Martin Bengtsson: Yes, it’s difficult to measure, but one way we have tried to measure is we’ve done our own surveys. And we’ve surveyed consumers, we’ve surveyed supplement users and, you know, again, unfortunately and fortunately depending on how you look at it, but unfortunately, I’ll lead with that. The awareness is relatively low. So if you take a Vitamin C or D, the awareness would be as high as 80% or higher. Most people have certainly heard of those vitamins. We’re down more in 20s and 30s, and so that’s really our challenge. But looking at it positively, that’s really our opportunity. And we do believe, we can make headway relative to the awareness. And that’s largely why we’ve been talking about not only the science that we’re bringing to light, because that ultimately will help build awareness and drive penetration, but also just simply the marketing that we really haven’t done historically, that we’re starting to do now and we need to do even more of.
And you’ll see some things coming out from us in 2024, that we haven’t done before, that are more consumer awareness programs and so forth. And so we can measure it going back to your fundamental question around by doing surveys such as those. And we’ll continue to do that and do expect to see numbers improve over time based on what we’re doing. But we also measure awareness based on new product launches, that include our ingredients. As we talk to our key customers and they start to launch products that include our nutrients, it’s also partly because they’re doing the analysis around consumer demand and what the consumers care about. And so we are seeing an increased number of launches that include our ingredients, many of which we’re super excited about, kind of are co-branded with our Balchem brands and we see that as a way for us to kind of reach to the consumer a little bit.
But the number of consumer launches with our ingredients, I think, is also an important measure, and we’ll continue to look at that while we do our own surveys and try to get a feel for real consumer awareness. But we’ve got a big opportunity, we’re not where we want to be from this perspective. But that also is in part why we’re so excited about the addressable market, the potential markets out there for us.
Bob Labick: Okay, great. Thanks so much.
Martin Bengtsson: Thanks, Bob.
Operator: Our next question comes from line of Kyle May with Sidoti. Please proceed with your question.
Kyle May: Hi. Good morning, everyone.
Martin Bengtsson: Hi, Kyle.
Kyle May: I wanted to start with the CureMark comments that you gave us an update on. I appreciate all the color there. But I was wondering if you could expand on the partnership with CureMark and the autism drug and how that could potentially impact the top and bottom line for you?
Ted Harris: So, again, this has been a long time coming and a project that’s been in development for, dare I say, decades, or at least a decade and a half. But it does take a long time to introduce a new drug and get drug approval. And we tend not to talk about this that much, because not that much has materially changed. But behind the scenes, we’ve been working hard on getting our manufacturing capabilities up, producing the batches that need to be produced for kind of setting quality standards, and ultimately getting approval. So a lot of work’s been going on from our side, and CureMark’s been doing a lot of work. We were excited to see that the data from their studies was published in JAMA in December, I think that was a really great step.
And as we work with them, we know that they’re working hard with their consultants to get their documents in order so that they can ultimately file for approval. This could be, if ultimately is approved, the first real drug treatment for autism, that’s specifically designed for autism. And unfortunately, the number of children that suffer from autism continues to increase and continues to expand. And our perspective is that, again, if it ultimately is approved, the use of this drug treatment in combination with behavioral therapy and so forth, could really make a difference for parents and these children. And so when you start to put numbers down on paper, it could be a very successful, sizable drug treatment. It’s very, very hard to estimate, this is not our product.
This is CureMark’s product, where we don’t have access to their data around market expectations and pricing and so forth. So we make estimates, but it could be very significant, if successful and we ultimately get a royalty. And we’ve talked about this in the past. There are some nuances in the early stages of launch, but ultimately we will get a 3% or so royalty on sales of the treatment. So it could again, if approved and if successful in the marketplace be a material impactor of our overall company. We manufacture the product in essence, we certainly aren’t manufacturing the enzyme blend and so forth, but we take that raw enzyme and we encapsulate it with our unique encapsulation technology and then pass it on to the packager. And so we play a very critical role in this process, an important role and some of our patents are used in part of CureMark’s patent portfolio.
We’re part of the drug master file and all of those things. So we feel good about our position in all of this and certainly are hopeful that ultimately this biologics license application is filed and approved by FDA, because there’s significant opportunity for us.
