Claire Smith, based in Geneva, Switzerland, is the CEO of Beyond Investing and Chief Innovative Officer for Beyond Impact. These two ventures work in concert, one providing impact investing, the other advancing startups for plant-based and cruelty-free businesses.

Claire describes her journey… how she melded two major aspects of her life: her vegan path with her 30-year career in conventional finance. Bringing them together brought coherence and consistency to her personal and professional life and how she invested her money. The ETF (Exchange Traded Fund) that she and her colleagues created can be traded through the day with prices moving like stocks. The fund has ~$180 million in traded assets.

After years of being a vegetarian, her experience as a mother amplified her empathy for animals, particularly females taken from their offspring. Cows are deprived of their calves so humans can drink their milk. She wanted to stop harming animals — the worst of which is killing them for their meat. She realized how embedded these patterns are in society while, without question, the health benefits of eating more fruits and veggies are universally known. Beyond our personal health, at a global scale, the production of animal products is major source of greenhouse gases.

Only 1-2% of the world’s population is vegan, with early roots in ancient India where some strict vegetarians do not eat some root vegetables such as potatoes because of the disturbance of soil and harm to insects that live there. Bees are also discussed and Claire expresses her sentiment that when we harvest honey, we are taking away their winter sustenance. “Let the bees eat their honey!”

Ted asks Claire about her diet and its diversity: She says she eats with an “Asian slant,” things like tofu and vegetables. She eats whole foods versus “junk food vegan.” She loves dark chocolate, but notes that there are vegan milk chocolate products as well as vegan ice cream. Her company is an investor in a vegan cheese producer in France that uses cashews mixed into a paste, then fermented with yeast to create cheese. The cheese is made of only four ingredients, without emulsifiers and other synthetic products.

Animal products are used in four broad categories, for nutrition, ingredients, pharmaceuticals, and materials… all part of same supply chain. In each case, Claire notes, replacement products are needed. Leather, for example constitutes up to 10% of animals’ carcass value. In addition to killing animals to make leather, its production has nasty environmental consequences. To stop skin from decomposing, harsh chemicals are used for tanning and dyeing products. These are extremely harmful to workers and then go into our environment. Automobile manufacturers are keen on supporting alternatives to leather as upholstered seats and interiors are responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions.

Pharmaceuticals have a history of being derived from animals. Drugs such as insulin were originally derived from pigs’ pancreases. The change from animal-based insulin production to microbes is a powerful example, the result is a superior version of the product without slaughter of pigs. Animals have been extensively used for preclinical trials and testing. Claire explains that her investment company is supporting businesses whose products are not based on “animal models” for drugs. Clever technologies provide alternative forms of cell replication that are able to provide far more accurate tests than those using animals.

Claire discusses the economics of her businesses. The fund is doing well, with strong returns. “Performance this year gratifying.” The ETF allows vegans and environmentalists and well as people concerned about social investing (no investments in oil, tobacco, or weapons), allow investors the ability to sleep at night, not worrying about what their money is profiting. Her ETF, in aggregate over seven years, is ahead of the conventional markets… from its inception in 2019 to the present, almost 3% ahead of the S&P 500.

Her final points speak to investments in things that are unsustainable, like oil production. The value of oil companies today is partially based on their proven reserves… reserves that they will not be able to use given their combustions’ environmental consequences. These business will be subject to increasing lawsuits, they will have to spend more and more on lobbying to be able to pollute. She states that “they are broken business models” in the long term, with stranded assets… underscoring the value of socially responsible investments that will truly benefit our global society.