Dear Shareholders,

Benson Hill was founded over a decade ago to modernize our food system in the face of environmental and nutritional challenges. While our technology is sophisticated and highly advanced, our premise is quite simple: Better food starts with better ingredients. Better ingredients start with better seeds.

Given the remarkable power of AI-driven advancements across a wide breadth of industry sectors and the fundamental importance of food, it’s quite amazing that agriculture still relies primarily on a one-size-fits-all commodity system to meet our global food and feed needs—especially given the demands of health- and ecoconscious Gen Z consumers and our changing climate. But that is the modernization currently underway.

Benson Hill is a technology company. Today, we believe we have the most advanced plant breeding platform in the ag tech industry that is actually focused on targeted advantages for specific food and feed end markets. Our AI-driven CropOS® technology platform is based on proven science—genomic innovation has improved food production for thousands of years. What differentiates Benson Hill is our focus on the end customer and the magnitude of food science, ingredient formulation, and consumer sensory data layers that guide our product development.

As Chairman of the Board, I’ve witnessed the creativity and agility of our entire team as we’ve introduced our disruptive technology to the market. Those efforts really blossomed in 2022 and the first part of 2023, as we established a fully functional closed-loop supply chain to translate our seed technology into ingredient products and demonstrate the power of our technology platform…