Daniel O’Brien: Again, not knowing which grades they buy. I think what you can probably, as a marker is $2,500 per metric — that come to — $225 million or $2.25 billion, something like that as a marker.
Unidentified Participant: Okay. Great. And then Dan, I wanted to move to the so-called sales cycle for your products, the time between when you — your first contact a customer and when he uses the product? And could you just talk about what of your products has along the sales cycle? And what has the shortage sales cycle? And is your end customer, the distributor or is he like the farmer?
Daniel O’Brien: It’s always a distributor. We have no direct sales. Direct sales would put us in competition with our existing customers and would cost us a lot of money. It might be terminal as a company. So we don’t do that. In the agriculture industry, we find that it’s a two-year cycle. If somebody is going to be a brand new customer rather than a growing existing customer, they will test it on selected customer land for one year for sure. They will increase that to three or four select customers in the second year and the third year, push it quite a bit harder. So it’s definitely a two to three year program with the significant sales coming in.
Unidentified Participant: Okay. And if you more move to more pure fertilizer type products, would the sales cycle be different?
Daniel O’Brien: Yes, it would. But if we were in pure fertilizer products, we would be having to carry the cost of the base. For instance, if we were the owners of the urea or the urea ammonium nitrate that we were adding our products to, to make them work better, we’d be owners of that base material. And we would run the risk of the both markets going against us, which is that’s the big worry that fertilizer companies have. They buy 500,000 metric tons and yes. And suddenly, somebody opens a new plant or a war starts in Ukraine and they can’t plant in one area. And the price of fertilizer drops and they are left holding stuff that they have to sell and lost. We’re not a company that can absorb those kind of risks. We would need partners for that.
Unidentified Participant: All right. And then finally, I wanted to go to the food division. And what foods is — this is a TPA that’s going into foods. What foods is it going into and what does it do for the food?
Daniel O’Brien: There are customer for that has asked us not to — not to disclose what they’re doing because they have market conditions that they prefer not to know that we’re supplying into. So if I speak to that one, but I will talk about some of the other things we’re looking at. We’re looking at organic uses that can be spray dried. We’re looking at potentially nutraceuticals, things like vitamin C supplements, combination supplements that other people are not capable of drying as a group. And so it ends up pretty mixed, ready for the — ready for our customer who is likely a capsule maker who then passes it on the retailer. So that’s the area that we’re working in. We’re aiming very much for high revenue areas, high margin areas.
And at this point, we don’t know what our next major product will be. It’s likely to be in the nutraceutical area. But — and we’ve made several products. We’ve made some sales. We’re waiting to see which of the customers come back with volume. As you know, we’re a volume company. We’re not making 500 kilos of something for somebody. We want to make a truckload.
Unidentified Participant: Okay. Great. I’ll get back to you. Thanks for your comments, Dan.
Daniel O’Brien: Appreciate it, Greg.
Operator: And our next question comes from Tim Clarkson from Van Clemens. Your line is open.
Timothy Clarkson: Hey, Dan. Good to see your results outstanding as usual. Just on a big picture basis, what are the three key products of the company now and what do you think are — where do you think the most potential lies in the future? Just first, I’m still trying to get a grasp on this company and understand it. So that would be helpful for me.
Daniel O’Brien: Okay. In agriculture, we’ve got two products. So two of the three that you’re asking about, polyaspartates are becoming better and better known and are increasing their position in fertilizer additives because they do increase yield, and they’re especially good at maintaining or increasing yield under tough conditions such as drought. So that’s going to continue growing, and it’s got good margins. Also in agriculture, our nitrogen conservation products. as oil stays high, natural gas stays high. Nitrogen fertilizers are staying expensive and they’re likely to remain expensive. So it’s worth protecting them in the soil. So we do see that, that group of products continuing to grow substantially. And that — a lot of that goes through our customer, the LLC in Florida, but an awful lot of it goes into the American market through other distributors.
Timothy Clarkson: Is that like 50% of your business now then, would you say — those two products.
Daniel O’Brien: The two nitrogen ones are between 35% and 45%. That’s a wild gas because we don’t break things out.
Timothy Clarkson: Yeah. That just gives me a handle on it go. Okay.