VanEck active food innovation
Hungry VanEck has launched a food innovation ETF that is actively managed.
The VanEck Future of Food ETF (YUMY) will use traditional bottom-up and fundamentals research to pick companies involved in farm technology and environmentally friendly food. It will be fully transparent, which allows for regular ETF market making.
YUMY will try to eat up companies involved in things like vegan foods, environmental farms, and more sustainable packaging. This means it tilts heavily to consumer staples.
The top 10 stocks are in the table below.
The fund charges 0.69%.
|
Ticker |
Holding Name |
Weight |
|
OTLY US |
Oatly Group Ab |
4.71% |
|
CTVA US |
Corteva Inc |
4.50% |
|
GIVN SW |
Givaudan Sa |
4.03% |
|
INGR US |
Ingredion Inc |
3.97% |
|
APPH US |
Appharvest Inc |
3.88% |
|
DE US |
Deere & Co |
3.56% |
|
MFI CN |
Maple Leaf Foods Inc |
3.54% |
|
BLL US |
Ball Corp |
3.50% |
|
TTCF US |
Tattooed Chef Inc |
3.31% |
|
ORBIA MM |
Orbia Advance Corp Sab De Cv |
3.20% |
Bernie’s commentary – I like this idea
There’s a lot of anti-environmental stuff going on in food. On my weekly grocery trip to Sainsbury’s, I’m always struck by the supermarket’s commitment to single use plastics. The meats, vegetables, fruits, pastas: they all come packaged in this plastic that gets used once and then becomes landfill. And once landfill, it doesn’t degrade. It just stays there for centuries.
Thirty years ago no-one paid attention to this sort of thing. Less still was there any of this: “is my coffee free trade? And is it made from decaffeinated kale?”. But many modern consumers are going woke, and imbuing their eating habits with political significance. The effects of which we’re feeling throughout the supply chain.
So to me, this niche makes sense. I think it will grow especially global warming upends modern farming. We’ve seen a lot of VC and PE investment in food and farm tech for this reason.
My only question would be about why VanEck has chosen active management. VanEck owns an index company, the German group MVIS. MVIS has an index on this theme. Yet VanEck has chosen to ignore its own index, and go active anyway. Why?