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:
29 - The causes of wealth inequality that no one is talking about
28 - A technology solution for solving the riddle of impact measurement and management
27 - Building better private equity structures and practices for a more equitable world
26 - Behind the scenes with an impact fund startup investing in African SMEs
25 - Leveraging employee ownership to fight wealth inequality
24 - The Purpose of Capital with Jed Emerson
23 - Breaking the shareholder primacy paradigm with alterantive ownership models
22 - Empowering indigenous innovators & communities
21 - Harnessing the vast untapped potential of newcomers to Canada
20 - How the Equality Fund is using Impact Investing to Fuel Feminist Futures
19 - Fighting a $200 Billion per year predatory industry using microfinance
18 - How Blended Finance is being used to massively scale the amount of capital for impact investments
17 - Around the world of impact investing with Rehana Nathoo
16 - Reinventing Commercial Banking for Good
15 - The best social return on investment? The case for delivering micro nutrients during the first 1,000 days of life
14 - Pioneering high-impact investments that create opportunity for the world's most vulnerable people
13 - Revitalizing the Indigenous economy by investing in Indigenous entrepreneurs
12 - Serving high net worth individuals, foundations, and institutions
11 - How to profit off the transition to a low carbon economy
10 - Challenging traditional philanthropy
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