Commentary from John Bissell, Origin CEO:
"Last year was a challenging one for Origin that also brought meaningful progress. Our commercialization journey has taken longer than we initially anticipated, which has had a negative impact on our stock price. However, this month we delivered the latest iteration of Origin PET caps to multiple world-class beverage brands – with approximately thirty key prospects in our pipeline receiving and evaluating our latest design. The new cap design incorporates feedback from household-name beverage brands. Origin’s internal testing of these caps demonstrates marked improvement in seal performance and impact resistance in a single design, meeting industry benchmarks for pressurized water applications on key test metrics, such as ball impact and heated stress testing. Customer qualification processes for these new caps are now underway, and we anticipate related customer announcements, pending the completion of successful qualifications, with timelines varying depending on customer requirements."
"To strengthen our financial position, in November 2025 we announced a convertible debt facility with an initial tranche of $15 million in cash, with the option to raise additional capital up to $90 million total. We also announced the execution of a non-binding term sheet for $20 million of equipment financing. To date, however, due to the significant decline in our stock price since securing the convertible debt facility, we have been able to make only limited use of the equity feature of this facility to service the outstanding debt at reasonable conversion values, which we had intended to do in order to preserve our cash for operations. Servicing the outstanding debt with cash has had, and will continue to have, an adverse impact on our liquidity. Also, at recent stock price levels, we do not meet the minimum equity requirements for additional capital draws from this facility. Further, the aforementioned non-binding term sheet did not progress to a definitive agreement because the lender made material reductions to the valuation assumptions underlying the debt financing. As a result, absent near-term financing and reductions in operating expenses including reductions in force to extend our planned operations, we currently estimate that our existing cash and cash equivalents will allow us to continue our planned operations into the third quarter of 2026. Therefore, we continue to actively source equipment financing and are currently engaged with multiple prospects. In addition, we are intensifying our focus on potential strategic arrangements that we believe could help accelerate value creation from our technology for the benefit of our shareholders, including a potential business combination, equity and debt financing, divestiture of assets, technology licensing, and other arrangements."
"Despite challenging business conditions and customer adoption timelines longer than we initially anticipated, our prospective customers remain interested and engaged. These companies consume billions of caps per year and the latest cap designs, reflecting modifications which our customers requested, are now in their hands undergoing testing. For those new to Origin, our technology platform produces what we believe are the only commercially scalable PET bottlecaps, as opposed to the HDPE and polypropylene caps which today dominate the over $65 billion closures market. Our platform excels in seven areas: recyclability, oxygen and CO2 barrier (enabling longer shelf-life), closure diameter (enabling more economic large formats), thickness (enabling lighter weight), rigidity (premium feel), use of recycled content, and optical clarity."
Company Fourth Quarter and Recent Business Highlights
- Our strategic review with RBC Capital Markets, announced in our Q2 2025 earnings release, is progressing well with productive engagement from potential counterparties. We are intensifying our focus on potential strategic arrangements that we believe could help accelerate value creation from our technology for the benefit of our shareholders.
- Financing. We continue to actively source equipment financing and are currently engaged with multiple prospects. In addition, in connection with our strategic review process, we are in discussion with multiple parties and capital infusions are within the scope of those discussions. Overall, we believe our path to maximizing shareholder value will be a combination of successful new capital sourcing, monetization of current assets, and continued cost containment measures, and we look forward sharing updates as appropriate.
- Prospective customers are actively engaged in qualifying Origin PET caps. During Q1 2026, Origin delivered PET caps suitable for pressurized water applications to multiple marquee global beverage brands, with approximately thirty customers receiving and evaluating our latest cap iteration, to continue acceptance testing.
- In August 2025, the first products with Origin PET caps went onto store shelves in California, a milestone for PET cap market acceptance.
- Developed distribution network for PET caps. In March 2026, Origin announced HP Embalagens as strategic distributor for sustainable PET bottlecaps. HP Embalagens is a major Brazilian packaging company serving world-renowned brands such as Nestlé, Ferrero Rocher, Natura, and Johnson & Johnson. The relationship complements Origin’s strategic partnerships with Berlin Packaging and Matrix Bottling Group, announced in August 2025 and February 2026, respectively, and supports Origin’s ability to access markets and distribute PET caps globally.
- For PET cap production capacity, Origin’s CapFormer line build-out in 2026 entails six lines, already fully procured and projected to be installed by end of year.
- Updated guidance. Because of the additional time we have spent and anticipate spending on design iteration and customer qualification, reflective of customer feedback received in the past quarter, and because of our increased understanding of the bespoke design requirements of key market players, we no longer project achieving Adjusted EBITDA run-rate breakeven prior to 2028, updated from our previous projection of 2027. Further, this update reflects what we expect will be a more gradual commercialization process, likely characterized by multiple smaller product launches in series, rather than a single launch consuming all of Origin’s PET cap production.
- This is the first time in decades a truly new pressurized cap has been introduced into this beverage space and, while Origin has already overcome substantial technical obstacles, we expect to continue customer-driven product qualification and optimization on the way to adoption.
- Acquisition of premium water customers is expected to continue throughout 2026.
