MLEC

Good morning and welcome to Moolec Science’s fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2024 conference call. My name is Bill Zima of ICR Strategic Communications and Advisory. During this conference call, all participants will be muted until after management’s remarks, when there will be a question and answer session. Please also note that today’s session is being recorded. Today, Moolec announced its fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2024 business highlights. The document is now available on the company’s Investor Relations website at ir.moolecscience.com. This morning, you will hear from Gaston Paladini, Chief Executive Officer and co-Founder of Moolec Science, together with Jose Lopez Lecube, Chief Financial Officer, and Amit Dhingra Chief Science Officer. During the Q&A session, they will be joined by Martin Salinas, Chief Technology Officer. In today’s call, we will be referring to a presentation that will be later available on the company’s Investor Relations website. Moving to Slide 2, this conference call is mainly for informational purposes, and during this call the company will be making forward-looking statements regarding future events and results which are not historical facts and include, but are not limited to statements about the company’s beliefs and expectations. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Further information regarding these and other risks are included in the company’s annual report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC, also available on the company’s Investor Relations website. Now moving to Slide 3, I would like to turn the call over to Moolec CEO, Gaston. Please go ahead.

Thank you Bill, and good morning to everyone. It’s a pleasure to once again provide our latest business update corresponding to our annual review for our company. Today’s agenda will address three main topics. As I just mentioned, we will first review the major milestones we have achieved during the fiscal year of 2024. Secondly, Moolec’s Chief Financial Officer will walk you through the financial overview; and last but not least, we would like to share with you our thoughts on what we expect for fiscal year 2025. Let’s move now to the next slide. We will recap the main milestones the Moolec team achieved during fiscal year 2024. Turn with me now to Slide 5. What a phenomenal year it has been for Moolec in terms of scientific developments, business operations and regulatory achievements. Our team has been driven to deliver milestone after milestone and continues to fire up on all fronts to push out deliverables on all pillars. We have the commercialization of our science-based products using molecular farming technology shortly on the horizon, built upon the many efforts over the last year, from the setting up of Moolec’s self-owned molecular biology lab in the U.S. to the establishment of animal protein expression levels in Piggy Sooy products, as well as receiving USDA approval for Piggy Sooy, while preparing Glaso products for commercialization through trial production and securing farmland for production, and increasing Piggy Sooy [indiscernible] in three U.S. locations. The Moolec team has shown exceptional execution. To provide more details of these achievements during fiscal year 2024, I would like to hand things over to Amit Dhingra, our Chief Science Officer. Amit, over to you.

Thank you Gaston. I’m excited to share the significant accomplishments of the Moolec farming team over this fiscal year. In the first quarter of fiscal year 2024, we successfully set up our fully owned plant molecule and biology lab, the Moolabs, in College Station, Texas. Our lab became fully operational in Q1 FY2024, and I oversaw our plant molecular farming team that focused on the molecular characterization of the transgenic events for our target products. Conducting a significant portion of our plant biology R&D projects in-house versus third party labs helped us centralize and streamline the process. It facilitated faster implementation of decisions, ensuring the highest quality control standards, and improved the timeliness and quality of work while generating cost savings. Also during the first quarter, we achieved significant results in the continued development of Piggy Sooy product. During the first quarter, we harvested and analyzed third generation, or T3 transgenic events at Moolabs. Consistent with the prior results, the expression values of the animal protein, or myoglobin reached up to 20% in T3. Previously, we have observed expression levels of up to 25% of the total soluble protein in T2. Overall, what we have observed is that the expression of the animal protein has stabilized across three generations, which is very exciting. Onto the second half of this year, this business update marks a crucial moment for Moolec. In the third quarter, we announced a groundbreaking milestone, the first-ever approval from USDA, making Moolec the first company in our industry to achieve such a regulatory breakthrough. This achievement exemplifies our commitment to harnessing the power of plants through cutting edge science, addressing critical challenges like climate change and global food security. For those new to our journey, Moolec has developed a unique patentable soybean platform technology under the trademark, Piggy Sooy. Our dedicated scientific team has achieved remarkable results expressing animal meat proteins and soybeans, with porcine protein levels reaching up to 25% of total soluble protein in the seeds. With this approval, USDA APHIS RSR has determined that Piggy Sooy poses no greater plant pest risk than non-generic soybeans, allowing us to transport and distribute this product with individual APHIS permits. This significantly accelerates logistics and reduces costs while ensuring full compliance with USDA regulations, giving Moolec a distinct advantage in the market. Also in the third quarter, we carried out a trial for our downstream production of Glaso with our industrial partner in Iowa as we optimized, processed and produced a few tons of material to fine tune the process. In the fourth quarter, we began planting after successfully contracting 600 acres with key growers to produce Glaso seeds for crushing. Additionally, we contracted 60 more acres for seed production, aiming to yield 300 to 400 tons of safflower. This product has multiple customers, including a major client, as previously announced with Moolec signing an offtake agreement with a leading global CPG company. In addition, Piggy Sooy field trials have commenced in Ohio, Missouri, and Iowa in order to increase seeds for scale-up and sampling for customers and to collect environmental and regulatory data as we work on the US FDA approvals. Now I’d like to turn the presentation over to my colleague, Jose, for the financial overview part of the presentation. Thank you very much for your kind attention.

Thank you Amit, and good morning to everyone. I’m pleased to be providing this annual business update for Moolec for the fiscal year 2024. I would like to address our highlights with regards to revenues, cost of sales, expenses, and cash utilization. Please keep in mind that all figures mentioned today are in U.S. dollars, unaudited, and based [indiscernible] from IFRS unless otherwise stated. Let’s move on now to Slide 9. During fiscal year 2024, normalized revenues and other income excluding IAS29 increased $4.8 million year-over-year from approximately $1 million in 2023 to $5.8 million in 2024. This increase was due to the consolidation of the soy product ingredient business which occurred in April 2023. Normalized cost of sales increased as well on a year-over-year basis from close to $1 million in 2023 to $4.5 million in 2024. This was in line with our revenue growth, resulting in an annual gross margin of around [indiscernible]. On the expenses front, SG&A and R&D have increased $3.1 million, from $6.2 million in 2023 to $9.3 million in 2024. This increase in expenses is mainly related to non-cash items such as depreciation, amortization and equity incentives, as well as the consolidation of the soy ingredient business. In terms of cash used in operating activities, cash utilization has increased $1.8 million, from $7.5 million in 2023 to $9.3 million in 2024. In particular during 2024, an approximately $4 million was [indiscernible] the lower accounts payable mainly related to transaction costs during 2023. Finally, our cash position of approximately $5.4 million as of Q4 2024 has been complemented with the purchase of 15,000 tons of HB4 soybean, which has strategic value for Moolec in terms of ESG alignment, traceability, and raw material procurement stability. The purchase of HB4 soy has been executed through the issuance of a convertible note to BIOX and covers our projected raw material needs for our soy protein ingredient business until approximately December 2025. We are very pleased with how Moolec continues to deliver significant milestones and create value while maintaining an adequate corporate structure and a cost efficient strategy. I will now turn things back to Gaston as he gives a glimpse into Moolec’s fiscal year 2025. Gaston, over to you.

Thanks Jose. Looking forward to fiscal year 2025, we believe this is going to be a pivotal year for Moolec. Turn with me to the next slide. In terms of commercialization traction in 2025, we expect to see commercialization of our new science-based ingredient begin to take off. With our already established traction in textured soy protein generation revenues, we are honing our operational expertise in launching our new products, first with Glaso, which we’ll harvest in October and is targeted to generate new revenues for Moolec in the upcoming fiscal year. Glaso will be a strategic commercialized focus for us [indiscernible] by the signed R&D collaboration agreement with Bunge with the purpose of working together on the development of safflower varieties to improve productivity for a specific application or market, as well as the commitment made from the offtake agreement with a major global CPG company. At the same time, we are actively engaging in conversations with prospective partners and clients, providing samples of the different proteins in our pipeline. We are looking at all fronts of business income streams, including the licensing of our proprietary technology for using new markets. In terms of operational focus for 2025, we will continue to fine tune operations to enhance our upstream and downstream yields, as well as ensure the highest quality for our products following our identity preservation program, and implementing the best stewardship practices for all our crops. We are going step by step in each process to make sure we provide only the best. At the same time, we will continue scaling up our seed inventory so we can prepare for the different uses of our seeds from processing to planting. As we invest our time in all these activities in preparing for growth, we are still very committed to being careful to evaluate all our spending and managing the costs, while looking into different methods to improve our cost efficiency and streamline our logistics. The last point in this section, but one that is extremely critical to our operations, is our deliberative focus on making meaningful progress on the regulatory pathway. We are actively performing and pursuing relevant process and approvals from the different regulatory agencies. With regards to R&D and product development, this continues to be a core component of Moolec’s business. We plan to add new projects to the innovation pipeline with new proteins and molecular product development as current [indiscernible] development and enter the commercialization stage. Product development will continue during fiscal year 2025 in conjunction with the close communication and collaboration with partners and customers to ensure the marketability of our products in the pipeline. Lastly, in fiscal year 2025 we are consolidating our team. In order to optimize our work efficiency, we are consolidating efforts strategically. The company will be establishing a new operational hub based in the U.S. so that we can strengthen our team’s collaboration and communication and enhance our overall efficiency. Secondly, with the coming new product commercialization, we need to expand our sales and marketing efforts. With this, we are methodically expanding the team to capture this market opportunity. In addition, the company will promote expanded visibility and presence in the industry by sending team members to present and network at food, pet food, and supplement industry shows and conferences. Let’s now move onto the next and final slide. As we look forward to the exciting developments in 2025, I am confident that our strategic initiatives will drive growth and value for all our stakeholders. Now I would like to open the floor to your questions and hear your thoughts, so I will now turn things over to Bill for the Q&A portion of our call. Thank you very, very much.

Thank you Gaston. At this time, Moolec’s management - Gaston, Jose and Amit, as well as Moolec’s Chief of Technology, Martin Salinas will be taking questions. You will submit questions through the Q&A chat box by submitting your name and firm in the chat and typing your question. Please be advised that we will ask you to un-mute your line to ask your question live. We ask those that would like to participate in the Q&A if your name and firm is not indicated in your profile, please submit your name and firm in the Q&A box before asking the question. Again, you may submit your questions through the Q&A chat box. Okay, before we take questions from the live queue, we have received a few questions via email. The first question is, this quarter you highlighted an offtake agreement for Glaso with a major global CPG company to enter the U.S. market in 2025. Can you provide more details on this collaboration? What efforts have both parties made, and what is the estimated scale and expected revenue generation in 2025?

Well, thank you so much, Bill, and thank you for the question. Please, let’s leave the floor to Scott Fortune after this question, because I saw he raised his hand before. Thank you for the question, thank you for being here. Good morning. Great question, because we are very excited about this offtake agreement of our first molecular farming product, Glaso, in the United States. We are excited because of, I’d say, a couple of reasons. The first one, because it’s a major global CPG company, we can’t reveal the name, unfortunately, because it’s private, because it’s huge, but it’s a very well known brand worldwide with major operations in the States. That’s the main reason. Second good reason is that we are extremely happy about this is that Moolec is actually delivering milestones. We always tackle the U.S. We always had the U.S. market to be the first market to roll out our technology, our platform, molecular farming, and now this is real because it will be landing in the U.S. commercially. Third, it’s because it’s happening perfect timing. 2025 calendar year, we always had this timing in our internal plans. Moolec is delivering, and this is proof--this contract is proof of that. Going back to the question, I want to highlight before going to Martin and then to Jose, I want to highlight that this is not a one-year contract, this is a three-year contract with the possibility to expand it. It’s not only relevant for the landing and to the starting point, it’s also an ongoing relationship with these major customers. I will leave the floor now to Martin Salinas, our Chief Technology Officer. He’s leading this operation in the United States, and he can give more color about the volumes and the traction of the crops and the production of the product, and afterwards Jose can give some indications of the collect part - you know, the revenue, the new revenue stream that is opening now. Martin?

Okay, thank you Gaston. As Amit mentioned, we’re currently have more than 600 acres planted in Idaho in the American Falls area. Mostly will be used as grain for crushing purposes, but we also have our seed stock planned as well to get to production next year in the following season, so we’re close to the harvest time where we’ll actually know of our final yield, but we are expecting yields in a similar range to last year, around 1,400 tons per acre. Then, we’ll [indiscernible] a range between 50 to 60 tons of GLA to be produced for the first year, mostly dedicated to the offtake agreement that Gaston mentioned.

Jose? Thank you, Martin.

Sure, thanks Gaston. Look - in terms of revenue, as you know, we have had a revenue stream, which is the soy protein ingredient business, which has produced revenues in the range of $6 million this 2024 fiscal year, and we believe for the fiscal year 2025, $6 million of revenues is a pretty good indication of how the business could evolve. It could grow gradually in terms of the soy protein ingredient business. However, we are very pleased with the introduction of Glaso as the second revenue stream for Moolec. We have [indiscernible] expectations for this product. In the medium term, we expect Glaso to participate as incremental revenue in fiscal year 2025 with a range of around 15% of the total revenue in fiscal year 2025. Having said that, as information, we have a three-year contract with a major CPG company. We expect that contract to provide a base demand for Glaso, and as time goes by and as we move onto fiscal year 2026 and 2027, we expect Glaso to become a more important part of the overall total revenue and have high participation in the total revenue, and we have good hopes in terms of how much this business can grow and to increase Moolec’s revenues in the short term, in the medium term, and in the long term as well.

Thank you Jose. Okay, let’s move on. Thank you all.

All right, thank you. The second question is you mentioned signing an R&D collaboration agreement with Bunge to develop safflower varieties aimed at improving productivity for specific applications and markets. Can you share more details about this partnership and the business opportunities from this? Are there any notable developments you’d like to highlight?

Thank you Bill. I can’t wait to talk about Bunge agreement, but I would prefer, if you don’t mind, to go to Scott Fortune, because he raised his hand before. Scott, you want to un-mute yourself and ask your question?

Yes, here we go - thank you and good morning. I just want to congratulate you on your milestones and regulatory approvals achieved in fiscal year ’24. Just want to dig a little bit more into the commercialization and expansion here. Do we know where the end market--is this for supplements or mainly targeted for pet foods with this CPG company? You have initial tons about 50 tons from that standpoint, and just to kind of follow on that, your harvest is expected to produce about 300 to 400 tons of safflower seeds, and what amount of that will equal volume in tons that you’re expecting for 2026? Just kind of want to get a sense for the ramp-up into ’26 with the volume expectations and how much of that will go to a minimum of your new CPG partner. That’d be great for a little more detail on that.

Sure, well thank you so much, Scott, and welcome to the call. Well, let me frame it this way. Glaso applications are dietary supplements, nutritional beverages, infant formulas, animal health, pet food that included in that animal health in some way, and some others. Please don’t hesitate to step in, Martin, if you [indiscernible] if I’m missing one or two applications, but those are the main ones. We are in conversations with several different potential customers for all of these different applications, specifically in dietary supplementation because one of the competitive advantages that Glaso has with established and normal products that provide GLA oil in the market is the concentration level. Glaso has up to three times more concentration levels compared with the natural and current ones in the market. The dietary supplementation market is very relevant. In terms of this specific offtake agreement with the CPG company, that application is for pet food. It’s a volume and high value player that’s one of the top brands in the world. We are in good shape of conversations with other potential customers for other applications too. In terms of quantities, volume, scale-up and production, that harvest will change to produce around--between 50 to 70 tons. We are expecting around 60 tons, around 50 will be for this contract, commercial contract, and the rest will be for other customers in other applications. We still need to wait for, let’s say, a couple of weeks to harvest, finally see the yields, and start planning the production by the end of the month - I’m talking actually as we speak October, this is happening as we speak, so we will probably have the specific yields from the land and also from the factory by November. We’re excited because this is a molecular farming product, this is the first one. Thank you for the question, and I don’t know, Martin, Jose or Amit, if you want to add something on top of what I have just said, but that’s a quick summary of this offtake agreement, Scott.

I appreciate it. A follow-on - your discussions with other--you know, you mentioned other companies. What are--you know, how far along are those discussions, kind of expectations for potentially adding more in this year, and then what--they’re sampling, what needs to come across for them to move forward with you? Just put an idea of where that pipeline is and potentially adding on the Glaso for you.

I am quite confident to say that we are going to sell the whole production. I’m pretty sure. Actually, I think we could sell more if we had more material, but unfortunately we need to wait the biology times here, so this is the first commercial campaign. We are hitting the market - great contract, great players, and great starting point, but we need to multiply seeds, as Martin described before. We are reserving part of that production for multiplication of seeds, to scale up this campaign and proof for the next year, so we are actually planning our following commercial campaign. We will have more flexibility there, and I think that we are--we need to hold our horses and not sell absolutely all the tons of this campaign, to reserve some part of that fresh material for sampling, to expand the commercialization network and start--stay robust and consolidate the relationship with new customers by sending fresh samples right away. That’s the plan overall, and I’m really looking forward to grow the business next year. But at least as of now, it’s pretty all fully committed.

Got it, and last one from me and then you guys can touch base on that R&D collaboration with Bunge, which is great. Just kind of remind us, step us through--you know, obviously you’ve got the UDSA or the FDA on the Piggy Sooy side, but kind of the results here, we’ll find out more in October those results from the field trials and since. You’ve mentioned that 20% range, but just step us through--you know, are we still on track for commercialization on that in ’27, ’28 here, and just the key milestones that you have to hit leading up to ’27, kind of looking out for the next year on the Piggy Sooy side.

Sure, great question. Well, we announced, I think it was a month ago, that we will be harvesting both crops October this year now, Glaso for production, for commercial purposes, and Piggy Sooy for a couple of purposes. The first one is to gather information for the FDA - what you said, Scott, is true. We need to gather information not only for one place, for three different locations - that’s why we farm in Missouri, Ohio, and Iowa, three different locations in three different latitudes and states. We will gather the information for the FDA. We are in great conversations with regulators. Things are moving nicely, but we need to fulfill the path here, and we know how to navigate the regulatory fronts with our regulatory team. We are not envisioning any delay, so everything is on track and the plans are beautiful - beautiful. I really hope to invite all the stakeholders to these three different locations for the harvest, because the plants are very, very nice, so let’s see how that goes. We are excited about this historical moment of planting, of harvesting, let’s say, animals from the U.S. soil fully approved from the USDA. In terms of commercial efforts for Piggy Sooy, the second reason why we move forward with field trials over the regulatory information for the FDA is to gather also fresh material for summer. I want to remember all here that Moolec is a science-based ingredient company, and the ingredient sector, the ingredient business is not easy, but this is very--it’s very standard and what you need to do is to get samples [indiscernible] and to build relationships with producers and ingredient business and to prototype with samples. So we will gather samples from the farm directly, fresh material, we will recover proteins, and we will send those samples right away. We are in good conversations with several different potential players and customers for Piggy Sooy. They are all very interested to start proving or, let’s say, testing in their own recipes, in their own labs, and in their kind of facilities, that this ingredient could help them in so many ways, so that’s the second reason. The third reason of this field trial for Piggy Sooy in the United States is to analyze--to finish the D of the R&D stage, the development, product development. I will leave the floor to Amit to--just a little bit to explain the different events that are planted in the field because we need to start analyzing transgenic events, plant performance, and start processing that information to start selecting the champion event - that would be the champion seed that will be multiplied in the future, in the upcoming years so as to hit the market in 2027 and 2028. I want to reinforce that timeline. Amit, you want to add more color about the science in the field?

Yes, thank you Gaston, and thanks for the question as well. As you all know, Piggy Sooy has demonstrated that we can express animal proteins to a very high level and store it in the seed section of the plant, which is really what is the product that we’re going to be utilizing. As we are doing these field trials in different locations, we want to reach to a point where we want to evaluate in the fourth generation what the levels of this protein are going to be, and this platform technology which is primarily the regulatory elements that allow us to express this protein at a very high level, is really being tested out. As I initially spoke during the update, we are seeing 20% total soluble protein being consistent through the third generation, which is a very important milestone in any transgenic technology event, and as we are doing these field trials, we will be harvesting a lot of plant material which we’ll also do further evaluations on. This high level is really unprecedented in seed production, and we will take it from there. This is the platform we also want to utilize for other ingredients or other proteins, or other molecules that are desirable in the market as well, so very exciting what we are doing with this. We’re expanding our reach to commodity groups as well, soybean and other commodity groups to keep them involved and included as we are developing this product, so as Gaston invited stakeholders to our facilities and our trials just to see what we are really developing over here. Really exciting times for us and the science sector, and we continue to--you know, as a scientist, we continue to develop our concepts further and expand to other molecules as needed - it could be bioplastics, it could be any other pharmaceutical ingredient, etc. Thank you very much, Gaston. Back to you.

Thank you Amit. Okay, let’s move on. Thank you so much, Scott.

Thank you.

All right, our next question, we have an online question from Anthony Vendetti of Maxim Group. I’m going to read them. Have you signed any additional commercial uptake agreements for Glaso? If not, do you expect to sign any by the end of 2024? What percent of yield is accounted for?

Well, thank you Anthony, and we will not forget about answering the Bunge question that was online before. But I want to say hi to Anthony - Anthony, thank you for joining us today, and thank you for the question. We do not have any other offtake agreements signed yet. I think for the short term, it will not be necessary, it would be just invoicing and commercializing directly via spot sales for this campaign. We are envisioning to have a formal agreement for the following campaign, so that--who knows if it would be before the year end or next year. We have time for that. We are in good conversations with some other customers. I think that it’s also a matter of timing and awareness. We are hitting the market now, so it’s one new product, it’s new in the market, we are planning to attend some food and animal health shows and some dietary supplement shows next year to make some marketing for the product. I’m really optimistic of the traction of this product for next year, and I’m really looking forward to continue signing offtake agreements for the upcoming campaigns. Going back to the question, I want to answer it fully - what percentage of yield is accounted for? Do you want to tackle this question, Martin?

Yes, thank you for the question, Jeremy. I’m trying to understand what exactly is the yield that you are [indiscernible] in terms of the tons per acres yield that we can recover out of each acre, but nevertheless--

Talk about--talk about both, yes.

Yes, nevertheless so the yield that we are expecting, so yield for safflower in the area is around, I would say, 1,200, 1,300 tons per acre. We achieved last year in the range of 1,600, just was a seeding [indiscernible] with them last year compared to this season, where as Gaston said, was our very first commercial season. We expect kind of the same yield in that. On how much oil we can recover out of that, it’s highly dependent on the production that--the crushing facility that we are using, so in that sense, we have been working a lot the last few months on optimizing that processing. I think Gaston mentioned some of that during the presentation. This particular trait of GLA has a reduced amount of total oil compared to wild types of flower, so we expect extraction in the range of 15 to 20%--15% to 20% from the--it’s the total oil, right? Let’s say out of that, we can expect maybe 80% of yield from the total oil recovery. That’s kind of the yield that we are expecting, very soon to be fully determined.

Yes, agree. This is happening as we speak, as I said before. Thank you so much, Martin. Okay, let’s move on. Thanks Anthony.

Okay, we can move onto that--my previous question. You mentioned signing an R&D collaboration with Bunge to develop safflower varieties aimed at improving productivity for specific applications and markets. Can you share more details about this partnership and the business opportunities from this? Are there any notable developments you’d like to highlight?

Yes, well, I remember the Bunge question. Thank you for that. We’re very excited about being close to Bunge now with this R&D and collaboration agreement with them. As you all surely know, Bunge is one of the ABCD companies, you know, that there’s four dominant agriculture trading worldwide, together with ADM, Cargill and Dreyfus [ph]. It’s an honor for us, as a young company, to be close to these major players. Specifically about the R&D collaboration, this is for upstream efforts in our safflower platform. That’s part of our Glaso improvements, and some other new developments in the safflower varieties and safflower platform as well. I will leave the floor to Amit first to fully explain the importance of the genetics in the upstream from--to improve and [indiscernible] and focus on breeding varieties in the field. This is high level, you know? - this is very important to understand yields in the fields and to focus on science and genetics, and then Martin can give more color in terms of the specific traits that we are working. I want to highlight that Bunge is focusing on safflower for biofuel applications. Moolec is focusing on safflower as a bioreactor platform, as many small factories to produce Glaso and new products in the pipeline, but both share the upstream part of the value chain. But again, I will put a pause now and pass to Amit to explain the breeding side, and Martin can explain the trait side.

Thank you Gaston. I would say that what we produce, what transgenic lines we produce, we select our champion events which have the highest level of expression and agronomic performance. But as new breeding lines are being generated which either have other traits, for example they can perform better agronomically in different geographies or under different climatic conditions, so we can introgress or make crosses between these plants, go back to traditional breeding and take these traits that we’ve developed in our lines and move them into the desirable genetic backgrounds so that we can produce this product at a larger scale more efficiently with less input. One of the biggest things is that the genetic potential through breeding continues to be enhanced, and we have the opportunity through these partnerships where we can kind of capitalize on the new genetics that are coming through the pipeline as well by combining these traits through breeding. I also wanted to say that we have in our internal Moolabs where we can categorize all these very rapidly with the equipment and the robotics that are available to us. We are able to really fast track identification of progeny or products that come out of those crosses, that can then be deployed. In the past, we mentioned about global scale-up potential of our technology, and I think this is where combining what we develop as initial traits with the breeding pipelines that exist in different crops, especially in this case, safflower, we can really produce this anywhere in the world. Thank you. Over to Martin.

Yes, so basically the yield that I mentioned for safflower GLA, [indiscernible] around 14 to 15 tons is quite a great yield in the United States, and it’s a variety that we have been using since a while. But when you compare that yield with the commercial of many other germplasms in the southern hemisphere, particularly in countries like Argentina, yields are not as good, so our main goal is to evaluate this and develop new lines that are better adapted, that are optimized in terms of the yield, the productivity for different territories, other territories than the United States, for us to increase our potential opportunities to expand the technology into other territories. That’s on us. As Amit said, once we identify this optimized line for other territories, we can start the integration process where we can introduce our traits into new germplasm and new varieties. Thank you.

Thank you, Martin - very clear, and thank you for the question. I want to add on top of that before going to the next question, I think would be [indiscernible] questions, that it’s a huge opportunity for Moolec being close to Bunge because of not--not only because of safflower seeds, it’s because of all our pipeline, soybean as well. We are having great conversations about soybean in the future, so let’s see how it goes in the future. We are focusing of course on delivering our commitment with Bunge in terms of safflower upstream, but as I said before, this is maybe one step for the new potential collaborations in the future with this major company. Let’s move on, Bill. Thanks for the question again.

Okay, great. Our next question comes from Arun Suresh. In terms of safflower oil products, how much revenue growth is expected in 2025, and can this be the main part of business in the future, given the push in AI and data centers for biofuels?

Well, thank you Arun for joining us today, and thank you for the question. Before going to Jose and talking about--he will give some indication about the growth in 2025 in terms of the business, but in terms of applications in AI and data centers, I don’t know. What I can say is--and this is amazing, it’s a good idea, great, but I want to highlight and point out that Moolec is focusing on improving yields for Glaso and the future products by using safflower as a bioreactor, as a great small factor and biological factory. Bunge is focusing on biofuels. I personally think that we haven’t reached what plants can do. Moolec is proving with Glaso and Piggy Sooy that this technology is not only doable, not only feasible, it’s cost effective, it’s sustainable, and it’s real. It’s material, guys, it’s concrete. By using AI in the future, data centers, or any other applications, I think it’s great, and we could--we have the ability to produce any molecule, any protein in any crop so far by using the same tactics. But I want to go back to the question, Arun - thank you for that, and I leave the floor to Jose to give more details in terms of revenue.

Sure, thank you Gaston, and Arun, thank you very much for the question. As mentioned before, what we expect for fiscal year 2025 is that Glaso participates in the overall total revenue in around 15%. Again, for fiscal year 2026, there’s going to be a lot of focus in the operation of Glaso and the scale-up of the operation of Glaso, with a bigger campaign starting in May-June calendar year 2025. So what to expect in terms of Glaso participating in the revenue onwards for fiscal year 2026, probably in fiscal year 2025 it’s going to be around 50%, for fiscal year ’26, I would expect it could be participating [indiscernible] fiscal year 2025, so yes, we have good hopes, good expectations for the product and how it helps grow the revenue of Moolec.

Thank you Jose. Before going to the next question, I want to leave the floor to Amit to--probably he will want to expand my technological and scientific answer. Over to you, Amit.

Yes, sorry - I’m having some connection issues.

No worries.

Well, in this particular case, I think our technologies are expanding quite a bit. Gaston, as you already mentioned, and Jose has also mentioned quite a bit about it. I don’t have much to add, but I think as we expand our technology platform here, we can make further milestones in this case to reach the market, as well as expand our product line in the future. Back to you, Gaston. Thank you.

Yes, I fully agree. Thank you Arun for the question. Please Bill, let’s move to the next question.

Okay, we have a follow-up question from Anthony Vendetti with Maxim Group. Anthony states, can you discuss what steps you have taken or intend to take to continue to drive awareness and adoption of your PMF products?

Well, thank you for the question, Anthony, again. All the efforts that we have done, we are willing to do in terms of our awareness of plant molecular farming as a technology are for the industry, are for the people that really understand technology, science, and applications. Moolec has a B2B business model. We don’t need to invest money and time to de-focus communications in mainstream communications. We don’t need to talk to consumers. The Nestle’s of the world know how to communicate to consumers. Of course, we need to be transparent. We need to talk about the science. If you get into our website, we are trying to be very transparent of how we modify plants, how all our technology works and so on, but all our efforts are to approach the people that really understand the tech, and that’s mostly the R&D departments of our potential customers - food technologies, scientists, food scientists, and people that now I can say that are fully understanding the potential of this tech. I always say that when we started back in 2020, talking about modifying seeds for human consumption purposes, it was quite shocking. Four years, I definitely can assure that this is very well understood. So we are going to continue educating the R&D departments. Most of them approach us directly because we are very active in leading, in PR and some specific shows that we are attending, so it’s working so far. We really want to reinforce that communication since we are hitting the market now with Glaso and getting fresh material from Piggy Sooy very soon. We want to continue investing and maybe expanding that message now with fresh materials and new materials, clear communication materials as well. This is a very relevant topic that you have just raised, Anthony, in terms of helping us in the commercialization stage that Moolec is starting as we speak.

Okay, moving forward, we’ve received an online question from Patricio. Some of this is similar to the prior question, but if you care to elaborate, feel free to do so, Moolec team. The question is the achievements made so far in terms of advancements, research, commercialization and technology are truly impressive; however, what are the specific plans for marketing campaigns and public relations? While this technology is innovative, I believe it is still not widely understood by the general public. Do you think greater exposure and support could attract more investors and increase the value of the shares? What is the plan on this matter?

It’s in your question, but it’s very important for us to tackle all of these things, specifically the investor relations efforts that we are having together with ICR, with you Bill, Steph and the ICR team. For us, it’s very important as a small company to have these good practices of investor relationships by getting an important IR firm such as you guys. The plans are to continue working with you guys and to attend more conferences, to deliver good stuff in terms of PR and to keep the investors updated. Sometimes it’s not good enough because the market is huge, there are so many public companies and so many promising companies using biotechnology, that it’s hard to reach all; but I personally believe that if we continue delivering and getting good milestones and communicating these milestones right away to the public and to our investors, step by step, day by day we are going to start gaining more traction, more awareness, and don’t forget that we are here for the long run. We are talking--we are thinking about decades here, and this is just starting. But I think it’s a very good question. Patricio, thank you for that. Let me reinforce the great work that we are doing together with ICR to expand and spread the word together with them.

Okay, another follow-up question--or a question we have is from Salvatore Verdoliva. He says, I’m new to the story. From my understanding, Glaso is a fat-based product, so how can it be competitive from a cost point of view compared to palm oil, for example, or is it targeting another more premium market?

Thank you Salvatore, and thank you for the question. I’m very glad that you are getting into the story now so we could give more color not only about Glaso applications, some products and the competitive edge, also you could have a better color and sense of what Moolec is doing here with molecular farming. Before going to Martin to--who will explain the product, I will try to do it quick because the market has just opened and probably most of you want to start seeing the--to take a look at the shares and the market, is that Glaso is--the name Glaso means GLA safflower oil - that means gamma-linolenic acid safflower oil. Gamma-linolenic acid is a specific omega-6, it’s a nutritional oil, so it’s not competing with palm oil, it’s competing with some other GLA oils in the market. Most of these products are from sources such as borage oil and primrose. Jose, do you want--sorry, Martin, do you want to add more on that?

No, I think you explained it quite well. The only thing I would add is our competitive advantage compared to borage and maybe even primrose, which are plant-based oils rich in GLA, is that our expresses something between 50 to 60% of GLA, so out of the complete fatty acid profile, 60%--between 50 and 60% is GLA. The next most rich GLA plant-based oil is borage, and it has only 20%, and then even in primrose, it’s in the 10% range, so our fatty acid profile, our oil produces three times more GLA per kilo of oil than other oils in the market rich in GLA. That’s our main competitive advantage.

Thank you Martin. I want to add before we close, or we go to the next question, that concentration levels are critical for dietary supplements, for example. It’s not the same to take three or four pills per day rather than one pill, so our competitive advantage is definitely a strong sales message and that’s what we are going to do in terms of communications. Now that we have products in the market, it’s to reinforce that competitive edge. Bill, do you have any more questions? I think there is not any other questions in the chat box.

That’s correct, Gaston. It appears there no further questions at this time, so I’d like to hand the call back over to you for some closing remarks.

Yes, well before that, I want to ask my fellow partners here if you want to add something before we go. Amit, I think that maybe you wanted to add some comments in terms of the technology. Jose, Martin, feel free before we go.

Yes, thank you Gaston. I wanted to address a couple of comments earlier and add to t those about plant molecular farming. We are really connecting a lot with commodity group organizations where--because as Gaston mentioned, we had a B2B business. We are first informing them, so as we interact a lot with the commodity group organizations, that really helps us be in front of these groups, which also fosters collaborations, business collaborations and partnerships that will come out of those. Secondly, we are also becoming members--we’re already members of several other organizations such as the International Society of Plant Molecule Farming, Society of In Vitro Biology, and then other organizations such as the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology, because we really want to work with these groups. These are scientific bodies that can then utilize our information and they utilize the plant molecule farming to reach our policy makers. Sometimes that also crosses over to the investor groups, so really the effort on the science side is that what we have developed in our technology platform is cross-cutting the business piece, the technology leadership piece, as well as it’s really leading the way forward for producing some of the major ingredients that we need today through plant molecule farming. Through this ecosystem, we are developing that. As Gaston said, R&D folks are coming to us - in fact, I get invited out on behalf of Moolec to speak at various plenary sessions to talk about what we’ve achieved through soy, Piggy Sooy as well as Glaso, so that’s a very exciting time for us in the science field. That also fosters new ideas that are our new scientists who are starting their careers or have new technologies that really are interested in this, and that’s how together we will really advance the science on this front, so that’s very exciting. Thank you Gaston. Over back to you.

Thank you Amit, thank you. Yes, to add on top of that, we are very committed to stewardship, we are very committed to follow identities with our program, for our crops in the United States. We are dealing with high value products here, fully operating in the United States with the RSR from the USDA APHIS - that’s amazing. Nevertheless, we are very focused on following and having traceability of our beans, our seeds, so that’s very important for the operational side, on top of what you said, Amit, that we are part of these soybean associations and scientific associations as well. Jose, Martin, before we go--?

No, for my part, thank you everyone for participating in the call, the interest in Moolec. Please do reach for anything, any questions, any doubts that you have. I’ll be pleased to help and get in touch with you.

Thanks. Martin?

I’m okay. I’m okay on my end, thank you. Thank you all. It was quite an interesting conversation during this Q&A. Thank you.

Good, okay. Great. I personally would like to thank Catalina Jones, our Chief of Staff and Sustainability of Moolec, for leading internally again this business update. Thanks ICR, Steph, Bill, thank you, and to the Moolec team, and also to my fellow officers here presenting with me. To all of you, thanks for joining us today on this annual business update. Thank you for that, for taking the time and your interest in the company and our story. Finally, I want to reinforce the commitment of our company, of Moolec, and our main shareholders as well to keep the company public in this challenging market, as you surely know. We redouble our commitment to our purpose of redefining the way we produce animal proteins through molecular farming for the good of the planet, for the good of all. So thank you again, and have a great day.

Thank you all, you may now disconnect.

This morning, you will hear from Gaston Paladini, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Moolec Science, together with Jose Lopez Lecube, Chief Financial Officer and Amit Dhingra, Chief Science Officer. In today's call, we will be referring to a presentation that is available on the company's Investor Relations website. Moving to Slide 2, this conference call is mainly for informational purposes. And during this call, the company will be making-forward looking statements regarding future events and results, which are not historical facts and include, but are not about the company's beliefs and expectations. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Further information regarding these and other risks are included in the company's annual report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC, also available on the company's investor relations website. Now moving to Slide 3, I would like to turn the call over to Moolec's CEO, Gaston. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Bill, and good morning to everyone. It's a pleasure to once again provide our latest business update. Today's agenda will address three main topics. First, I will highlight our outstanding progress on Piggy Sooy. Second, Amit Dhingra, Moolec's Chief Science Officer will walk you through our highlights on safflower platform. And finally, Jose Lopez Lecube, our Chief Financial Officer will present our financial highlights from Q3. Let's move now to the next slide. I want to share with you how proud I am of our team consistent execution on all fronts. Today, I would like to hone in on our news breaking success on the regulatory pathway with our achievement of Piggy Sooy. I cannot simply describe how big of an accomplishment it is to be the first company in the industry to obtain regulatory approval of this kind from the USDA-APHIS. As I said before in the press release from this particular topic, Moolec is unlocking the power of plants by leveraging science to overcome climate change and global food security concerns. I am very proud of the Moolec team creating value for the shareholders and the planet at the same time, while rewriting the history of biotechnology. With this approval, USDA-APHIS RSR has then Piggy Sooy unlikely to pose increased plant pest risk related to non-engineered soybeans thus giving Moolec a green light to move and ship our products without individual permits relating to the APHIS regulation. For those new to the story, Moolec developed a unique and patented soybean platform technology under the trademark Piggy Sooy. Our scientific team has achieved high level of expression of animal meat proteins in soybeans, where the seeds exhsibited portion protein expression level up to 26.6% over total soybean protein. Now turn to the next slide, so we can share with you why we understand Piggy Sooy is relevant for our planet. In Moolec, we work daily with the mission to create food ingredients that can make a positive impact on the food industry environmental footprint and further strengthen food security. First of all, the industry is already growing soybeans in order to feed pigs that are then slaughtered to produce processed meat products and cuts of meat. Roughly 1 acre of traditional soybean can feed 10 pigs used for livestock. To produce these livestock, it is estimated that more than 60,000 liter of water are required and that the process produce around 550 kilogram of CO2 equivalent emissions. Now talking about Moolec, in contrast, if we achieve to farm 1 acre of Piggy Sooy, this acre could potentially produce pork meat proteins equivalent to the same 10 pigs as well, while not requiring any additional water to produce them and will not produce extra CO2 emissions. Is that amazing? Turn with me to the next slide to see what we understand is Piggy Sooy value proposition. I would like to give you one perspective on the attractive value presented by our Piggy Sooy platform and why we are confident it is a market potential going forward. This is currently how the industry works. As highlighted in the previous slide, the industry consumes a significant amount of soybeans used as animal feed to support livestock, later slaughtering for meat. The industry is also using traditional soy protein ingredients, which are generic soy commodity plants used as meat extender or fillers in the processed meat product such as sausages, burger, nuggets, meatballs, dumplings, and so on. By the way, these kind of products represent 70% of the $1 trillion global meat market. That's huge, $700 billion market. These traditional soy protein ingredients contain no meat flavors and other meat properties when compared to meat and need to be mixed with extra ingredients, mostly chemical, colorant and flavoring in order to provide different functionalities to processed meat products. By the way, I am very well acquainted with this traditional meat industry since I'm part of the fourth generation of one of the largest processed meat players in South America Paladin. So now let's talk about Moolec and what Moolec will offer. Moolec will leverage commodity supply chain, introducing science at the beginning of the value chain as new ingredients for food companies. Remember, we started with seeds. And how will we do this? Well, Piggy Sooy will be a unique product used each replacement as an ingredient with a higher level of nutrition could potentially put the same iron content, flavor and color as true meat. As a result, food processors could replace part or eventually all additive used for coloring and flavoring as well as real meat from slaughterhouses. Now I leave you with Amit Dhingra, Moolec Chief Science Officer, who will provide an overview of Moolec Science and Piggy Sooy milestones on top of the safflower platform highlights. Amit, over to you.

Thank you, Gaston, and good morning to everyone. As critical as our regulatory approval milestone is, we continue to work on commercializing our product. I want to emphasize our team's excellent track record of effectively delivering on scientific and product development milestones. From the discovery stage in 2020 to the planned transformation stage, regulatory approval applications and patent applications, we have consistently produced results and continue to build our IP portfolio and file regulatory applications in other territories. With the approval from the USDA-APHIS, we started field trials at three different locations in May 2024, with fourth generation seeds. Everything is progressing on schedule and as planned originally. Starting next year, we will strategize the breeding of the selected events and scale up the production in two to four years. The commercialization process will likely begin in 2027, 2028. We look forward to updating you on our progress and implementation of our plans in subsequent business updates. Moving on to the next slide, I would like to highlight our recent achievements for Moolec's safflower platform in terms of product development and intellectual property. Moving on to Slide 10, I will begin with our team's progress on gamma-linolenic acid, safflower oil or GLASO. This nutritional oil has many varied applications, such as dietary supplements and functional foods, cosmetic and personal care, pharmaceutical industry, food and beverage, animal nutrition and others. We are proud to share that our GLASO is now in the pre commercialization stages. In February of 2024, we started trial production of GLASO at our processor facility as we optimized, processed and produced roughly 5 tons of material to develop pre-commercial collaborations. We began planting in April and May 2024. We have successfully contracted 600 acres of production with key growers to plant GLASO seeds for crushing purposes. We have additionally contracted another 60 acres, which have been planted for seed production. We use roughly 200 tons to 400 tons of safflower during this production season. Shortly before the year ends, we plan to harvest, crush and market our 2024 GLASO seeds, as we engage with potential customers and partners. Now to the next slide, I would like to highlight our exciting progress on SPC2 product. Two U.S. patents were granted for SPC2. These patents extend the protection of our technology and processes that were used to increase the expression levels in safflower seeds until 2041. Building up on our intellectual property portfolio is one of the strategic pillars at Moolec. To protect our leading edge innovations in the coming years, we continue to pursue patents for all technologies and processes across strategic geographies. Now, I'd like to turn the presentation over to my colleague, Jose, for the financial overview. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Amit, and good morning to everyone. It is a pleasure to be providing this business update of Moolec for the third quarter of fiscal year 2024. Today, I would like to review our latest highlights with regards to revenues, expenses and cash utilization. In particular, we are introducing year-over-year figures from quarter-over-quarter comparisons as we have completed four quarters reporting as a public company. We are confident that this change in how we report the progress of Moolec will provide our stakeholders with a more comprehensive understanding of the evolution of the business given that year-over-year comparisons offer a more view of the company progress. Please keep in mind that all figures mentioned today are in U.S. dollars, unaudited and based or derived from IFRS unless otherwise stated. Let's move on now to Slide 13. During the third quarter, normalized revenues and other income excluding IAS29 increased year-over-year from nil to approximately $1.3 million. This increase was due to the consolidation of the soy protein ingredient business, which occurred in April 2023. Normalized costs of goods sold increased as well on a year-over-year basis from nil to close to $1 million resulting in a gross margin of around 18%. On the expenses from this quarter, SG&A and R&D have increased to $2.3 million from $1.4 million in Q3 2023. This increase in expenses is mainly related to non-cash items such as depreciation, amortization and equity incentives as well as the consolidation of the soy ingredient business. We continue to be confident in our conservative approach to expenses, while delivering significant milestones and supporting company growth. In terms of cash utilization, operational cash flow this quarter was approximately $2.7 million, which includes close to $1.4 million allocated to lower accounts payable mainly related to transaction costs. On a year-over-year basis, operational and cash utilization has decreased from $4.2 million in Q3 2023, given that this quarter we have had significantly lower cash payments associated with listing costs. Finally, our cash position of approximately $4.3 million as of Q3 2024 was strengthened by approximately $2 million of additional funding received during the end of April 2024, as a result of the utilization of the equity line of credit in place with Moolec. We are very pleased with how Moolec continues to deliver significant milestones such as the USDA-APHIS regulatory approval of Piggy Sooy, while maintaining an adequate corporate structure and a cost efficient strategy. I will now turn things over to Bill for the Q&A portion of our call. Thank you.

Thank you, Jose. At this time, our management will be taking questions. You may submit questions through the Q&A chat box by submitting your name and firm in the chat and typing your question. Please be advised that we will ask you to unmute your line to ask your question live. We ask those who would like to participate in the Q&A, if your name and firm is not indicated on your profile, please submit your name and firm in the Q&A before asking a question. Again, you may submit questions through the Q&A chat box.

Before we take questions from the live queue, we have received a few questions via e-mail. The first question is as follows. This quarter, you highlighted USDA approval for Piggy Sooy. Can you provide more color on the significance of this achievement, what's next and the opportunity you see?

We are really happy of being the first molecular farming company by achieving this kind of USDA approval. The U.S. government and the agencies telling us that there's no such a patch risk in implanting our animal proteins in U.S. soil. Very happy of that. I think personally that this achievement is beyond Moolec. I'm quite proud of Amit and Martin Salinas and [Hank] and Bruce, and let's say all the Moolec team to achieve this great milestone, because I personally believe this, they are right in the history of biotechnology. They are unlocking in some way molecular farming food by getting this kind of approvals. So what's next? Well, in terms of operations, field trials, we are planting, as we speak, Piggy Sooy in three different locations in the United States without permits because now it's approved. That will brings a lot of information in terms of product development, in terms of the next step in -- of a regulatory front that will be FDA. So, we have already started conversation with the FDA. So, we quite understand how the FDA framework works. I'm quite optimistic of -- about how our regulatory team works. So really looking forward to continue, providing information to regulators. I'm pushing, this product from a bunch of seeds to balance and commercialization. So, thank you for the question, and again, I'm very happy and I take this opportunity to congratulate Moolec's team now in this earning call for this great milestone.

In the business update, you mentioned GLASO was in pre-commercialization stages. Can you talk more about the types of customers and timing of commercialization for GLASO?

Sure. I could do that. Well, yes, GLASO product is in pre-commercialization stages. The type of customers for GLASO and GLA all will be pet foods, dietary supplementation, companies that provide dietary supplements. Ingredient company that blends nutritional oils, not only omega 6, that's GLA GLASO, also omega 3 It's very complementary to the EPA and DHA, omega 3 oils. And nutritional beverages, that will be another application as well and some specific food applications. So customers -- potential customers are all around this category of products. And this as you said before, William in the question, I don't know who is answering but who is asking but this is true. We are very close to hit the market with GLASO. We are planting around 600 acres, in Idaho, U.S. for commercial purposes and in active conversation with customers to hit the market, hopefully, by the beginning of -- by the first part of the 2025 calendar year. So, we are working hard to deliver. Moolec is a science-based food ingredient company and this is definitely a scientific product -- science based product and a huge market understanding that GLA market is around $1.5 billion globally per year. So the opportunity is quite big.

On Piggy Sooy, when can you expect commitments from customers? Have you had feedback from potential customers so far?

Good question. Well, it's hard to say, specific timing of customer commitments, but I can say that we are receiving very good feedback from potential customers and different stakeholders that are very interesting in receiving samples of Piggy Sooy. Actually, we have already started delivering some samples, but we haven't had too many seeds to crash and deliver samples. So we are actually multiplying seeds, making a seed increase. Actually, this is happening as we speak. As I described before, in our field trials, we are also increasing seeds to get more seeds to crush, prepare sample for potential customers. So Moolec is a science-based company, but it's an ingredient company explaining the ingredient business. That's how the ingredient business work. You need to deliver samples, co-work with established players, co-work with the R&D departments and that relationship take time. This is not just plug-and-play. You need to go work things away with the customers, in the applications. We are in great conversations on Piggy Sooy but let's go step-by-step.

Now we're going to take our first question from the live queue. The first question comes from Thomas McGovern at Maxim Group. Thomas, at this time, we ask.

Sorry William to interrupt, but I saw Scott Fortune raising his hand from the beginning of the earning call. Sorry, Thomas, but I would prefer to prioritize Scott's question, if you don't mind, William.

That's fine. We can go -- we'll take Thomas next. So, we'll go to Scott Fortune at Roth MKM. Scott, please unmute your line and proceed.

I appreciate all the color and the progress you've made here, but just provide a little more color on the conversations you're having with you mentioned ingredient foods and dietary supplements. I know you've given out a number of samples and delivered to kind of to those different companies. But just a little more color on how those conversations, what's the feedback for -- ahead of this GLASO, you're still looking to commercialize this in early 2025 here. That'd be helpful from that standpoint.

Well, unfortunately, I can't reveal names now about who these potential customers are. But what I can say is that we are, in some cases, working to close off take agreements and some commercial agreement. So that will come for sure, and that's part of the commercial conversation and that's definitely the output, that Moolec needs to actually progress and move forward with the commercialization of these products. But what I also can say about Piggy Sooy is that this interest is coming from multiple ways. So we are focusing on who -- in case of Piggy Sooy. And that will be the majority of the excitement comes from food applications. But we all know that soybean is a very well understood ingredient for feed, for pet foods and for some other applications as well. Pita food goes to hand to hand. So we are also receiving interest from different other industries as well. Again, we are prioritizing food. That's where our focus is from now. But that's as I said before, it's quite tuned to talk now about the soy progress. GLASO overall, yes, probably we will keep you updated very soon in the following business updates or any calls.

And then one more question for me just maybe providing a little color around the YEA, Y-E-A one kind of the skill up process here and timing to arrive at kind of the characterization prototypes to achieve regulatory compliance. Just kind of an update on that side of the business from your aspect here.

Sorry. I didn't understand the question. Could you please, come again, Scott?

Color around the YEA1 scale up. If you guys can update that, but just a little more color on that in achieving regulatory compliance as you move forward. Just a little bit of help from that standpoint.

Sure. Yes. Well, one is on track. We use our last business update to talk deeper about YEA1. We are, right now, multiply – no, sorry. This is well, we would not be multiplying. We'll be scaling up this product with our partner, Grupo Insud in Europe. We are using their facilities to scale up this product and that scale up stage will also bring us samples and information for regulators to in the United States. So quite similar to Piggy Sooy, we are in multiple fronts with regulators, open channels to provide information from both products. This is moving quite nicely, but we need to respect the regulatory, pathway and framework. And I'm quite happy of how our regulatory team internally Moolec with David Herron as an adviser -- regulatory adviser of our old team. He's handling all the different and multiple regulatory fronts for YEA1. So this goes in parallel. We probably will we will expect some results. Not talking about regulation, but I'm talking about overall in the products. The yeast could eventually go faster than plants. Because it's a controlling environment and plants, you need to -- in terms of plants, you need to respect the biology times, the campaigns and the multiplication quite more I will not say easy but quite faster to scale up in liters in a controlled environment than in tanks in open field. But I will summarize my answer to YEA1 and Piggy Sooy and moving forward with FDA in parallel with open channels, providing information. All the things that we are doing now is to fine tune product development and gather information to provide for the regulators in the United States.

Thank you. Congratulations again, the USDA and really moving molecular farming forward for the industry.

Our next question comes from Thomas McGovern at Maxim Group.

So a lot of my high level questions were addressed. So I just wanted to focus now kind of taking a step away from Moolec and looking more at Argentina's economy as a whole right now. So in April for the first time in six months, Argentina achieved a single-digit inflation rate on a monthly basis. So I was just wondering, how your outlook on the hyperinflationary environment in Argentina has kind of changed in the recent months and if you expect this trended decline in inflation rates to materially impact Moolec moving throughout the calendar year and then into 2025?

Well, I will leave the floor to Jose to explain and talk people in inflation rates and Argentina business. Before that I can say that Argentina inflation is going down for sure. So, 8.8 should be crazy but compared with the five month right before, this is definitely going down. Our President, I'm saying now because I'm personally in Argentina. So our President now is in the U.S., expanding the network for investment in Argentina. So it's a good momentum for the country now. But definitely, it's the main topic should be inflation and how the Argentina coming will recover. So, Jose, please, go ahead and get deeper into Thomas’ question.

Moolec has a global operation with presence in the U.S., in Europe and in Argentina as well. So that provides Moolec with some exposure to the Argentine effects movement and the inflation as well. So having said that, our business present in Argentina has, for the most part, revenues denominated in U.S. dollars. So from that perspective, inflation movement shouldn't have a large impact on the underlying business. On the cost front, we do have some costs denominated in local currency in Argentine pesos. So from that end, there is some exposure to the inflation that fly through our cost structure. So conceptually, I would say the following. When there is an evaluation of the Argentine peso that has some positive impact on the cost front for us given that we have some cost to eliminate in the Argentine peso. When there is inflation, when there is high inflation that kind of raise our cost in Argentina pesos a bit. So it all comes to what is, how devaluation and inflation move along. If devaluation is higher than inflation then that has some positive impact on our cost. If inflation is higher than the valuation, that kind of -- has some potential higher cost on our P&L. But, again, our costs denominated in Argentina peso is a small part of our overall cost structure. Now looking forward, what can we expect? It's too soon to tell, but, what we are seeing is a gradual devaluation of the Argentine peso at a 3% per month. And a strong decline in inflation from 25% at the beginning of the year now falling to single-digits. So if things continue in this way, you should see a match between inflation and devaluation. So that provides a stable -- some stability in real terms for the local currency.

At this time, it appears that there are no further questions. Therefore, I'd like to turn the call back over to Moolec's CEO, Gaston for some closing remarks.

Well, thank you, Williams. Well, I really want to thanks, Catalina Jones, our Chief of Staff & Sustainability Officer. So for handling all this greater business update from our side and also thanks the ICR team to help us as usual. I also thank you all here, all the audience for joining us on today's conference call. Thank you for that. We are, very, very happy, as I said before of the this USDA approval. Moolec is definitely a flagship in molecular farming. This is a proof of that. And, I am also happy that the Moolers are providing value not only for the shareholders and all the stakeholders of Moolec also for the planet. Because if we farm, a Piggy Sooy and this definitely could be very beneficial for our planet in terms of carbon and water footprint compared with livestock. And believe me, that's where I come from. And my name Paladini is one of the one of the most famous meat brands in Argentina. I'm very well acquainted with the traditional meat value chain. I'm very proud of my family business, but we need to understand we need to find alternative solutions to produce the same animal proteins and meat proteins with science and technology to overcome the mere challenges in the food system. And we need to address carbon and water footprint for sure. So that's what Piggy Sooy does. So I'm going back to the final remarks. So I'm happy, as I said to share with you this solid execution of Mooler, the team. And we will we continue working hard to the step ahead for sure. A big thanks also to our partners, to our investors and the analysts that are following us and for all the supporters and followers. And thanks again, for joining us today. We look forward to updating you in the next quarter for sure. Have a grand wonderful day or wonderful afternoon there in Europe for our European followers. Thanks.

Thank you all. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, and welcome to Moolec's Conference Call. My name is Michael Bowen, from ICR's, Strategic Communications and Advisory. [Operator Instructions] Please also note that today's session is being recorded. Moolec announced today's first quarter fiscal year 2024 business highlights yesterday after market closed. The document is now available on the company's Investor Relations website at ir.moolecscience.com. This morning, you will hear from Gaston Paladini, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder of Moolec Science, together with Amit Dhingra, Chief Science Officer; and Jose Lopez Lecube, Chief Financial Officer. In today's call, we will be referring to a presentation that will be available on the company's Investor Relations website. This conference call is mainly for informational purposes only. And during this call, the company will be making some forward-looking statements regarding future events and results. Statements that are not historical facts, including, but not limited to statements about the company's beliefs and expectations are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Further information regarding these and other risks will be included in the company's annual report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC, later also available on our Investor Relations website. Now I would like to turn the call over to Moolec's CEO to comment on our business and recent developments. Gaston, please go ahead.

Thank you, Michael. Hello, everyone. I am happy to present our quarterly business update conference call. I want to thank you all in advance for your interest and support. Not much time has passed since our last update, but this quarter has been another solid period of performance and development. After having a great 2023 fiscal year, where we announced many great breakthroughs in our development, we certainly continue to steadily deliver and execute on our strategies. I would like to start by outlining today's agenda on Slide 3. First, let me briefly review Moolec's business opportunity. Second, our Chief Science Officer, Amit Dhingra, will walk you through our latest scientific and operational progress. Third, Moolec's Chief Financial Officer, Jose Lopez Lecube, will go through our financial highlights from Q1. Let's move now to Slide 4. This morning, I will start our remarks by quickly reemphasizing the important work we do here at Moolec. Moolec is using science to bypass dependence on animals by genetically engineering plants to produce the proteins of animals in addition to the native plant proteins. Moolec is at the forefront of contributing a solution to the current unsustainable food industry. We are a science-based food ingredient company using molecular farming, a cutting-edge technology to move away from traditional practices and over-consume resources and contribute to excessive gas emissions. A cutting-edge technology to move away from traditional practices that over-consume resources and contribute to excessive gas emissions. Let's move now to Slide 6. To quantify the massive market opportunity ahead, we are exposed to a very large agro-market sitting in an $829 billion market by 2025, mostly represented by processed meat such as burgers, sausages, meatballs, ground meat, nuggets, cold cuts, et cetera. Moolec focuses on these big markets on top of their genetic protein niche due to the good scientific and product development results we have obtained. And in comparison to the chart we showed last quarter, we have included iron supplementation as one of our addressable markets. Our ingredients can be applied not only to the food ingredient industry but also to the pharmaceutical, nutraceutical, supplementation and others. I would like to comment on our product development and research team for their excellent work in developing revolutionary products. And I would like to hand the call over to Amit, Moolec's Chief Science Officer, to comment on our scientific and operational progress. Amit, over to you.

Thank you, Gaston. I will provide an update on our scientific and operational progress section of today's agenda. Let's go to the Slide 8. First, I will highlight the progress on our gamma-linolenic acid, safflower oil, which we call GLASO. During the first quarter of fiscal year 2024, which corresponds to calendar year June to September 2023, we successfully harvested 35 hectares of GLASO with a notable yield of 1.8 tons per hectare, which exceeds average yields by approximately 50%. At the same time, we maintained expression levels of up to 60% from the previous harvest, exceeding our original expectations by 10%. We have been in the process of scaling up our operations as we move towards commercialization, and we expect to plant between 100 to 350 hectares in fiscal year 2024. In 2025, we still have plans to harvest, crush, and market our 2024 GLASO seed. And we continue to actively engage in discussions with potential clients and partners to expand and advance our GLASO business. This will result in risk reduction as we prepare to launch our inaugural molecular farming product. Moreover, it represents a crucial step towards diversification in terms of our product portfolio, as well as resilience against potential challenges from weather and geography. On to Slide 9. Let us walk together through our process of discovery to selection to get that one selected event of molecular seed for our soy 1, the first product of our piggy soy platform. Our ultimate goal is to get to that one transgenic event that has the best combination of the highest expression level of animal protein and yield performance. Then that seed is multiplied for further work. For discovery, we started by synthesizing DNA or the gene coding for animal proteins of interest. After that, the gene was inserted into an expression vector. As I explained to you during our first conference call in May, 2023, a vector is like a truck that allows us to deliver the cargo of gene expression components into the cells and integrate the DNA coding for animal protein into the plant DNA so that the animal protein can be expressed stably in the transgenic lines through different generations. During the genetic transformation stage, vectors are inserted into plant chromosomes. Plants expressing the desired animal proteins were then selected by using PCR and were grown in cultures. In this project, we first started with 550 zero generation or T0 transgenic events that were narrowed down to 256 transgenic generation 1 or T1 events using PCR tests that allowed us to know whether or not those events contain the desired animal protein genes or not. Thereafter, the remaining events were further narrowed down using the main KPIs from the plants where we finally selected 140 second generation transgenic or T2 transgenic events. We are currently at the developmental stage. We have just finished harvesting and analyzing our third generation or T3 transgenic events using animal protein level of expression as our key selection criteria. I will discuss the results in the next slide. To complete the process first, we will select some of these transgenic events and we will test them in the field to see how they behave under real agronomic conditions in order to finally select the best event. In the next slide, I will provide details about the expression level of the animal protein, which is myoglobin observed in the soy 1 seeds. Slide 10 shows our soybean seeds consistently expressing high level of myoglobin both in the second and third generation of seeds. The exceptional expression levels of myoglobin achieved in the piggy soy platform remains consistent across two generations. This chart shows 16 selected events and the corresponding level of animal protein expression for transgenic generation number 2 or T2, which is the green bars. And that was tested in June this year. And generation number 3 or T3 represented by gray bars tested in November this year. You can see that the expression values for T3 correlate with T2. While expression values reached up to 26.6% total soluble protein in the T2 generation. And in T3, we were able to achieve 20.4% total soluble protein expression in one of the lines. Overall, this is a demonstration that the animal protein continues to express stably through the generations. We expect these expression values to stabilize with the advancement of generations and identification of completely homozygous lines. I would also like to point out that these T3 expression analyses were performed at our own lab, the Moolabs located in College Station, Texas. As depicted in the prior slide, we will finally narrow our selection of events to the one best candidate after testing the performance of several selected events in the field. Now, an update on our fully equipped molecular biology lab. I'm very pleased to share with you that Moolec has successfully set up Moo Labs, a fully owned plant molecular biology lab in a research incubator space operated by Texas A&M University College Station, Texas. Our lab became fully operational in September of 2023. And this is where I oversee our plant molecular farming team. As I said, the lab is currently 100% operational and our aim is to focus efforts here in the molecular characterization of the transgenics produced by Moolec. The company is able to now perform a significant part of R&D in plant biology projects here at this location. Compared to conducting research via third party labs as done in the past, the initiative to centralize Moolec's molecular farming research will establish a clear chain of command, facilitate quick implementation of decisions, ensure higher standard quality control, and improve the timeliness and quality of work while reducing costs. These new facilities have already come to generate cost and time savings for each of the phases of the R&D projects we've completed there thus far, which have demonstrated, accelerated and streamlined development compared to the use of third party labs. Overall, I would like to thank my research team for the quality work they've been producing. I will now hand it over to my colleague, Jose, for the financial overview. Thank you.

Thank you, Amit. And good morning to everyone. It is a pleasure to be providing Moolec 's business update for the first quarter of fiscal year 2024. Today, I would like to take some time to review our latest highlights with regards to revenues, expenses, and gas utilization. Please keep in mind that all numbers mentioned today are in U.S. dollars, unaudited, and based on IFRS, unless otherwise stated. During the first quarter, revenues increased to $1.7 million versus $0.9 million in the last quarter, representing a growth of 92% quarter-over-quarter. This growth was primarily driven by a full quarter consolidation of our acquired business versus only two months last quarter. In addition, revenues were also positively impacted by higher average pricing and higher volumes than last quarter. In terms of costs, our operations benefited from stable soy origination from local farmers and more favorable market conditions. As a result, there was a cross margin increase versus last quarter. Quarterly expenses have remained in line with our historical track record with no significant changes except for admin expenses of approximately $1.9 million, which were significantly lower than last quarter. Admin expenses in the previous quarter of approximately $3 million were exceptionally high, mainly due to one-time items such as accounting provisions and end of fiscal year non-cash payments. Finally, our operational cash utilization, this quarter of approximately $1.8 million remains in line with our historical track record of controlled cash expenses while supporting R&D progress. As mentioned in our previous earnings call, Moolec has recently closed a capital raise with strategic investors resulting in $10 million of cash contributions and $21 million of income in-kind contributions, which strengthens our liquidity position. We are pleased with the evolution of the business this quarter and remain focused on the execution of our R&D pipeline. I would like to take some time to thank our partners and investors for their support as we continue to work towards building value for our stakeholders. I will now turn things over to Michael for the Q&A portion of our call. Thank you.

Thank you, Jose. At this time, our management will be taking questions. You may submit questions through the chat box directly to me or by using the hand-raising function. We ask those who would like to participate in the Q&A session to right-click their image, click rename, and enter their firm and full name before asking a question. Okay, thank you, everybody. While we are assembling a roster of questions, we've had a couple come in over the Internet and email. So I will start off by asking them now. So give me one second. Okay, the first question is, what are the biggest advantages of setting up Moolab at Texas A&M? Why is it such an advantage to not use a third-party lab as you've done in the past? And then finally, could you help us think about the cost savings as a result of setting up Moolab? Thank you.

Well, thank you so much, Michael, for the question. Good morning to everyone. Thank you so much for attending our business at day-to-day. Well, personally, I'm really happy to have a self-owned molecular biology lab in Texas. And there's a lot of upsides by getting our lab running now, fully operational with our team. I'm happy also that Amit Dhingra is here and he's leading the lab itself by being located in Texas. So hand it to Amit to fully explain the benefits, the upsides, the savings, you know, because when we - going back to when we founded Moolec, it makes sense at that time to start working with third parties, with great partners. But now that the progress and the great masters are getting now to a very good result, we need to take control of that intellectual property and about that seeds and all the processes. So there's a lot of upsides by getting our lab. I'm sorry, Amit, please go ahead and give more colors about the...

Sure. Thank you, Gaston. And good morning, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. So there are different phases of this discovery and development piece. The big part is that there are certain aspects of the work that we had outsourced, but now that we do have those transgenic events, we need to move rapidly towards deployment, scale up towards market. So how do we get there is we want to control all that material. It really provides protection to our intellectual property, of course. But also we can be - we are very nimble. If we need to do different types of analyses, we don't have to go farm it out because every time we do that, we waste time. At this particular stage, it really makes us more efficient in cost savings. Also, we are not paying overheads to a third party for their work because that's all our work itself. And we have access to some excellent scientists, plant biologists, senior plant biologists in our group. Bruce Williamson, who's really - he's very well trained in different areas and can really move very quickly. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you for that. Actually, at this point, we're going to take our first question from Brian Wright from ROTH MKM. Brian, I'm going to - we're going to unmute you. I'm going to let you ask live. So give that a try. If not, I can read your question. Go ahead.

Thanks. Sorry about the operator error here, I'm sorry about that. Thanks for allowing me for the question. First of all, congrats on both the financial results and on the operating and R&D development during the quarter. What I was just struck with is just given those yields on GLASO are so impressive, just thoughts on potentially accelerating that commercial development or even advancing that commercialization model to maybe a royalty-based model to kind of get in the market quicker. And just kind of like your thoughts on that.

Sure. Well, thank you so much, Brian. And yes, we are happy for this strong GLASO yields. We are happy because, by the way, the timeline is on track. And this is very important, specifically in the scale-up stage. To get the proper amount of seeds, of tons of seeds, do not forget that we went from a bunch of grains to tons. So everything is on track and we are happy about that. We are not expecting to accelerate the process because this is a part of the process. We still need to crush the grains and get the product into the market. But we are quite optimistic of that process so far. Going to your second question, royalty model, I want to point out that the royalty model is always a possibility in Moolec since we are focused on intellectual property and get our own IP for our own seeds. This option could be executed to expand different territories. Talking specifically about GLASO, we are focusing this product in the U.S. and we are getting fully control of the process of our seeds. So it's an option, it's a possibility, we are very open to explore it. In the meantime, we are focusing the process to get fully control of our products and deliver it to customers directly.

Great, thank you. If you don't mind, I've got a couple more. Or I could go back in queue, whichever works best for you all, for the team

No, no, go ahead.

Okay, thank you. It looks like the T3 for piggy soy, really strong again, up around that 20% level. Is that where you think, as you go from T3 to T6, is the thought in, that's well above your initial expectations to begin with by multiple factors. But is that kind of a reasonable expectation for like when you get to T6, in that 20% content range?

Well, first, I'm glad that you are putting focus on the level of expression, because definitely the level of expression is one of our main KPIs, of scientific KPIs. Don't forget that when we started, our first expectation was 5%. Now we are talking about 20%, so that's amazing. But I will pass to Amit to fully explain how the level of expression will continue, without our expectation for the future generations.

Hi, Brian. That's a great question. And since you have seen - when you get a chance to see the slides, we can tell that the expression level is still stabilizing. So in T3, we are at 20%, which means that we expect these levels to stabilize around this level. And of course, when we do agronomic, when we do field trials, that's when the real answer will come out. We can expect there is equal possibility that we might even get higher levels, because of proper fertilizer use, proper photosynthesis in the field as well. So we're very optimistic based on what we've observed so far. However, the stabilization at 20% is really great observation for this generation of seeds.

Great, great. And then, Jose, on a finance question, so revenue was higher than expected, and gross margin was a bit higher than expected as well this quarter. Should we think about, as we get to harvest in the second half of the year, how to think about that in terms of cash flow? Is it just kind of keep thinking about that kind of similar kind of range of the $2 million a quarter? Or is there some potential improvements depending on how the processing and once the harvest comes?

Sure. Thank you, Brian. Sorry, Gaston, well, I took the question directly. But look, I think that the impact of the drought in Argentina, we're still going to see that throughout the next couple of months. So it will be difficult to originate soy. So we're going to see that impact until May, June of next year. So but in terms of cash burn, what I would say that the most important thing here is that we will control, we will have a controlled cash flow as we have had in the past. We're going to keep that track record while continue progressing our R&D pipeline. We're very good at delivering milestones and keeping our cash burn controlled. So, you know, look, going forward, of course, is going to be some increase in the cash burn, specifically probably related to the campaign of GLASO starting in mid-calendar year 2024. So again, controlled cash flow in the short term, probably increasing second half of calendar year next year, even the GLASO campaign.

Okay, thank you. That's very helpful. And then I guess just a bigger kind of picture question. How should we think about the proposed economic reforms and, any impact on the business, positive or negative, just - how to think about that impact on any potential impact on that from that to the company?

Jose, do you want to expand?

Sure, I believe, Brian, you're talking about the elections, or the changing government in Argentina, correct?

Correct. Yes.

Okay. Look, I think it's too soon to tell. The government just took office two days ago, they announced several measures that we are seeing then explained a little bit more as days go by. So there was a devaluation of the Argentine peso. Moolec is not a company that has a huge exposure to Argentina. We do have some exposure to Argentina. So, you know, theoretically, devaluation should mean lower costs in terms of dollar denominated expenses. But again, I would say, Brian, too soon to tell. It's been only two days and as days go by, we will know more about the measures and how they have an impact on Moolec. Again, Moolec has a limited exposure to Argentina, but it does have an exposure.

Okay. That's great. Congrats again on all the progress and thanks for letting me ask some questions.

Thank you, Brian. All right. Thanks, Brian.

If you have any other questions, either raise your hand or jump back into the chat and we'll turn you live again. In the meantime, we have a question from Tom McGovern at Maxim Group. Tom, we'll flip you live. Go ahead. Make sure you unmute yourself.

Hi, guys, can you hear me?

Yes, we can.

First of all, congrats on the quarter. I just have a real quick question here relating back to Moolabs. So just kind of high level, how are you guys looking at the relationships you guys currently have with other third party labs? Do you expect, first of all how many third party labs are still in use? And maybe where are they located? And then kind of, again, high level, as you look at this moving forward, do you expect to continue to utilize third party labs or will you eventually start to transition? I know you already said significant, but almost all or maybe all of your R&D efforts to company owned and managed labs. Thank you.

Good. Good question. Well, we are still using third party labs. One is Wisconsin Crop Innovation Center in Madison, Wisconsin. The other one is a specific lab in Washington State University. And we do use partially some efforts in [indiscernible] that's a company of a quality in Argentina. So we have third parties in different locations. I'm sorry - and we also have some efforts in the U.K. for a specific thing in Cranfield University. So Vivek Narisetty for Molecular Biology works there as well. I think it's very important to have our self-owned lab to concentrate the efforts, cost savings and specifically to get fully control of our intellectual property and seed. But as Jose said, Moolec management will really focus on cash expenses and invest really wisely. So there are specific efforts from the scientific team that make sense to do it in a specific third party labs. And some other ones make much more sense to have it internally in our cell phone lab. So we are pragmatic, but we always put really, really focused on control and intellectual property because that's where the value is. One of the value for Moolec is to have fully control and trustability of where our seats are, where our strengths are, and how to protect the IP. I don't know, Amit, if you want to expand my answer.

Sure. Thank you, Gaston. And thanks, Thomas. Thanks for your question. I think continuing where Gaston left off, the strategy is really to see if we need a lot of infrastructure to accomplish something, which will be a very large overhead cost. Of course, we don't want to do that inside if we can outsource it in a third party lab. What we are doing in Moolec right now, it's a one-time investment of creating a system where we can do the analysis piece. So the question going forward would be depending on the volume of things we have to do. I think that these partnerships also have another advantage. It provides access to us to additional ideas, to additional thoughts. As a scientist, we are always trying to innovate, bring more value, intellectual property value to the company. And so these relationships have another advantage to be maintained. But as Gaston said, we just have to be very pragmatic on where we invest in our efforts and in the end generate value through intellectual property generation. Thank you, Thomas.

Great. I appreciate your response. Congrats again on the quarter.

Okay. As a quick reminder, if you have any questions, you can submit to the chat box or raise your hand and we can turn you live to ask your question. In the meantime, we have a second question in coming from the Internet. So the question is, could you please elaborate on what are the majors - what's the major significance of moving from greenhouses to field trials?

Good question. Well, it's a good question because that is what is happening as we speak. You know, we are transitioning from greenhouses, environment control stage into field trials because I want to point out before going to Amit that he could explain it much better than me. It's that the competitive advantage of Moolec is to keep the commodity cost. And the soybean will get - Moolec soybean will get the commodity cost if we perform with good yields in open fields, not in environment control. And so it's a very important transition, not only for the whole path, also to confirm level of expressions and plant performance, and also for the regulatory process. But Amit, please give more color about that.

Yes, that's a great question. First of all, it's part of the process of going through that pipeline. I was sharing with you where we started 550 events, and then we've narrowed it down to the 16 events that I showed you on a slide where we are seeing variable expression of myoglobin in this. And the big part that we have to go through all of this is going from controlled environment, where the light intensities are not at the level that will allow for maximum production or expose the plants to the elements. Because eventually, as Gaston said, how do we get commodity prices for soybean? We have to do field production anyways. And the good part is soybean production is very routine across the world. And once we find those, we will basically do trials with several of these lines in the field. And the one that performs the best in terms of stability, agronomic performance, as well as high expression levels, is what we will continue to go towards commercialization with. Thank you.

Okay, we have another question coming in by email. And the question is, could you please help us understand what the most important operating metrics that investors should focus on each quarter and also annually as well? Thank you.

Thank you, Michael. Good question. I think that the best way to address this question is to share with the audience how the management sees our value creation. So before handing to Jose, he explained this part of our narrative quite well, is that there is not only one. There's not only one vertical to see. We have four different pillars. And inside each of these pillars, investors could find metrics that we internally follow and really focus on. But this is very important to consider all and not just only one. I don't know, Jose, if you want to get into each of these verticals fully explained. The value creation of Moolec from our view.

Sure. Thank you, Gaston. Look, we think that the correct way of looking at Moolec is on three strategic pillars of value creation. So the first pillar is, of course, product development and science. And I will put inside that bucket, for example, the expression levels on piggy soy and how we evolve in our product development. Second, I would say very important is how we move forward with the regulators. USDA, FDA, and how our R&D progress works hand-to-hand with how we progress with the regulators as they have to be articulated. Third is how we create intellectual property and how we present patents, provisional patents, and other intellectual property protection mechanisms that we will use. Third - I'm sorry, fourth, I would say how we build relationships and how we formalize relationships with the market, with strategic players, and how that translates into partnerships and alliances. Again, we believe that we are in a market that we can progress much more quickly if we build bridges and relationships with well-established players in the ingredients and the biotech industry in general. So I would say that those are the four buckets, which we internally continuously monitor ourselves and how we are progressing in each one of those four buckets, which we believe are key for creating value for our business model.

Okay, thank you, Jose. At this time, we are showing no further questions. So we want to thank everybody for joining our first quarter fiscal '24 conference call. And at this point, I will turn it back over to Co-Founder and CEO, Gaston Paladini for closing remarks.

Well, thank you, Michael. Thank you all for joining us today in our conference call. We are really, really excited about the prospect that lies ahead for Moolec for sure. We are working really hard to execute our strategies, our plans, and bring value to our stakeholders. I want to thank all our team, Moolers, great work. Also, thank our partners and our investors for their continued support. And thank again for joining us today. And I'm really looking forward to updating you in our next quarter. So happy holidays. Have a great day. Bye-bye.

Thanks, everybody. You can now disconnect.

Good morning, and welcome to Moolec's conference call. My name is Martín Taraciuk, and I'm Moolec's Head of Investor Relations. [Operator Instructions]. Moolec announced its third quarter fiscal year 2023 business highlights yesterday after market closed. A press release is now available on the company's Investor Relations website at ir.moolecscience.com. This morning, you will hear from Gaston Paladini, Senior Chairman and Co-Founder of Moolec Science, together with Amit Dhingra, Chief Science Officer; and Jose Lopez Lecube, Chief Financial Officer and Director. In today's call, we will be referring to a presentation that will be available on the company's Investor Relations website. This conference call is mainly for informational purposes only. And during this call, the company will be making some forward-looking statements regarding future events and results. Statements that are not historical facts, including, but not limited to statements about the company's beliefs and expectations are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties. Further information regarding these and other risks are included in the company's annual report on Form 20-F filed with the SEC and available on our Investor Relations website. I would like to turn the call over to Gaston to comment on our business and recent developments. Gaston, please go ahead.

Thank you, Martín. Hello, everyone. I'm thrilled to present our first business update conference call as a public company. I want to thank you all in advance for your interest and support. These few months have been exciting for Moolec due to all the milestones we are about to share now. I would like to start by outlining today's agenda on Slide 3. First, we have been able to deliver scientific and operational milestones in a very short period of time. We have made significant progress on different fronts, such as R&D and regulatory matters. Secondly, we are happy to announce integrations on both downstream and upstream capabilities. Thirdly, I would like to walk you through the execution of Moolec's business plan in order to implement our short, medium and long-term strategy. And last, we will show our significant highlights on the financial front. Let's move forward now to the next slide, where I will share our latest scientific and operational milestones. On the cheese and nutraceutical program, we are moving according to schedule with our safflower molecular seeds multiplication campaigns on both SPC2 and GLASO products. Also in the last one, GLASO, we have achieved expression levels of approximately 60%, which is 10% above our expectations, significantly improving the GLA oil yield. Finally, I would like to highlight that last March, we received regulatory clearance from the USDA-APHIS for our GLA production safflower plants. On the meat replacement program, new proteins were successfully expressed in the several [indiscernible] and other ones reached the transformation stage. We were able to scale up our prototyping operations from 3 liters to 300 liters and PCR analysis confirmed that transgenic events contain the desired animal genes in . Moving now to Slide 6. I want to show you a summary of how our pipeline strategy looks today. In terms of research and development for new products, Moolec is at the forefront of the plant-based animal protein food ingredients and is committed to being a leader in this field. Our team is working really hard in the development of revolutionary products through a process of discovery, transformation, development, selection and scale up into production, while simultaneously undergoing regulatory approvals with agencies like the FDA and the USDA. Displayed in orange, you can observe our latest progress as of today. Project moved from discovery to transformation stage since the feasibility assessment and contract design were successfully concluded. Also the regulation pathway for GLA safflower oil, GLASO was completed after we received regulatory statutory [indiscernible] clearance, as I previously mentioned. Let's now turn to Slide 7, where Amit Dhingra will present a bit of scientific dive into our soybean . Amit, go ahead.

Thank you very much, Gaston. In this chart, I will walk you through how we work through the process of discovery to selection to get that 1 selected event. Our ultimate goal is to get to that 1 transgenic event that has the best combination of the highest expression level of animal protein and yield performance, then that seed is multiplied for further work. For discovery, we started by synthesizing DNA or the gene coding for animal proteins of interest. After that, the gene was inserted into an expression vector. A vector is like a truck that allows us to deliver the cargo of gene expression components into the cells and integrate the animal protein DNA into the plant DNA so that the animal protein can be expressed stably in the transgenic lines through different generations. During the genetic transformation stage, vectors are inserted in plant chromosomes, plants expressing the desired proteins are grown in cultures and selected by using PCR. In this project, we started with 550 0 generation or T0 transgenic events that were narrowed down to 256 transgenic generation 1 or T1 events using PCR that allowed us to know whether or not those events contained the desired animal protein genes. Soon after, the remaining events were further narrowed down using the main KPIs from the plants where we finally selected 140 second-generation transgenic or T2 transgenic events. So we are currently at the development stage. We will get to third-generation or T3 transgenic events using animal protein level of expression as the key selection criteria. We already have some significant results regarding expression levels. Once we have these 3 transgenic events, we will test them in the fields to see how they behave under real agronomic conditions in order to finally select the best event. Now let's move to the next slide where I will provide additional details on the regulatory clearance from the USDA. So on March 31, Moolec received regulatory status review clearance from USDA-APHIS for our GLA-producing safflower. As you can imagine, this is an exciting and a major milestone. This huge milestone marks the completion of this project's regulatory pathway in the U.S. Collectively, and now we have approvals from the FDA on the final product for human and animal consumption and USDA-APHIS for planting genetically modified safflower seeds in the U.S. soil. What does this RSR approval mean? It means that Moolec GLA safflower plants pose no greater plant pest risk than non-genetically engineered safflower plants according to regulation found at 7 CFR Part 340. And how does this impact us at Moolec? It increases the efficiency of our upstream operations by decreasing operating costs that we would have incurred if the crop was regulated. Also, it makes our operations more agile due to the fact that we no longer need permits to import interstate movement or grow these plants in the United States. It is also very important to highlight that the USDA's green light increases awareness of Molecular Farming as a safe technology, and it sets a precedent and a pathway for regulatory approvals for all of our products in the future. Now let's go to Slide 9, where I would like to explain the scale of progress achieved in our operations so far. So looking closer at our products, SPC2 and GLASO which are in the scale up stage, these products have demonstrated encouraging results with regards to seed multiplication. On the left side of the slide, you can see the scale up of seeds for the SPC2/chymosin-producing safflower. We went from 0.7 hectares to 27.4 harvested hectares last January, which equates to a 42x extension of genetically modified safflower seeds. At the center, you can observe the scale-up of GLASO seeds. This year, we planted 20 hectares that we expect to harvest this fall in October 2023. This equates to a 25x expansion of transgenic seeds. Last year, 60% of the total oil in GLASO safflower seeds was GLA. That is 10% more than our initial projections and expectations. This is significant for us because it improves the economics that we estimated for this project. Lastly, on the right part of the chart, you can observe the growth in scale from a lab to a semi-pilot facility. We increased the size of our reactor 100x, coupled with a sixfold increase in biomass . Thank you, and back to you, Gaston.

Thank you, Amit. Let's move forward now to the next topic in our agenda, which addresses the integration of upstream and downstream capabilities. Let's move ahead to Slide 11. On the business front, our team has been working to grow and develop our products and business both organically and inorganically. We are always actively analyzing value-added opportunities. On April 11 this year, we were pleased to announce and disclose the acquisition of a plant-based ingredient capability. This includes a state-of-art soybean processing facility with 10,000 tons per year of capacity that is already fully operational. These facilities are strategically located in a soybean corridor to maximize raw material origination and focuses on the development of texturized vegetable , TVP, that serve as food ingredients in meat substitute as meat replacement. This capability bring to Moolec Science a highly experienced team with a 10-year track record on production and commercialization of soy ingredients. This will be complementary in areas such as product development, sales and engineering. The deal terms included $6 million, of which $2 million was paid in cash at closing, $0.5 at 6 months, and the rest will be paid with MLEC shares from which $0.5 million will be transferred in 12 months and the rest with a period subject to meeting certain business metrics during the next 3 to 4 years. Let's go now to Slide 12. You can see a lot of soybeans here. This is because we are pleased to announce today that we have signed a memorandum of understanding or an MoU with Bioceres Crop Solutions . We believe this has synergies with the acquisition we just discussed. This strategic deal will give Moolec the possibility to finance working capital needs for the next 18 to 24 months. The MoU formalized and reaffirms the commitment and alignment with one of our main shareholders [indiscernible]. Additionally, it brings an ESG approach that consolidates seed-to-fork strategy that I will explain in the following slides. The deal will consist of Bioceres delivering up to 20,000 tons of HB4 soybeans progressively over the next 3 years. Soybeans will be paid at maturity with common shares or cash at the option of Moolec. Moolec's Chief Financial Officer will later explain more details about the financial side of this deal. Moving now on to Slide 13. I would like to point out how important and complementary the HB4 soybean deal is for Moolec. It will bring us the opportunity to build our value chain and use of Molecular Farming technology on top of a traceable and sustainable platform. Bioceres have been developing HB4 technology for almost 20 years as a drought-tolerant technology in soybeans. HB4 platform supplies around 100 farmers helping to lower water and carbon footprint, the use of chemicals and reconnecting farming practices information, thanks to this technology. The combination of Molecular Farming technology with the HB4 platform will contribute to the transition towards carbon neutrality, agricultural regeneration, work inclusion, transparent value chain and a clear end product label information focusing on traceability. Let's now continue to the next chapter of this presentation, where we will address the company's business plan overview. I would like to start this chapter by stressing the massive size opportunity that Moolec has at hand. The total addressable market or TAM expected for 2025 for all of our product is approximately $827 billion. That is near the trillion-dollar figure, and this is huge. On the left side and from a top-down approach, the TAM includes processed meat from the traditional industry, alternative proteins, nutritional lipids and rennet. On the right side, we have the serviceable addressable market or SAM that is approximately $37 billion. We have built the figure from a bottom-up approach that includes, first, $22.4 billion from the non-meat ingredient market, such as flavoring, coloring, binders and texturing that are huge both in the traditional and alternative protein industry to extend and improve processed meat and plant protein properties. Second, $13 billion for TVP, for texturized vegetable protein market that is used as a food ingredient for direct human consumption. Many of you may not know that TVP is used to complement processed meat products to make them affordable and also in the main source of protein using meat analogs as meat replacement. And finally, we have $1.5 billion for gamma linolenic acid or GLA and $0.3 billion for chymosin serviceable markets, which were narrowed by product type, geography and applications. Overall, the growth of our target market will be mainly driven by double-digit growth figures in the alternative protein industry. Let's move to the next slide. Moolec's platform has integrated a network of farmers, sustainable soybean procurement and industrial demo center to replicate and scale with farmers globally, keeping an asset-light approach and a network of customers that are food producers and distributors in 14 countries in 3 different continents that give us market understanding. Please now turn to Slide 17 where we explain in phases of our business plan execution. Moolec's business plan execution has 4 consecutive stages. As we move forward and start timing those stages, we will be able to deliver more value-added products with similar cost structures and higher margins. In Stage 1, we were traditional soybean seeds with our current industrial capabilities. The end products from this process is a soybean texturized vegetable protein or TVP that is sold across the world to food companies and distributors in the traditional and plant-based industries for human consumptions, mainly as meat replacement. By signing the definitive documentation of the deal with BIOX, we will stand in Stage 2. We incorporated HB4 soy to have a more sustainable product that the world is demanding, and we you to a traceability and a lower CO2 footprint. In Stage 3, we will leverage the company's technological experience to enhance and adapt processes, prototype and incorporate future clients for Moolec Soy 2.0 TVP that has Moolec's technology. Finally in Stage 4, we expect to have animal proteins inside Moolec's molecular seeds that have our ingredients by contracted growers with potential partnerships and process it in Moolec's owned and third-party facilities. I will now like to hand the call over to Jose to give a review of our financial highlights.

Thank you very much, Gaston, and good morning to everyone. It is a pleasure to be providing the first business update of Moolec. Today, I would like to take some time to review our corporate structure at the listing, run through the latest financial highlights and provide color on what strategic initiatives we are pursuing. Please keep in mind that all numbers mentioned today are in U.S. dollars, unaudited and based on IFRS unless otherwise stated. Moving on now to Slide 19. As the business combination effectiveness and subsequent commencement of trading in NASDAQ, our corporate structure still reflects a very strong presence of our regional shareholders, manifesting a renewed vote of confidence in our progress as a company. As a spinoff of Bioceres Group, a proven leader in life sciences, we maximize efforts and traction by combining technologies in mutually beneficial partnerships as described in previous sections. This has also positive financial implications we will touch on in the following slides. Moving forward to Slide 20. I would like to go through our underlying financial strategy and the most important events that for the company. The current year has proven to be challenging for financial markets. After business combination with LightJump and subsequent listing on January 3, Moolec received $10 million of proceeds facing a high level of redemptions in line with market trends. As of the 31st of March, we have $6 million of cash and cash equivalents. We continue navigating a difficult year for financial markets. We are managing our cash position efficiently while at the same time, putting in place initiatives to generate increasing positive operating cash flow. In order to manage our cash position in the short term, we have negotiated payment schedules for the majority of listing expenses, issued $2 million of debt through one of our subsidiaries at 0% interest rate and expect to maintain controlled operational expenses in line with our historical . The negotiated payment schemes for the listing piece will alleviate cash needs in the short term and smooth payments through March 2024. The $2 million of debt issuance offsets the upfront payment of our recently acquired downstream capabilities. Moolec has a historically low cash burn while at the same time, proving to progress in R&D projects. We expect this trend to continue throughout the rest of 2023 calendar year with no significant increases of R&D and moderate increases in our administrative expenses. In parallel, our objective, as mentioned, is to increase operational cash flow, while deferring share issuance. In order to achieve this, we have acquired an operational assets with a revenue-generating pipeline. This transaction was structured with 50% share-based payments deferred through 2024, 2025 and 2026. Finally, we have signed a memorandum of understanding with Bioceres Crop Solutions with the objective to secure the majority of raw material costs also with deferred share-based payment of 3 years. As we continue working with Bioceres on definitive documentation, this agreement will significantly decrease raw material cash expenses and generate liquidity for R&D and expansion of operations. Let's now turn to Slide 21 where I will explain the equity subscription memorandum signed with Bioceres in more detail. Upon closing of the definitive documentation, Moolec would have access to up to 20,000 tons of HB4 soybeans progressively in the next 3 years in a mutually agreed delivery schedule. We expect this to cover the majority of raw materials needed for our downstream capabilities in the next 18 to 24 months. This transaction will also allow Moolec to defer the payment of soybean for 3 years. And at maturity, Moolec would have the option to pay for a principle of $14 million plus a payment in kind of 9% with common shares or cash. Throughout the life of the instrument, Bioceres will have the option to do an anticipated conversion to common shares at a strike of $11 per share. I will now turn things over to Martín for the final Q&A portion of our call.

Thank you, Jose, Gaston and Amit. At this time, our management will be taking questions. [Operator Instructions]. So we have our first question coming from Brian Wright from ROTH Capital. And the question is, can you talk about Molecular Farming technologies first quarter results.

Sure. Well, thank you, Brian, for that. And good morning to everyone. Very pleased to start this Q&A and to be hosting this first business update for Moolec as a public company. Again, thank you, Brian, it's a good question, of course, because we are definitely a science-based company focusing Molecular Farming technologies by being pioneering with this tech. And I will pass the post to Amit to explain our significant progress in Molecular Farming, specifically in the safflower seeds that we are in scale-up stages and also in our soybeans and in the labs and greenhouses stages. So Amit, please move forward and please bring more details to Brian.

Thank you, Brian, for your question, and good morning, everyone. I'm very excited about this update, sharing this update about Moolec Science. So in the first quarter, I'll start with the 3 sections. Of course, we talked about safflower. We have quantified the expression of GLA oil, which, as we shared earlier, out of the total oil content, 60% of the oil is GLA, and that is really exciting for us. And then we also talked about the RSR or the regulatory approval, which now allows us to move forward with several aspects. So the regulatory approval is completed for 1 of our products, which is really significant, as you can imagine. So that's the first part of that. Now I'll switch to soybean. In soybean, we are already at T2 generation. So once we integrate these expression cassettes or the vectors that produce that animal protein, we have confirmed by PCR. We have moved these onto the second generation already. We are also right now in the process of confirming the expression levels. We are seeing some significant results. We are in the process of confirming everything right now, which is really exciting to see this all materialize together. And those plants are in the greenhouses right now. As soon as we have confirmed everything, we'll move them to the multiplication stage where we can then start working with those products. And then finally in peas, we have confirmed that the peas that we have selected by PCR have the gene that we want to express. Those plants are currently in the greenhouse going through the motions of getting to the different generations. It is very important to see the stability of this expression cassette that is stably integrated over multiple generations. That's a standard in the industry or just in the process of creating -- utilizing the Molecular Farming technology. So that's a quick update on what we've been working with that. Thank you. Anything else to add, Gaston. Over to you.

Yes. No, I think it's a very good answer. Thank you, Amit. Of course, Brian, we could get deeper into the technology in one-to-one or maybe in another question. I'm really now -- sorry, Martín, that I jumped here that have just sent a question regarding the HB4 platform and the HB4 soybean from Bioceres. So Jessica says, how does this differ from traditional soybean. Quick answer is that this is a technology that Bioceres has been developing for more than 20 years as a drought-tolerant technology in soybean and also in wheat. So that means lower carbon footprint, water footprint as well, the lower use of chemicals and this platform has the possibility to gather information and to get the traceability technically from seed to fork because this technology also is included in the platform of traceable farmers, so we know where this seed and grains come from and any specific information about this production. And you also make a question regarding what will the HB4 soybean [indiscernible] be used for. And that's a very important question because it's not also a strategic upstream acquisition, so a financial acquisition that Jose could explain later on because this is technically the raw material that we need for our downstream brand-new capabilities to produce TVP, texturized vegetable . That's the base of our ingredient and this is a base of soy, of course. I don't know if the audience knows, but soy proteins are one of the best meat analog, meat replacement in the food industry. In the traditional food industry, replacing meat in the processing meat industry and also in the alternative industry. So we have the procurement of this soybean to produce ingredients right away. And that's quite important for us for our current operation. So Jose, I don't know if you want to expand the question? If not, we could go directly to Brian's new question.

Thank you, Gaston. And again, it's a pleasure for me to be part of this first business update. So what I would say about the Bioceres, BIOX deal is that it has different levels of positive implications for Moolec. Of course, we're working on definitive documentation and definitive terms. But as you mentioned, the first positive implication is the soybean traceability and that will be used for or the recently acquired assets that Gaston mentioned. But it's very important that for these recently acquired assets, we have a secure source of raw material. And on top of that, that we have in place a scheme that guarantees working capital through a structure that will allow us to be fair or to pay the soybean and Moolec will have the optionality to pay for that soybean in 3 years in cash or with equity. So that is very positive in terms of the funding of Moolec overall.

Thank you, Jose. Now Martín, you want to read Brian's new question?

Yes. We have Brian's new question. And the question is, what is the practical effect the GLA expression levels at 60%, [indiscernible] expectations? You mentioned on the call, this was a function of oil yields. How does this compare to current standards?

Thank you, Martín, and thank you, Brian. I think it's a very good question. Well, the level of expression for us is one of the most important KPIs as a science-based company because we are producing molecules and a specific high-value ingredients into plants. So if we could get better results of a level of expression in seeds that's very positive for us. But I will leave that question to Amit to better explain this specific milestone for Moolec from the scientific point of view and also from a business point of view because this is when the science and the business join and connect by getting good results in the lab and in the fields. Amit?

Yes. Thank you, Gaston. The big part is that you asked the question about what -- how does it compare? So the total oil yield or total oil content in soybean is 40% of oil.

In safflower, sorry, Amit.

Sorry, sorry. Yes, sorry. And I was going on that side. So it's about 23% total, but oil in safflower and as you can see, by first such presentation, I can be a bit nervous, right? Anyway, so 23% and then of that, 60% of the oil content of total of that is GLA, and it does not significantly impact the total oil content. Now this is a value add. But also this is coming from the fields actually. So this is in real agronomic conditions while it can fluctuate here and there a little bit, but I think just getting the 10% extra in the last year season that we had. That, of course, has a practical implication on the economics of production as well as which Jose can speak to better. But I think in general, generally speaking, it doesn't change the plant. There was no impact on the plant's performance. Nothing really changed. So this is, again, a great example of how you can produce a value-added product in a crop without having a detrimental effect. Now that doesn't apply universally, but in this particular case, for sure that we've been able to see a very good achievement of this milestone. We were expecting 50% and it's at 60% today.

Thank you. So we don't have any more questions. [Operator Instructions]. So this concludes our Q&A session. At this time, I would like to hand the call to Gaston for final remarks.

Thank you, Martín. I will really like to thank you all again for joining us today. It's a great milestone for Moolec as a company by being here hosting our first business update. Well, as you surely know, we are focusing on building value for our stakeholders, of course, and saving the planet by planting the future of food with Molecular Farming technologies, that's our core, and that's our goal. That's what we are. That's why we are here. And that's the main reason why we are here, creating the future of food in Moolec. We definitely want a better future for all, and that's why we really push boundaries here with this tech in food. We value your feedback and support, of course, and we look forward to updating you again soon. The best is yet to come. Stay tuned. Thank you so much.