HACCP Certificate Enabling Access to B2C Market

This announcement contains inside information for the purposes of Article 7 of EU Regulation No. 596/2014, which forms part of United Kingdom domestic law by virtue of the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 (as amended).

12 May 2022

Graft Polymer (UK) Plc

("Graft Polymer", the "Company", and together with its subsidiaries, the "Group")

Awarded HACCP Certificate Enabling Access to B2C Market

Graft Polymer (UK) Plc (LSE: GPL), a business focused on the development of polymer modification, biological supplements and drug delivery systems, is pleased to announce that it has been granted a Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point ("HACCP") certificate at the Group's Research and Development ("R&D") facility in Slovenia. The grant of this certificate to the Group's GraftBio division is a major milestone for the Company which will enable Graft Polymer to enter the Business-to-Consumer ("B2C") market, thereby introducing a further revenue stream to its business.

Overview

• Grant of HACCP certificate represents the delivery of a key operational milestone as stipulated in the Company's IPO Prospectus
• HACCP certificate enables Graft Polymer to enter the lucrative B2C market and commercialise its IP for bio/pharma applications, developing active pharmaceutical ingredients and drug delivery platforms for use in the food supplement market
• Intention to create a strong reputation as a manufacturer of quality and safe food supplements for delivery direct to consumers
• HACCP certificate granted by Bureau Veritas SA (EPA: BVI), a French company specialised in testing, inspection, and certification

Victor Bolduev, CEO, commented, "Graft Polymer is demonstrating its ability to deliver on key operational deliverables on time, and on budget. The grant of this HACCP certificate is a clear endorsement of our technical abilities and opens up a large and diversified marketplace to support our future growth. 

"The HACCP certificate will allow us to create a strong reputation in the B2C market as a manufacturer of quality and safe food supplements, selling direct to consumers over time - a more lucrative revenue stream. We intend to develop the GraftBio division in the international market with the development of drug delivery systems for different applications dependent on customers' and consumers' needs.

"I would like to congratulate our R&D team in Slovenia for their innovation and technical expertise, and I look forward to providing further operational updates and commercial developments in the coming weeks."

About HACCP:

HACCP is a systematic preventive approach to food safety from biological, chemical, and physical hazards in production processes that can cause the finished product to be unsafe and designs measures to reduce these risks to a safe level. In this manner, HACCP attempts to avoid hazards rather than attempting to inspect finished products for the effects of those hazards. The HACCP system can be used at all stages of a food chain, from food production and preparation processes including packaging, distribution, etc.

HACCP has been increasingly applied to industries other than food, such as cosmetics and pharmaceuticals. This method, which in effect seeks to identify unsafe practices based on science, differs from traditional "produce and sort" quality control methods that do not seek to prevent hazards from occurring, and retrospectively identify them.

For more information, please visit https://www.graftpolymer.com or contact:

About Graft Polymer

Graft Polymer is a UK incorporated holding company with an innovative research and manufacturing facility, based in Slovenia. The core business of the Group comprises polymer modification and drug delivery systems developments. Established in 2017, the Group has already introduced more than 50 products to the market.

The Group has developed a proprietary set of polymer modification technologies, which can improve existing products and processing methodologies by enhancing performance, simplifying manufacturing, reducing material consumption, widening the choice of feedstocks, and reducing costs.

In particular, the Group's techniques allow the combination of otherwise incompatible polymers, facilitating the creation of polymer composites engineered at a molecular level, that combine the attractive properties of different input materials. This enables customers to receive a synergism of properties in polymer composites.

The solutions and products offered by the Group are designed to improve performance, reduce raw materials consumption, and enhance the physical characteristic values of finished products or improve or modify their chemical interaction. In the past several years, there has been increased emphasis by the industry as a whole on applications of grafted polymers, which are produced by monomers being covalently bonded and polymerised as side chains onto the main polymer chain (the backbone).

In 2020, the Group launched a new division named GraftBio to develop IP for Bio/Pharma applications. This includes a drug delivery system to support and provide solutions to the market, which had been heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The GraftBio division has been granted HACCP certification for its production facility. The Group has developed a set of drug delivery platforms that enable it to licence its DDS platform (IP) to MGC Pharmaceuticals Limited ("MGC"; LSE: MXC) in relation to MGC's CimetrA™ and CannEpil-IL™ products. The Group expects to receive royalty payments resulting from the sale by MGC of CimetrA™ and CannEpil-IL™ products.