Zack Fuss – Breaking Down the Food Ecosystem

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, methods, stories, and of strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. You can learn more and stay up to date at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:39)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of Oshanose Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (3:04)
My guest today is Zack Fuss, an investor at Continental Grain, a 200-year-old family-owned business that is focused on investing and operating businesses through the food and agriculture ecosystem.
Prior to his work at Continental, Zack was an analyst at Tiger and at Citadel. This is a must-listen for those interested in any aspect of the food ecosystem, but also for those trying to understand value chains more generally. In our conversation, we cover where profits tend to sit in a specific value chain, how legacy food businesses are creating their second act as digital businesses, and explore what makes Domino's Pizza so interesting and special. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Zack Fuss.
Zack, I think an appropriate place to begin is with sort of how the ecosystem breaks down. So if someone's new to this area, what are the key sort of components? You can break it down however you want. Value chain, supply chain, you give us the right taxonomy for thinking about this. What are the meaningful areas that you think it's important to develop special expertise in?

**Zack Fuss** (4:03)
Think about the value chain. At the top, you have large producers, industrial farms, they interact directly with companies like a John Deere or a Cargill.
And you go all the way downstream, just like energy assets. So you go from the soy and the corn and the animal protein to the producers to the processors like Tyson Foods, and they sell into the distributors in the restaurant. So a Cisco and a Performance Foods and a US. Foods who sell to a McDonald's and a Burger King and a Chick-fil-A who sell to people like you and I and everything in between that ecosystem. The grocery stores, you have the cult storage businesses. It's just such a rich ecosystem with so much change and dynamicism. But the reason that we find it to be so interesting is because at the end of the day, people are going to need to eat.