I have been writing a fair bit about digital infrastructure recently – here in the FT, and here in Citywire. Completely coincidentally Gravis have announced this week a new fund to add to their existing (fund of fund) range of infra funds. It’s called the VT Gravis Digital Infrastructure Income Fund. According to Gravis the Fund will launch with an offer period which will run from 4 – 31 May 2021, with the Fund officially launching on the 31 May 2021. It’ll invest in exactly what I’ve been talking about incessantly – data centres, communications towers, fibre and lastly logistics. Their screen has currently identified over 125 listed companies, with a screen for minimum market cap of £250m, average daily trading volume above £250,000 and all producing an income. The resulting universe is over 50 companies with a combined market cap of c £450 bn which will be winnowed down to 30 stocks for the portfolio. Other details on the fund include the following:
- 0.8% AMC taken from capital, OCF capped at AMC
- Minimum investment £100
- Yield objective 3% per annum paid quarterly
- Will be available on all major platforms and directly
I’ll be looking at this fund in a bit more detail when it launches but for now it seems like a smart idea for income investors.
Food for thought
If you haven’t already done so, it’s worth checking out FutureFoodFinance.con, the sister site to this but focused on the food-tech revolution. There’s lots and lots of great, original content on there but I particularly recommend the monthly curation of news from the broad Foodtech/Agtech sector. We pull together the most interesting articles and this month the shortlist is especially interesting.
I’ve pasted over this short section for AdventurousInvestor readers because they are all worth digging into over the weekend. They’re all below.
But before scanning through that list I present one simple chart.
There are two listed funds that currently invest in earlier stage foodtech / alt proteins private (and public) businesses. They are Agronomics in the UK and Eat Beyond in Canada. For the record I own shares in both. Now they are reasonably similar in their core mission though there are important differences. Agronomics is much more focused on cultured meat and IP/tech, whereas Eat Beyond is broader in its focus. Personally, I think Agronomics is probably on balanced more focused and certainly has some influential shareholders behind it (Jim Mellon) but the chart below suggests a radically different outcome in terms of share prices. The chart is based on percentage change rather than price over the last six months. The blue is Agronomics, the red is Eat Beyond. In simple arbitrage terms, they are plays in the same space and have interesting portfolios full of exciting companies. But Eat Beyond seems to have gone into reverse.
Anyway, back to the weekend further reading….
Alternative take on alternative proteins impact
Fake meat’s real impacts . What do we know so far about how faux burgers and nuggets affect food choices, the environment, and health?
https://peeled.substack.com/p/fake-meats-real-impacts?mc_cid=ade0480052&mc_eid=c50da91d11
Great VOX article on the state of the market – improving but nothing to shout about
…meat consumption continues to rise slowly in the US while it explodes around the globe. But it’s also worth remembering that this new generation of the plant-based food industry is still in its infancy; it was only a couple of years ago when the sector’s biggest players even got their products on grocery store shelves.
NYT magazine feature on why we don’t eat insects
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that two billion people, more than a quarter of the world’s population, eat bugs as part of their standard diet. In Kenya, termites are drummed out of their mounds..
NYT’s columnist Ezra Klein on a moon shot to replace meat
Funding alternative proteins doesn’t mean adopting a vegan diet, or believing that all animal consumption is wrong. One possible future is that alternative proteins take over the market for cheap meat, replacing the commodity meat that goes into so many burgers and chicken nuggets and fish sticks, and animal-based meat becomes a much smaller part of our diet. But we raise those animals more humanely and we run less risk to the planet and ourselves.
More NYT : cooking website stops publishing beef recipes
Could an empire of the kitchen quietly stop cooking with beef and leave no one the wiser? That appears to be the feat accomplished by Epicurious, the popular online recipe bank where home cooks have gone to hone their skills for a quarter of a century. The editors there revealed to readers this week that not only were they done with new recipes containing beef, but they had been phasing them out for over a year.
The likely impact of AI on agriculture
In a not too distant – but still imaginable – future, farmers and agricultural scientists will be accompanied by aids in the form of agronomic robots. These fieldbots, or agrobots, will not only understand the language of agricultural science, but also the language of complex environments in which they are trained to assist in cultivation.
Wired on the quest for genuinely cheesy non cheese
The white gold rush is on. And Pandya feels, after plenty of triumphal false dawns for VC-funded cellular agriculture, that Perfect Day’s proprietary dairy protein – which it plans to sell to other businesses in isolated form – represents a significant market shift, set to start with (what else) an animal-free cream cheese partnership planned for 2021. “I think there’s a step change that is happening now,” Pandya says. “Because we can actually achieve the same kind of melt-in-your-mouth profile and flavours that you actually get with dairy.”
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dairy-free-cheese?mc_cid=31d08c83de&mc_eid=c50da91d11
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