EnWave expands partnership with MicroDried - ICYMI

EnWave Corp (TSX-V:ENW, OTC:NWVCF) CEO Brent Charleton talked with Proactive about a significant new equipment deal and license amendments with MicroDried, one of EnWave’s earliest clients.

MicroDried is a long-time user of EnWave’s radiant energy vacuum (REV) dehydration technology and has steadily expanded its operations to supply premium dried ingredients to major global food brands.

Proactive: All right. Welcome back inside our Proactive newsroom. And joining me now is Brent Charleton. He's the CEO of EnWave Corporation. And Brent, great to see you again. How are you?

Brent Charleton: I'm well.

Big news up in the company today talking about a new equipment deal and some license amendments. And this is from really one of your original clients—someone that's been with you from the very beginning?

MicroDried was one of the earliest adopters of radiant energy vacuum dehydration technology. And they've done just a phenomenal job of building out their business, which is to supply premium ingredients and snack food products to some of the biggest branded food companies globally. And this more recent purchase of another large-scale line, which adds to their three existing large-scale vacuum microwave lines, gives them necessary increased manufacturing capacity for some new projects that have come about more recently.

Talk to me a little bit about MicroDried. You mentioned just how big they are, and they hold a number of clients within their portfolio as well. So they have some pretty big reach.

They do. And the diversity of products that they help produce in their portfolio is quite astounding. When you think about dried products, you're thinking of, okay, your dried cereals perhaps on a shelf, maybe some dried fruit you'd buy to go on a hike. But really, they're supplying dried ingredients to the alcohol industry as flavor for craft beers. They're providing ingredients for ice cream products, granola bars, cereals, instant noodles—like pretty much any shelf-stable food product that you can find in your grocery store, they have one or more of their ingredients as part of those.

And there's also, talked about in the news release, that there's opportunity to even add more to this in the future—that, you know, as they grow, they want to grow with you as well?

Yes. There has been a robust increase in demand for their products, given the tariffs that have been put in place in the United States, which has caused some challenges for international importers of food products into the US. Which has given MicroDried a leg up with different opportunities where food companies are now also looking for healthier ingredients. So I'm not sure how closely you follow some of the mandates from HHS in the US, but they obviously got rid of the red dye in the food ingredient ecosystem. They're likely to ban additional ingredients—artificial flavors and artificial colors. So this is an opportunity for MicroDried to thrive and again grow their business.

And is that one of the reasons why they wanted to get this in so quickly? As you mentioned, the tariffs obviously and the changes—they're being made once it's inside the US before a tariff could be hit anyway. It's there no matter what.

That's part of it. But specific to this particular machine acquisition, it is associated with a specific brand. It's that company that needs massive quantities of a high-value dried apple product. As you saw in the news release, they now have exclusivity for the production of apple products in Washington state, Idaho, and Oregon. And this is specifically to do with that project. The follow-up potential purchase order would be more broad in nature. So that would be to support more widespread demand from different customers versus the specific project.

Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and style