Recently, I had the privilege of participating in the Single Family Office Summit in Brooklyn, NY., the year’s largest global gathering of leading Family Office financial and investment professionals who shared their expertise and discussed their projects and opportunities. It was a powerful event, both for investors and for those seeking investors for their company, private equity firm, or real estate business.
The conference featured over 1,000 attendees with more than 125 speakers on stage, 10 networking sessions, and 400 investors.
I was honored to lead an individual presentation entitled Food Waste: A $2.6 Trillion Loss or Golden Opportunity? My audience was comprised of family office executives, high net worth individuals, institutional investors, and a variety of family office industry participants.
As CEO of PHT Investment Group, I am passionate about the theme of my presentation: preventing the one trillion-dollar annual financial loss due to food waste. How do we solve this enormous food wastage problem? That’s the elephant I have taken on. PHT Investment Group is operating because there has been no innovation in the post-harvest side of the food chain over the past 100 years. Our objective is to build facilities and pre-cooling equipment to eliminate food waste.
I touched on the climate crisis that is exacerbated by methane (a greenhouse gas) emitted by landfills; the horrifying environmental cost of food loss; the $2.6 trillion global economic loss; the 45 trillion gallons of water wasted on spoiled produce, and other statistics. And I talked about the social impact of food loss. I mentioned that contrary to popular belief, widespread hunger is not caused by food scarcity but by failure of distribution.
How to fix all this through impact investing was the point of my presentation…and is the point of our family of companies, as you know.
Additionally, I served on a panel called $1 Billion+ Allocators, an educational panel for audience members to hear directly from some of the nation’s largest family offices and investment firms.
Moderated by Richard C. Wilson of the Family Office Club, my co-panelists included Regina Wang (CBRE), Dr. Shubhra Jain (Tarsadia Investments), Brant Behr (EME Research & Consulting LLC), and John Lettera (Fairbridge Asset Management).
My colleagues discussed their approaches to investing strategies in areas such as health care, real estate, venture capital, private equity, hedge funds, and private credit.
I introduced PHT Investment Group and our focus on eliminating food waste through our investment in ag infrastructure, cold storage facilities, supply chain, and our mission to make sure all fresh produce maintains its temperature from field to table.
I talked about how I identified that many of the ag space companies operating in Salinas, CA., were typically fourth generation family-owned businesses that, unfortunately, were too often governed by ego: “Who took the toy away in the sandbox in the third grade?” When many of these companies started to take distributions, I recognized we could come in and offer a fair valuation, start adding value for consistent returns, put in place an accountable management team, and most of all, continue to educate. I believe strongly in education. I explained how our companies are proud to offer our employees, 97% of whom are Hispanic, an opportunity to attain a high school or college diploma.
PHT Investment Group has been able to move into the ag space from an educational standpoint and with capital investment and management expertise.
Thanks to the Family Office Club for organizing an excellent summit.
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