Dr. Sasha Goodman, Chief Investment Officer of VegTech Invest, joins Elysabeth Alfano, CEO of VegTech Invest to discuss what has happened to the Beyond Meat and Oatly Stocks and, conversely, the large landscape of Plant-based Innovation companies in the public markets that are thriving.
Think that Beyond Meat and Oatly are the only publicly traded plant-based innovation companies? Think again. Learn about the depth of the sector in this special episode of the Plantbased Business Hour, taken from the Upside & Impact: Investing for Change podcast, now also on the New York Stock Exchange’s platform, ETFCentral.com.
Specifically we discuss,
- What other companies are publicly traded that are focusing on Plant-based Innovation?
- What common misconceptions exist about the alt protein sector?
- What is driving food systems innovation and is it an investable opportunity?
- What kind of growth and innovation will we see in the sector?
A highlight clip from our long-form conversation is below.
Elysabeth: The person to answer these questions today is Dr. Sasha Goodman. He is the Chief Investment Officer of VegTech Invest and also my partner. Dr. Sasha Goodman, how are you today?
Dr. Sasha Goodman: Thanks, it’s good to be here. I’m doing well.
Elysabeth: I think we’ve established that there are more companies than Beyond Meat and Oatly but since you, as the Chief Investment Officer of VegTech Invest, are really responsible for scouring the globe and finding these companies, I wondered if you could share with us a little bit about your methodology for putting together the universe and then finding that EATVi Index which does kind of represent the global food systems transformation.
Dr. Sasha Goodman: Sure. For the index that you’re speaking of, of course we include the expected plant-based milks and meat companies that we can find but there’s really a lot more in the global economy than just those going on now in the plant-based sectors. So we scrutinize a lot more data. We scrutinize global markets, believe it or not. We scrutinize them not just for that little niche of plant-based milks and meats but we also look at AgTech, ingredients, flavor technologies, synthetic biology, and these companies also include plant-based consumer packaged goods.
So how do we do it? There’s a lot of markets out there. There’s thousands of companies internationally in multiple languages. We do use technology to search, so one of the tools that’s been really helpful for us in the last year has been FactSet’s thematic search technology that they developed using AI. It cuts across languages. It would read news items in Japan, news items in Asia and Europe in different languages and then point us in the direction of companies that are relevant to our sector. That was just the start.
We’ve added those. We have well over a hundred public companies that we have in our research database, actually closer to two hundred in our research database with over a hundred plant-based companies in there. Once they’re in there we monitor them more carefully. We look more carefully at their fundamentals and their level of engagement in the plant-based industry. So while we leverage these tools we then verify with people.
Elysabeth: Yeah it’s wonderful. So it’s a set methodology, is that fair to say? In terms of finding the companies but then putting them in the index. Is there a set methodology that you might follow there?
Dr. Sasha Goodman: Yeah there’s different phases. So we initially have candidates and then we look more deeply at the index companies at their relevance to the plant-based industry and their purity. Are they mostly involved in animal feed? You see that in a lot of companies that are very involved in animal feed that you wouldn’t expect necessarily. So we’re careful to screen those out and make sure that they follow what’s disclosed in the index methodology which is that it needs to be plant-based companies.
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