You Won’t Go Hungry With the Food Fund

A longtime friend of mine spends the majority of the year living in rural Costa Rica, where he raises crops, bathes in a river and exists completely “off the grid” with no electricity. To me, that doesn’t sound like paradise. It sounds like hell on earth.

Human beings have spent millions of years trying to escape nature, not surrender to it. The fact is that, untouched by human hands, the untamed jungle — or desert, or rainforest — are not hospitable environments. Life-saving chemotherapy or HIV treatment doesn’t grow in a garden. Air conditioning, laptop computers and breakfast buffets don’t sprout out of the ground. Indeed, the things we most enjoy and value in the world are created by man, not simply those that occur in nature.

So while my friend forages for nuts and plantains, I’m perfectly happy to live in a world of edible abundance. From street cart falafel to fine dining, food in America is abundant in food like no other civilization in man’s history. The fact that obesity is so rampant among lower-income citizens is an achievement unmatched across human history, where lives have almost always been cut short by a lack of food, not an abundance of it.

The PowerShares Dynamic Food & Beverage Portfolio (PBJ) holds shares of companies that feed our nation and the rest of the world. Twenty percent of the fund is held in restaurant stocks, primarily multinational restaurant operators like Yum! Brands (YUM) (5.04%), McDonald’s (MCD) (4.95%) and Chipotle (CMG) (2.87%). The majority of the fund is held in food-related consumer staples, including packaged food companies like General Mills (GIS) (4.98%), Kellogg (K) (4.94%), Kraft Foods (KFT) and Sara Lee (SLE). Even grocer Safeway (SWY) (4.96%) is included.

Chew on This

The PowerShares Dynamic Food & Beverage Portfolio (PBJ) vs. S&P 500 — 1 year

PowerShares Dynamic Food and Beverage Portfolio (PBJ)
Source: PowerShares
Yum! Brands	5.04%
Kraft Foods	4.98%
General Mills	4.98%
Safeway	4.96%
McDonads	4.95%
Archer Daniels Midlan	4.95%
Kellogg	4.94%
Kroger	4.91%
Seaboard	3.19%
Coca-Cola Bottling	3.09%

As simple as the approach seems — that folks always need to eat — the strategy has actually outperformed. Food stocks, especially the staples like Dean Foods (DF), Hormel (HRL) and J&J Snack Foods (JJSF), have held up comparatively well even amid the meltdown in finance. Over the past year, the fund has outpaced the S&P 500 by about 10%. At current prices the fund yields 2.91%

Worth a Look

Despite recent gains, both RMR Asia Real Estate Fund (RAF) and RMR Asia Pacific Real Estate Fund (RAP) trade at wide 20% discounts to their underlying NAV — a spread likely to narrow as the funds are merged and reorganized into a “new” RAP fund on June 16. The asset class, Asian real estate, is a strong, off-the-radar screen idea not found in most investors’ books.

Asian Property Play

Asia Real Estate Fund (RAF), RMR Asia Pacific Real Estate Fund (RAP) – 6 months

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