Climate change is widely recognized as an existential threat to humanity. Chief among the contributors to climate change is our food systems. The advent of modern industrial farming brought with it a sharp increase in our ability to feed the planet. Yet this industrialization has been so rapid and so extreme that we’re now recognizing how unhealthy and unsustainable our practices have become.
Despite these advances, the system will crack under the pressure of our expected population growth (the UN predicts the global population to hit 10 billion by 2050). This is because animal agriculture is a wildly inefficient food source. The time and resources it takes to provide land, food, and water produces far fewer calories for consumption than the investment required to simply grow plants for us to eat.
Recently though we’ve seen an explosion of demand for healthier and more sustainable food choices along with a flourishing of innovation. Enter today’s guest, Elysabeth Alfano, Founder & CEO of VegTech Invest; provider of the world’s first pure-play ETF investing in plant-based innovation. Launched in Dec 2021, the VegTech Plant-Based Innovation & Climate ETF (ticker: EATV) invests in “a portfolio of high growth global equities in a pure-play plant-based innovation and technology category. VegTech™ companies are those that are innovating with plants and plant-derived ingredients to create animal-free products for sustainable consumption.”
During this episode, Elysabeth and I have a wide-ranging conversation on all things related to our food systems and the innovation we’re seeing in plant-based foods. Our conversation runs the gamut from discussing the size and scope of the problem with industrialized factory farming to more sustainable alternatives such as plant-based burgers like Beyond Meat, popular non-dairy alternatives like Oatmilk, advances in cultured (aka lab-grown) meat and cheese, and all sorts of other fascinating innovations. And be sure to stay tuned to the very end when we talk about how the VegTech ETF works and what companies the fund is investing in now.
Resources from this episode:
49 - Building the field of regenerative media
48 - Addressing climate change & housing affordability through real estate development
46 - Why assets managers should be managing the risk of Gender-Based Violence
45 - Investing for systemic change in a world of Web3
44 - The Rhodes scholar who is democratizing access to impact investments in Africa
43 - Putting humanity back into Economics
42 - Leveraging technology and a human-centred focus to better manage crises response
41 - Transforming idle church properties into thriving communities of sustainable impact
40 - The charity that gave birth to a $300M global impact asset manager
39 - Exploring new possibilities by blending philanthropy and impact investing
38 - Accelerating investment into diverse emerging fund managers
37 - Accelerating the flow of impact capital
36 - Opportunities for impact in the mining industry
35 - Understanding the impact revolution with the father of impact investing
34 - Addressing the housing affordability crisis with impact investing
33 - Challenging the Nobel-prize winning theory that stands in the way of impact investing
32 - Art activism as a force for impact with Benjamin Von Wong
31 - Impact investing through the eyes of an institutional money manager
30 - A deep dive into gender lens investing with a true OG of the movement
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