In 2012, the co-founders of a fledgling company called Beyond Meat received the e-mail of start-up dreams.

An investor, Seth Goldman, had read about the Los Angeles-based venture’s mission to make a burger from plant protein that truly, once and for all, tasted like meat. Intrigued, Goldman went to their website and sent a note saying, “If there’s any way I can help, I would love to,” he recalls.

Having been an aspiring social entrepreneur himself—back in 1998, before anybody called it that, he co-founded the organic beverage company Honest Tea—Goldman had vowed to support up-and-coming companies in the sustainable food space. But he had another, more selfish reason for his interest in this particular start-up.

“I’d been a vegetarian for 13 years and was always frustrated with the options,” says Goldman, who’s now executive chair of Beyond Meat. “So I had a personal interest in seeing this company succeed.”

“Personal” is the key word here.

Think of sustainable food and agriculture as the impact investment where the mind, heart and body meet. The sector is increasingly attracting the smart money by offering significant opportunities to create environmental impact alongside market-rate financial returns. But it also appeals because of the personal, and very human, connection investors can make to the product. Food is one of our basic needs.

“There’s no doubt that people being able to go into their local Whole Foods and pick up brands they’ve invested in through us, or seeing other people pick up those brands, makes an investment much more real,” says Paul Richardson, CEO and co-founder of Renewal Funds, an early-stage venture capital firm with portfolio companies such as Ian’s Natural Foods and Sensible Organics. “It’s an investment trend really driven by the consumer, which investors are following. And actually the investors are a little late to the party.”

U.S. organic food sales have more than doubled over the last decade, to $43 billion in 2016, and now make up more than 5% of the country’s total food sales, according to the Organic Trade Association. Moreover, this growth shows no signs of letting up as consumers increasingly demand these products, whether they’re concerned about personal health and nutrition, animal welfare, the effects of conventional farming practices on the environment or a combination of the three.

This trend is not lost on a growing number of wealthy and influential investors who envision a very different food system than the one we have now. In August, Richard Branson and Bill Gates, alongside smart money investors like Cargill Ventures and Kimbal Musk, backed the “clean meat” start-up Memphis Meats in its $17 million Series A round. Memphis Meats, which produces meat directly from animal cells, marked another in a string of sustainable food companies that have raised an impressive amount of capital in recent years. (Gates also invested in Beyond Meat.)

Branson even made the bold prediction that in roughly 30 years we will no longer need to kill animals because all meat will either be clean or plant-based.

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