Open Letter to Stakeholders from Chief Executive Officer,
To the stakeholders of 48North:
I write to provide you an update on our company's state of affairs, corporate strategy, and path to future success.
While I am excited to update you all on the important progress that 48North has made, I would be remiss if I did not first acknowledge the difficult circumstances that we are collectively facing as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect millions of Canadians in different ways. I am grateful for our team's hard work in response to the circumstances, particularly frontline staff at our cultivation and manufacturing facilities.
While many Canadians will soon want to forget the year that was, for 48North 2020 was a pivotal year where we shifted our attention squarely on the consumer. In 2021 that focus will only continue to sharpen.
To best understand where we are going as a company, it is important to revisit the two fundamental commitments I made to our stakeholders last year:
- That we would maintain focus on the company's founding vision, that natural and high-quality products can create thought-provoking experiences that nurture wellbeing.
- That we would make necessary operational improvements so that our company could bring more products to the market and live up to the high expectations of our consumers.
We have delivered on both commitments, launching 32 SKUs nationwide since
With confidence, I can now say that 48North is a brand-led and consumer-obsessed Licensed Producer with an expansive portfolio of high-quality, accessibly priced products.
While our peers with deeper pockets and larger teams splurged on international expansion, medical markets, and patent hoarding – our mission never changed – to build a best-in-class Canadian recreational cannabis company. We remain steadfastly driven by this pursuit.
In the legal recreational industry's earliest days, we saw a feeding frenzy of investment activity, fueled by stock promotion with limited interest in building meaningful brands or quality products. For most Licensed Producers, consumers were afterthoughts, and it is showing.
At 48North, our strategy flips this flawed way of thinking on its head. We lead with brand and consumer insights. Our investments in facilities, people, and products serve to bring our brand vision to consumers across
Our People
When I took over as CEO, much of the operational foundation still needed to be laid. To achieve this, we needed to add experience and sharpen our focus. We have done exactly that.
We hired
We have added experience to our cultivation team and entered this year's Good:Farm planting and harvesting seasons with valuable insights from our ground-breaking year as one of
Effective immediately, the company is announcing the departure of Chief Financial Officer,
To that end, the company is also announcing the naming of Donnacha Rahill as Interim CFO. Donnacha has over 20 years of experience in various CFO and senior finance roles in
I am also pleased to announce we have officially begun a formal search process for the Company's permanent CFO position.
Our leadership team is committed to the success of the company and is well positioned to continue with our rapid growth.
Our Products
48North's approach to product development is informed by an understanding not only of where the industry is today, but where it is going and where we want to position ourselves within it. We have established ourselves as an early leader in innovative product development, introducing
Delighting consumers is at the heart of our strategy, and we are constantly leveraging data in order to refine our product offering, and to deliver accessible quality across the country. For example, we were pleased to see recent data from the
We are listening to consumers about gaps in the market so that we can reach underserviced segments of the population. Under our Latitude brand, for example, we have launched a range of products from sexual wellness, to beauty, and beyond. Under this banner, our intimacy oil is available in
Our investments into our operational capabilities allow us to quickly launch new products to market while meeting growing in-market demand for our branded products. In the coming year, we expect to expand our offerings even further with live resin, edibles, accessible vapes, a new topical line, and value-branded pre-rolls.
Our Facilities
We are now fully licensed to cultivate, extract, manufacture and sell all cannabis, and this is a direct testament to the progress we have made at our three facilities: delshen, Good:Farm, and Good:House.
At delshen, we cultivate high-quality indoor craft cannabis. Most notably, delshen is where we cultivate our Green Crush and Where's My Bike strains that consistently test at over 20% THC with strong terpene content. At Good:Farm, we have proven that outdoor cultivation works; when it comes to products such as vapes and topicals, outdoor cannabis allows us to compete on price and quality. And finally, at Good:House, we run an automated state-of-the-art production facility critical to ensuring that our supply chain can meet in-market demand for our products.
These investments into our operational infrastructure have required significant patience and commitment but have allowed us to lay a strong foundation to our commercialization strategy.
Our Results
The industry has matured and the metrics that govern our success have evolved. Capacity and cultivation yields continue to be important for vertically integrated companies like 48North, but revenue, market share, distribution, and consumer preference now reign supreme in an industry that is rapidly starting to mature. By these metrics, 48North is exceeding expectations.
To wit: we have recently ranked as the number one topical at retail in
Our approach is reliant on a consumer-centric selection of high-quality, affordable products, and building upon our excellent relationships with wholesalers and retailers alike. In provinces like
In
Not only are consumers intrigued by our new products, but we continue to experience high rates of reorders. We are working hard to ensure that 48North consumers of today will be with us tomorrow, and that they will be joined by an ever-increasing number of Canadians across the country.
In Q1 of Fiscal 2021, we decreased our cash use by nearly 20 per cent from
We are a company that believes we can achieve strong results by focusing on what we do best: delighting the consumer by focusing on our brands, our products, and our people. As a brand-led and consumer-obsessed Licensed Producer, I am proud of the progress we continue to make.
I look forward to providing additional updates as we progress on our steady climb towards profitability.
Yours truly,
About 48North
48North has a growing portfolio of brands that includes: 48North, an innovative and high-quality cannabis brand focused on sustainability; Latitude, a next-generation lifestyle cannabis platform focused on sexual wellness, beauty and beyond; Trail Mix, an accessibly-priced recreational cannabis brand that leverages biomass from the Company's outdoor cannabis farm, and two-licensed
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