VANCOUVER, BC, August 5, 2026 — Eat Well Investment Group Inc. (CSE: EWG) (US: EWGFF) (FSE: 6BC0) ("Eat Well" or the "Company") is pleased to announce a shareholder update from the CEO.
Fellow shareholders,
I always look back to one of my favourite CEOs, George Paleologou of Premium Brands Holdings (TSX-PBH), when I think about writing these letters. He has written them for 25 years and I've read them for 12 years, and every year pulling motivation, inspiration and ideas from them. George just has a way of articulating strategy combined with good writing and storytelling that makes you want to go back and look hard at your own business, and his last two letters, "The Future of Food is in the Past" and this year's "A New Food Order," were no different.
So, before I get into our business, let me take, share, and relate a few lessons from his, that I think are important for ours.
But first, a warning. This is long. More than a few people told me to cut it down, but after three years of not being able to say much at all, I did not care. I wanted this one to read the way I wanted it to read, and anyone who knows me knows I love to write. So here it is.
1. The future of food is in the past.
That is his maxim, and I think it is the best sentence written about this industry in the last decade. His argument is that for seventy years the Standard American Diet moved consumers off whole food and onto ultra-processed products high in sugar, unhealthy fats and artificial ingredients, and that we are now living with the results in the form of metabolic, cardiovascular and neurological disease. What he says consumers are now discovering is that the answer is not complicated. It comes down to re-embracing the past, when simple, clean, minimally processed foods provided most of what people ate. He puts it bluntly:
"I have no doubt that in the coming years we will look back on the last 70 years as the dark ages of human nutrition."
Now consider what we actually sell. A pea is not a formulation. It is not a novel ingredient with a marketing story. It is one of the oldest cultivated foods on earth. It is high in protein and fibre, and it arrives on a plate looking roughly the way it looked in the field.
If the future of food really is in the past, then pulses are not a niche we happen to occupy. They are the category the market is walking back toward, and the proof is in the pricing and the demand. And best of all, we did not have to reposition for this, we have been doing this for 50 years.
2. A New Food Order.
This year he extends the argument, and the title itself says it. The order is changing.
And the mechanism is technology.
Data captured on wearables is being used by ordinary people to adjust what they eat, not only to move a health metric but simply to feel better. He calls it the "democratization of health data", and he points out that his dinner conversations now routinely turn into discussions about glucose levels, sleep scores, HRV and resting heart rates. Add GLP-1 drugs, trusted podcasters and influencers, and AI, and you get what he calls a genuinely new food order.
The consequence is the part worth underlining.
When a consumer can see their own data in real time, no amount of marketing can talk them out of it. He notes the result is remarkable growth in products that have simple ingredients, are high in protein and low in added sugar.
The new U.S. Food Guide, which prioritizes whole foods, protein, vegetables and whole grains while discouraging ultra-processed products, pushes in exactly the same direction.
Simple ingredients. High protein. Whole food.
That is not an adjacent description of our business. That is our business.
Here is where I would extend his thinking into our corner of the industry, because the New Food Order has started showing up in raw material prices.
According to new studies, 70% of Americans now say they want more protein in their diet, up from 59% four years ago.
Millions of people on GLP-1s are eating meaningfully less volume, and every clinician working with them says the same thing: whatever you do eat has to carry more protein.
Demand for protein is climbing while the appetite for calories falls. The market has responded the way markets do. Dry whey prices are up more than 50% since January, according to DCA Market Intelligence, and as of USDA's June report whey protein concentrate was hovering around $13 a pound with isolate around $14 and slightly higher.
BellRing Brands, which owns Premier Protein and Dymatize, told investors in May that whey pricing had reached historic highs and that most companies would need to reevaluate their pricing. Every formulator in North America is now sitting in a room asking the same question: what else can we use?
And for a lot of applications, the honest answer is peas.
Pea protein isolate runs around 80% protein, it is high in lysine, it is allergen-friendly, it is not dairy, it performs and it's one of the most affordable grams of protein you can buy. It is not identical to whey, and I am not going to pretend that it is, but it is close in most applications, so that when whey doubles, the only main alternative stops being theoretical and starts being a purchase order.
3. Protein, premiumization and convenience.
George condenses the trends Premium Brands invests in down to three themes: protein, premiumization and convenience. He is explicit that plenty of companies are now chasing all three, mostly on a catch-up basis, and that what differentiates his company is having identified them early and built the production capacity to serve them.
His line about the laggards stuck with me: even when other food companies react, they are often constrained by legacy assets that are not well suited to producing the right products.
Protein: we process pulses, and pulses are protein. Premiumization: we have spent 50 years selling specification and consistency rather than tonnage, and our customers pay for it. Convenience is where we are earliest, and it is precisely where our value-added investment is going.
But the passage I keep returning to is from his previous letter, where he explains why acquisitions had become so difficult for them. He writes that there is a general lack of businesses with modern production facilities and excess capacity competing in the high growth categories they are investing in, and that buying a business with older assets, or one already running at full capacity, means you:
"...essentially pay for the business twice: once up-front and a second time to modernize or expand their production capacity."
Read that again with our balance sheet in mind.
The thing one of the most disciplined acquirers in North American food says he cannot find is a modern facility with excess capacity in a high-growth protein category. That describes what we own. Not every piece of it is new and upgrades are happening, but the hard part, the sites, the footprint and 50 years of process capability, is here, and it is not something you can go out and buy. And production capacity? We are running at roughly 42% of what our facilities can physically handle.
I have spent this turnaround listening to our idle capacity being described as a problem.
It is not a problem. It is the scarce half of the asset, and it is the half we intend to put to work with a CAPEX plan in motion. That is why our capital goes into the plants and why we are not out shopping, yet. Fund that program, put the right debt stack behind it, and there is a high probability throughput moves well beyond 42%. Demand has never been our constraint. Capital and people have, and I am going at both.
4. Pick an industry that will still be here.
I have done the other thing.
Earlier in my career I helped start a company in a rapidly growing industry during the years it went vertical. I learned what a boom feels like from the inside, which suffice to say feels exactly like being right. But, it is very hard in the middle of one to tell a business that is working, from a market that is simply expanding. What I took from it was simple. I never wanted to build in an industry where the thesis had an expiry date.
So, I went looking for the opposite.
George draws a hard line between fads and trends. He says he is not interested in the over-hyped or short-lived fads that move a market over a few quarters, but in the long-term trends that run for decades and that nobody in the mainstream media is talking about, yet.
Twenty-five years of his letters cover an enormous amount of change in food. Categories come and go, formats change, channels change, entire stores get reinvented. Through all of it one thing has been constant and is only getting stronger: people want high protein, limited ingredient foods they can actually pronounce.
That is not a trend. Trends end. That is a direction of travel.
Food does not boom and bust, because people eat. And inside food, the nutritious, high-protein, short-ingredient-list end is the part that keeps compounding. That is the sector I kept coming back to, and it is the one I intend to stay in.
It is precisely why I have believed in this story from day one, and wanted to take the helm in January of 2025 to turn the ship into what I always knew and believed was possible.
5. Simple, but not easy.
This is the principle I think about often, and it is how he opens this year's letter. His core strategies, he says, are simple: invest in sustainable consumer food trends without sacrificing long-term value for short-term gains. Executing them consistently, without being distracted by transitory challenges is the part that is not easy, and is what separates his company from the rest of the industry.
Our business is now extremely simple.
We source, clean, sort, process and sell pulses. That is it. Some people call it boring, and I always invite those people to sit down with me and go through the nuances for an hour. I have yet to lose one. They come out the other side understanding that simple and easy are two entirely different words.
Simple is the strategy, but the execution is not easy.
Getting a crop to spec is not easy. Colour sorting to the tolerance a premium buyer expects is not easy. Holding grade consistency across a season is not easy. Managing moisture, protein, splits and foreign material while shipping into a dozen countries with a dozen different standards is not easy. 50 years of doing that well is why customers keep coming back, and it is not something a competitor replicates by buying the same equipment.
The businesses worth owning are the ones you can explain in a sentence and cannot copy in a decade.
And my favourite thing is when someone asks me what I do, and I respond, "I sell peas". No elevator pitch, although I'll likely go into why we're extremely undervalued like most CEOs, but I also take a lot of pride in our hard work. I learned that from my uncle who ran Canada's third largest door manufacturer. He filled entire condos with doors and to think about that for a second, 50 stories, 10 units per floor, 10 doors per condo. That's a lot of doors, but when asked what he did for a living? "I sell doors" was always his response.
6. Be a price setter, not a price taker.
In my all-time favorite of his letters, 2017, he writes "A Bright Future by Learning From Our Past." George tells the story of the start of his career at Fletcher's. They ran a large commodity hog plant in Red Deer, AB processing 4,000 hogs a day and selling pork globally, and a small plant in Langley, BC processing 800 a day for niche markets. The big efficient plant constantly struggled to make money. The small, specialized one always made money.
They sold Langley and spent $40 million modernizing Red Deer. The project came in on time and on budget, they got the efficiency and quality gains they expected, but the results stayed underwhelming, because they were still making an undifferentiated product at a price the world set for them.
"...we should have sold the commodity focused business that was a price taker and instead dedicated our capital and efforts to the niche focused business that was a price setter... To this day this hard lesson is at the core of every capital allocation decision we make."
I read that and saw our business.
Belle is the Langley plant. That is our entire strategy in one sentence.
We are not trying to be the biggest pulse processor in Canada. We are trying to be the one customers specify by name. And that's what they do.
We work with farmers growing our own seed genetics. We hold process knowledge built over 50 years that our competitors would very much like to have and do not. We sell specialized product into demanding markets that pay a premium for consistency, and we earn margins that commodity processors in our category simply do not see.
We are not everything to everyone.
We are a specific thing to a specific set of customers who cannot easily replace us. That is the whole game, and every dollar of capital we allocate from here goes toward making that more true, not less.
Where I sit in all of this.
I joined the board in 2021 and I have been putting my own money into this Company ever since, through every stage of it, including the stages that took real conviction.
I took over as CEO in January 2025. My salary since then has been one dollar a year. Through the entire cease trade order, I was not paid. Shareholders could not sell, could not buy, could not do anything but wait, so I did not believe the people running the company should be collecting while the owners of it were stuck.
And at the hardest point of this, when walking away would have been the easy call, I put in another million dollars of my own money. I did that for a specific reason. I needed everyone from our plant operators to our lenders to see that I was not managing a decline, I was funding a turnaround, and that I was willing to go first.
They responded.
Our lenders came to the table. Our people stayed. We sold the last of our non-core assets and used the proceeds to help restructure, taking us from paying north of 15% on roughly $15 million down to 10% on $11 million. That is real money that now goes into the business instead of out the door.
Where we actually are.
The cease trade order was fully revoked on July 15, 2026. The CSE reinstated our shares on July 29, 2026. Three fiscal years of audited financial statements are filed, along with every outstanding quarterly interim and MD&A.
In fiscal 2025 we did $53.2 million of revenue with $6.9 million of gross profit, roughly 16% better than the prior year, and we narrowed the net loss. I am not going to dress those numbers up. They are the numbers of a real operating business that spent three years carrying a holding company problem it did not create.
Through all of it, the plants ran. Our customers were supplied, our specifications held, and whatever was happening at the holding company level never reached a container. That is the part I am proudest of, and it is not mine to be proud of. It belongs to the people who run our facilities.
The single biggest value creator available to us is not an acquisition and it is not a pivot. It is filling capacity we already own and adding the value-added steps our customers are already asking us for.
On our share price, and what to watch.
George closes this year on stock price volatility.
His point is that in a market with faster capital flows, more algorithmic and index-based trading and less fundamentals-based ownership, a company running a genuinely long-term strategy will see more volatility in its shares, not less.
His advice is to keep your eye on where the puck is going and to watch the signals that actually indicate durable value being created. He also notes that he has never sold a single share of his company other than shares donated to charity.
Our situation is not his.
We are a much smaller company that has just come back from three years of not trading at all. The first weeks and months back on the board are going to be volatile, and I would rather say that plainly now than have anyone surprised by it. Price discovery after a halt of that length is a process, not an event.
What I would ask is the same thing he asks. Watch the signals that matter. He runs his business against a short, published list of metrics and holds himself to them in public every year, which is a discipline I intend to copy.
Ours are these.
Throughput against installed capacity, which is the number that turns our fixed cost base into operating leverage. Gross margin per tonne, which tells you whether we are still a price setter. Our cost of debt, which we have already moved and intend to keep moving. And the conversion of our value-added projects, meaning whether they get built on time and then actually get filled.
Those four are what I manage to. If they move in the right direction over the next several years, this will have been worth it. If they do not, no amount of narrative from me should persuade you otherwise.
I am the largest shareholder of this Company. I have bought, I have lent, and I have not sold. My outcome and yours are the same outcome.
What comes next.
We are repositioning the Company, strengthening the balance sheet and adding to the leadership team. More information will be provided on these actions in due course.
I will commit to the discipline. We are not going to chase a dozen market segments. What put this Company in trouble before I took over was doing too many things at once, none of them core. Investing hard in the plants we already own is the opposite of that. We are going to execute methodically against a very short list.
Simplicity. Peas. Canadian supply. Global markets. Premium products.
We are nowhere near perfect. This has been an intense turnaround and a great deal of work is still in front of us. But we have a great core business, customers who have stayed with us for decades, a team that did not quit, and for the first time in three years, a clean runway to operate on.
We will learn from our past to have a brighter future.
Thank you for your patience, and for your ownership.
Daniel Brody
President & Chief Executive Officer
Eat Well Investment Group Inc.
About Eat Well Investment Group Inc.
Eat Well Investment Group Inc. is a publicly traded Canadian agricultural and food infrastructure company. The Company operates pulse processing facilities in Saskatchewan and Montana serving food ingredient and consumer markets across North America and internationally. The Company's common shares trade on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol "EWG".
Contact Information
Eat Well Investment Group Inc.
Daniel Brody, President, CEO & Director
ir@eatwellgroup.com
www.eatwellgroup.com
Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements
This letter contains forward-looking information and forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation ("forward-looking statements"), often identified by words such as "expect," "intend," "plan," "believe," "anticipate," "estimate," "target" and similar expressions, or statements that an event "may," "will," "should," "could" or "would" occur. Forward-looking statements in this letter include, without limitation, statements regarding: capacity utilization and expected throughput; planned storage and value-added capital projects, and their timing and cost; the Company's working capital structure, capital structure and cost of debt; the proposed repositioning of the Company; additions to the finance leadership team; the metrics against which management intends to measure performance and their expected direction; expectations regarding protein demand, commodity pricing and customer reformulation; expected trading dynamics in the Company's shares following reinstatement; and the Company's strategy and future operations generally. These statements are based on assumptions management considers reasonable, including that the Company will have access to sufficient working capital and financing on acceptable terms; that crop supply, quality and pricing, and input, freight and labour costs, will remain within historical ranges; that customer demand will continue at or above current levels; that the Company can attract and retain qualified personnel; that capital projects will be completed substantially on the anticipated timelines and budgets; and that no material adverse change will occur in the Company's business or in general economic conditions. Forward-looking statements should not be unduly relied upon. They are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, including: the Company's ability to obtain financing and to refinance or repay indebtedness; share price volatility, limited liquidity and unpredictable price discovery following a prolonged suspension of trading; crop yield, weather and commodity price volatility; foreign exchange, tariff and international trade risks; customer and supplier concentration; labour availability; execution risk on capital projects; competition; and the other risk factors described in the Company's continuous disclosure filings. Forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this letter, and the Company disclaims any obligation to update them except as required by law. Investors should review the Company's continuous disclosure filings at www.sedarplus.ca. This letter quotes shareholder letters and public statements of Premium Brands Holdings Corporation and its Chief Executive Officer. Those materials are the views of their authors, are reproduced for commentary purposes, and are not adopted or endorsed by the Company. Premium Brands Holdings Corporation is not affiliated with the Company. This letter also refers to industry data, commodity pricing and survey information from third-party sources that the Company has not independently verified. This letter refers to financial measures, including gross margin per tonne, that are not standardized under IFRS, may not be comparable to similar measures used by other issuers, and should not be considered in isolation from measures prepared in accordance with IFRS.