction have also fostered another medicine.

The pharmacy, and Matsuzaka massage that cows with alcohol.

This time, it is not to improve their appetite, but they're appealing.

All right with your alcohol third I know you guys report published regarding a fair diagnose avocado.

Unusual associated with your volume for your staff communities as it does on our content you hold them on that.

The number will go up materially.

Alright perfect.

Perfect.

Modern user friendly.

We will go to Lucas I don't always online.

Its not just Idaho powers that costanoan cards can be very expensive.

Oh sure, yes, we have demand.

You don't see it doesn't raise his cutoff from bus at 10 months old consoles sold at auctions throughout Japan.

The total spend almost half of his time at block buying cars.

He is very demanding the law the law.

The cash cow.

<unk> Sky.

Mackenzie.

Uh huh.

Wish you all a.

And all because youre looking at there is a more critical.

Let me know.

That's normal.

No no.

What wasn't when you must stay as long as we're gaining Sheila.

And I wish you and your home you can support our guidance.

Got it.

Tiger.

Well, then designee Scottish stop he executives your AWS.

One of course, you are Bud Rooney HEICO killer.

Jim.

Why do I feel like there are more conversations.

BNS 12 is the highest modeling quite for Joaquin in Japan, the more intense the marbling the higher the price.

So customers in Tokyo 100 clubs at Donlin.

10000 yen, but that's still much less than what policing in the pain at Maya Kenya, whether thank God is sold at 360 euros.

Okay.

The most premium cut tenderloin, south of 5000 euros per kilograms.

Gordon of Yardstick Taylor's departure.

Mid teens.

Sure.

Okay.

Because.

Yes.

Stefan.

No.

No.

That's it.

The Bush.

Uh huh.

I don't know.

Core numbers.

Sets us apart.

So.

The panel format further good Tessa Michelle focus of lupus.

Yeah.

The Paris restaurant with the first to successfully explore matsuzaka walking out of Japan and included on its menu. Its most expensive tasting menu costs 520 euros.

Sure.

Matsuzaka Rocky is heavily regulated did include Mark soccer beef on the menu the background to follow strict rules.

The Paris restaurant needed to apply for a license, which took a year to be accredited.

To maintain at the restaurant need to have a high rating on Google maps, and they couldnt be another restaurants, serving matsuzaka walgreen within an 840 meter radius.

2023, Iraqi is shipped only three cows did Maria Kenya diesel is limited supply the 520 euro menu with Epo lunches premium Tenderloin served to only one table per day.

This exclusivity is that to get a little bit Lisa.

In the last 10 years, Japan has been a major importer of U S beef importing an average of $183 billion a year.

Meanwhile, millions worth of Joaquin, maybe opposite Johnny as it reached international thing.

Klein and tourism after the COVID-19 outbreak and a change in consumer behavior towards cheaper meat exacerbated that.

And now Japanese cattle farmers are looking outside the country's buda the export quota for Matsuzaka has jumped from 24 and 2022 to 700 in 2024.

Often it is the most premium cuts that are exported go into high end restaurants like multiyear Kenya in Paris.

This is pushing farmers, who want to ship a push back on those lucrative dangerous long fattening period.

Yeah.

<unk> August.

I see more hygiene signal from the origin of the buckets that doesn't matter.

People cross the Andes had been eating quinoa, we before it hit the shelves at gourmet markets.

And he said well simpler financing, although I guess elemental of incremental Medrano Park is looking like.

But on the hand, with a well connect them with the man for demand in August.

Uh huh.

For centuries, Peruvians of ground, the green to make flower and ferment teacher a popular drink.

Quinoa with secret to the Inca, who called it the mother Green, that's because it grew well under harsh conditions and flourish in areas, where other crops struggled.

Good morning.

Okay.

Please go ahead.

The Green is adapted as weather patterns have changed in recent years for growing it is still a struggle in Nissan and baton booklet about royalty and before they get a quotation for this year, but again I think with the important.

Ignacio with one of around 68000 quinoa producers in Peru.

He's been out in the field with his family since he was just 10 years old.

And I may not have happened.

No for the anthro have actually come on and you will get them a hard I'm not even book a book up a call you weren't Indian and ecommerce.

Somebody a thorn on the.

The season to plan Quinoa starts at the end of the summer.

Workers gather early in the morning.

And they pass around handfuls of Coca leaves.

Then they called departure manner or mother Earth to help them get the job done quickly and you put the horse.

Great.

With sandwiches.

Ignacio says the plant acts as a mild stimulant that gives them the strength.

Thank.