GI176: Investing in Coffee Farms with Josh Ziegelbaum

GI176: Investing in Coffee Farms with Josh Ziegelbaum

Josh Ziegelbaum is director of Investor Relations at Legacy Group; a company that focuses on investment opportunities in developing markets; mainly Latin America. These opportunities include; coffee farms, hospitality and real estate development projects.

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Announcer:
Welcome to the Global Investors Podcast, a show that focuses on helping foreign investors enter the lucrative US real estate market. Host, Charles Carillo, combined decades of real estate investing experience with a professional background in international banking to interview experts in all areas of US real estate investing. Now here’s your host, Charles Carillo.

Charles:
Do you have money sitting in the stock market? And you’re worried about it or worse. You have money sitting at the bank, not keeping up with inflation. My name is Charles Carillo, founder and managing partner of Harborside Partners. And since 2006, I’ve been investing my money and my family’s money into income producing properties. These are real assets, real properties with real addresses that produce real cash flow. At Harborside Partners, we provide passive investors who love real estate with a turnkey investing solution. If you want to put your money to work in real estate, but can’t find deals, don’t have the time to get funding in. The last thing that productive people want to do is manage real estate. We find the deals. We fund the deals and we manage the tenants, the termites and the properties. Partner with us at investwithharborside.com. That’s investwithharborside.com. Go to investwithharborside.com. If you love real estate, you like the idea of passive income and believe that income producing properties will appreciate over time. Go to investwithharborside.com. That’s investwithharborside.com.

Charles:
Welcome to another episode of the Global Investors Podcast; I’m your host Charles Carillo. Today we have Josh Ziegelbaum. He is director of Investor Relations at Legacy Group; a company that focuses on investment opportunities in developing markets; mainly Latin America. These opportunities include; coffee farms, hospitality and real estate development projects. Thanks for being on Josh. Great to have you here,

Josh:
Charles, it’s a pleasure being on the show and thanks for having me on.

Charles:
So give us a little background on yourself both personally and professionally prior to getting involved with your current company, which is Legacy Group.

Josh:
Let’s start at the beginning. I was born and raised in Central New Jersey New Brunswick to be more specific. And I went to college there as well. So studied economics and outta school. I I started in traditional banking and wealth management. So got my series seven license, was working with Wells Fargo advisors, helping high net worth clients meet their long term goals through public markets, investing and, and through the deposit and credit products that the bank had to offer. And really got my feet wet there, kind of getting to know the ins and outs of wealth management retirement planning and kind of personal finance, I, I would say. Right. so I was a private banker at the end of my stint at Wells Fargo and I was managing a book of high net worth individuals and business owners in Miami Beach.

Josh:
That position in New Jersey got me a lateral down to South Florida back in 2018. And then let’s call it two and a half years ago, maybe a little bit longer. Actually looking at the calendar from today I started working with the two partners who I’m with now, Cole Shepard and Adam Jason at Legacy Group. And we do alternative assets. So I’m the director of investor relations at Legacy Group, and as you mentioned in the beginning, we open up alternative investments with a focus on Latin America for a group of high net worth individuals. So I take my, took my experience that I had being a private banker and relationship manager and really applying that at Legacy Group, but on the private investment space and really given white gloves service to our investors, being openly communicative and personal with them and really trying to understand what drives them and their needs and helping fill in those gaps with solutions that we have at Legacy Group.

Josh:
So that’s kind of from the beginning and, and how I got here. And definitely exciting. Love what I’m doing. I’d say it’s a lot more rewarding than working in the public market space and, and it’s really just more dynamic with more more growth opportunity from an investment perspective and then also fresh and exciting. Like we’re doing projects that other people don’t have and can’t do. Whereas at the bank I found myself, you know, same fun that we offer, another bank could sell it to you or you can even buy it your own without the, the help of financial advisor. So theres some really big differences between public and private, but that’s how I got here and definitely grateful for the beginning steps in my career and really built a strong foundation for me and it allows me to be more successful at my current role at Legacy Group.

Charles:
Oh, great. So all the years of really being, and I would, I would consider kind of like traditional wealth management and, you know, what do you think with alternative manage? Cause I imagine you had clients that were in both, right? That you were handling them in the public and they had, not through Wells Fargo, but they had their own private investments. So why do you think alternative investments are becoming more popular with high net worth in investors and why do you think it’s important for them to have that in their portfolio?

Josh:
Yeah, definitely noticed that even from the beginning. When I was working with my high net worth clients and trying to emulate them myself as a young person at the time, of course, and trying to understand what they do and what drives their decisions and how I can apply those for myself. I noticed a lot of parallels. Almost all of my high net worth clients at the bank, they were invested in real estate and whether they use loan products from us or, or they, they did it through syndications. Like I just, almost every single client I had invested in real estate. So that, that, that opened up my mind to real assets and, and alternatives outside the bank. Obviously at, at the wells, at Wells Fargo were not a real estate broker <laugh>, and, and we, we would facilitate loan products to help these investors, but, but really we were somewhat pretty far removed from the transaction.

Josh:
So seeing that really kind of drove, drove me towards real assets. And then besides that, they all had ownership and businesses, whether it’s ones that they ran themselves on an active basis or ones that they had passive ownership in. And, and then yes, they had a, a brokerage account and a traditional portfolio for more of their liquid assets, but almost every single high net worth individual, unless they were just like a high income earner such as a physician. I mean, they, they owned real estate and they owned businesses. So that kind of drove me towards it and, and had me start to see the value in, in the alternative space. And then I guess to your point on why it’s important and why people are looking for it, people want uncorrelated returns that do not move with the market. Like when you have the Fed chairman speak or, or, or some other political figure markets move rapidly and you know, you wake up and, and and kind of like stomaching, the volatility is too much for certain people in certain at certain points, right?

Josh:
Especially in the market that we’re in now with like a tremendous amount of volatility. So our investors now that are investing with us, you know, they own those same things that I mentioned, right? They have stocks in their portfolio, they have bonds they’re heavily US focused, so it’s all domestic really. They own real estate still. So they own homes, they own investment properties, they have syn, they have equity and syndications, but they invest with us because they’re looking for exposure outside of the US into other markets that they couldn’t access. Agriculture is a great hedge against inflation at the time of this recording. We’re clocking close to 8% inflation on an annualized basis. So people are trying to, obviously dollars are a safe haven, but they want alternatives to that that are not gonna get eroded by inflation. They’re all loaded up on real estate. Everyone’s made a killing over the last 10 years since the financial crisis. So people are looking to fill in gaps in their portfolio and I think that’s what really makes what we’re doing so exciting. And then of course, I mean, from a return perspective, we’re forecasting higher returns than people could achieve in the public markets. So that’s another important one there. So it’s a combination of returns, diversification markets, and I think those are the main drivers of investment today in with Legacy group and our portfolio companies.

Charles:
So Josh, you kind of take alternative investments for most US investors to another level because you’re adding in investing outside of the United States. And I, you know, as I understand in my research, you guys really focus on Latin America and I saw a lot of different offerings that you’ve closed and ones that you’re offering currently through companies and projects in Latin America. So why is it important? I mean, how is it, why is it important and you know, for people looking to get that diversification outside of the US where they might be a little comfortable after, like you said, the last 10 years of investing here in alternative assets, mainly state real estate, you did really well if you were invested over the last 10 years.

Josh:
Yeah, so people are looking for other markets because, you know, not every country performs the same. Not every market performs the same, just like asset classes move differently, so do different geographies. So while what goes up comes down is kind of the theory for our investors, and not that they’re selling outta their real estate by any means. I mean, I’m, I’m certainly not right, Like I I hold assets here in the states as I think you should, but there’s an argument for having a portion of your portfolio into another market that’s not correlated with the market here. Because when you even see it in, in crypto and bond yields in, in the equity markets, like everything’s moving in tandem these days. Even assets that are supposed to move opposite to one another, such stock and bonds. So I’m, I’m not saying that we’re gonna see a collapse in the US or that people shouldn’t be invested in the US but it’s just important to have exposure to emerging markets or, or other markets.

Josh:
When you think of emerging markets, you typically would think of maybe Asia, parts of undeveloped Europe. You don’t usually think of Latin America right away. But right now with all the geo, with all the political instability and kind of macroeconomic backdrop that we’re experiencing some of that’s with the war and some of it’s with other things. Asia is not looking like a place to put <laugh> fresh money to work right now for an investor looking to get exposure to another market. And I would make the same argument for Europe or parts of developing Europe. So our investors are, they get really comfortable around Latin, even though it seems so far and, and foreign to us, it becomes more attractive with these other opportun these other markets kind of eroding from an investment perspective. So that’s driving a lot of interest into the region. The ways in which we’ve made our investors more comfortable is a US structure.

Josh:
So while we’re, our assets are primarily in Columbia through our flagship portfolio company, Green Coffee Company we are opening that up for investors with the US structure. So we issue common equity in a Delaware holding company that owns all of the farmland, all of the facilities, all the assets and the rights to its cash flow by having equity ownership here in the us. So it’s a way that we allow our investors to get more comfortable you know, banking in the us investing in the us we have a US management team at Legacy Group from a variety of different backgrounds. I already give you mine, but that allows our investors to get more comfortable cuz they’re not just investing with an asset manager in Columbia, the group of Columbia people and kind of shipping their their funds away. It’s a US based management team, the two partners, one was a former s e C attorney, the other is a former corporate accountant with a big four accounting firm. And you already, you heard my background of course at the operational level, we obviously have Columbian people working for us. Yeah. Both on the farms and in executive positions. So our CEO, Boris Woolner was a 25 year veteran of Columbia agriculture before we appointed him. So we do a lot of things to make our investors more comfortable with the region, but they like it because it’s not what they can access here and we’re not aware of anyone that has a similar product.

Charles:
So you’re saying that farmland investing, and I’ve had a couple people on the show that were talking about farmland investing mainly in the United States. The last one I think was talking about California for different crops there and whatnot, and what, what is like in farmland, How is that recession resistant? I know what we have going on with the war and you hear about potential food shortages there and everything like that in the world’s becoming more developed. So people are req, you know, requiring now more, more products, let’s say food that that they probably wouldn’t have before. More people eating meat and all that stuff trickles down the whole way in the world. How does that, how is it recession resistant? I mean, like when you’re, when you’re talking about that in farmland in general, just let’s say if it’s in California or in Columbia,

Josh:
Food is a necessity. That’s really kind of what it boils down to. I mean, certain products people can do without, I don’t believe coffee is one of them. It’s one that’s growing globally from a consumption perspective. And that’s in up or down markets, you might change the way in which you consume your coffee. So let, let’s say you’re, you’re out of a job or, or something goes poorly with, with one of your projects. You probably, I don’t know if you drink coffee, but do you

Charles:
Yes. Yeah. So all talking

Josh:
<Laugh>, Yeah, maybe, maybe you go to Starbucks now and, and you’re buying a specialty coffee that’s being made for you by a barista and that’s the way you consume it, right? Things get hard. You, you might not go to Starbucks anymore and buy your coffee, but you probably make it at home or, or you might buy it in another manner. So the way in which people consume it, let’s say everything’s shut down with Covid you know, that was previously right, But you’re not going to the coffee shop then, but you’re ordering coffee from Amazon or, or whatever source that you’re, you’re going to in order to consume it. And you know, there’s more than 2 billion cups of coffee consumed per day globally and that number is growing. So, and then all these supply chain issues, weather patterns in Brazil and other parts of the world had had pushed up coffee commodity prices.

Josh:
So when they say it’s a head against inflation or, or it works even in a recession, it’s because people are still gonna consume it. And as transportation costs become more expensive. As land comes more expensive, the commodity itself does. So as an owner of farmland, you stand to benefit with inflationary pressures because all this, imagine you own an apartment building, rents all of a sudden are going up 20% year over year. You just made 20% more money owning the same assets. Same thing applies if you’re owning farmland, that produces a resource. If that resource becomes more expensive in time owning it, owning the land, the land becomes more expensive and so on. I know I answered that question in several directions, but it’s kind of my general thoughts there. So in a downturn, long story short, people will still eat and consume <laugh> consume agricultural products.

Charles:
Yeah, no, that makes perfect sense. I think it’s also similar with alcohol too, when you’re going through a recession, they might just, how they consume it would be a little, little different. But now when, let’s just talk like high level, can you give us like an overview for people that have never heard about investing in coffee how the process works you know is there a waiting period? How do distributions work? Can you give us like a high level overview of coffee investing and specifically how you guys do it?

Josh:
Yeah, so there’s a couple different people that that offer agriculture investments as well, but they package them in very different ways. Then you’ll find our structure. So we have a holding company structure where you would own shares in a parent company that owns all the land, all the trees. As of this recording, we have almost 7,000 acres of land controlled, owned by green coffee companies subsidiaries and 7 million coffee trees and growing. So as a shareholder in green coffee company, you would be, you would own a slice of this entire pie. So you would own a portion of the facilities, you would own rices to future profits and you wouldn’t own a small sliver of it, right? So it’s, it’s like a early stage private company investment. And we have a goal of continuing to roll up assets, build out this, continue to build out the, the coffee side of the business.

Josh:
And we’re also working on byproducts. So a roasting channel, a byproduct channel where we can work to build out an alcohol product. We’re modeling that out in our series C presentation. So an investor with us would be owning shares in a holding company that is essentially a conglomerate in the, in the coffee space or, or a growing one. And it’s currently the largest coffee producer in Columbia. So you would be a shareholder in this particular company. Taking a step back and comparing that to other products that I’ve seen in the agricultural space, you, you would be offered a plot of land, for example, where you own one acre of yeah orange trees or, or whatever it is. And then based or coffee trees, let’s just compare it to coffee. And then based on the production in that year and fees from whoever’s managing it, you would get cash flows each year for what’s produced on your particular parcel.

Josh:
Our structure is totally different than that depending on the harvest in one year. It doesn’t really matter to an investor in, I mean it does in the short term, but if you own a slice of an entire enterprise that’s growing that the evaluation continues to increase. And we have a goal of selling the company in this nice packaged us structure or more preferably going public in the US markets. It’s an early stage company investment as opposed to a real agriculture investment so to speak. Obviously that’s the backdrop, but the structure that we have, we believe is far superior from what you might find in the space in terms of investment offerings and agriculture cuz no one’s doing it this way. So in terms of like timing and period, coffee does take several years to mature that. Coffee trees that we currently have, some are many are already bearing fruit.

Josh:
Coffee actually grows in a fruit or in a cherry form and on the, in, on the inside of that cherry is the coffee bean. But there’s a process in order to remove the skin. We do that in our world class processing facility that we have in Salgar, that’s the town where we operate. We have two iden, two facilities where are essentially identical and we process the cherry down to what’s called Parchman or it’s Unroasted coffee, so it looks like a coffee bean, but it’s a very light brown and it, there still needs to be another process. It needs to be roasted, it actually needs to go through a dry mill after this wet mill and then it’s roasted. So we we’re at the very beginning of the chain where we take the cherry down to the raw product and, and green coffee and then we’re selling it in a wholesale manner at that point.

Josh:
So we’re selling containers of wholesale, b2b, green coffee to end traders and buyers who are then turning it off and selling it and then roasting it themselves. Like so, so that’s handled at the back end as we go through this next funding round, which we’re launching here in Q3 2022. As the time of this recording, we’re gonna be launching it in September we are gonna continue to build out that green coffee business, but we also have two other pillars we wanna focus on. One being the roasted channel. So we’re ding a location in the US preferably in the southern states, looking at Florida and Texas right now. So we could actually not just have a holding company presence, but operational presence here as well on the roasted side so we can go further down the value chain and not just sell it at a green coffee stage, but bring it through our own US race, US based roasting channel and make more margin.

Josh:
And then separately from that is the byproducts business. So that cherry that I mentioned on the outside of, of the fruit, it’s it’s waste right now. So you use the bean on the inside, but we have a tremendous amount of waste that’s produced through through this coffee byproduct. And we’re looking at ways to monetize that. So we’re planning to build an alcohol distilling facility so we can make ethanol, vodka, rum consumable liquor product out of what is now waste and both on another vertical for our investors. So you can kind of see that this isn’t like buy a plot of land plant trees get cash flow, it’s buy shares in a company that is the largest coffee producer in Columbia that’s building out multiple verticals that’s trying to carve a path towards a profitable exit. And we’re currently targeting 2026 right now for our investors.

Charles:
Yeah, no, that’s very, very interesting cuz usually, like you said, traditionally you would hear, you know, buy a plot of, you know, I don’t, you know, buy a hector or whatever it is I’m doing down there and then I’m, you know, having someone run in stuff like this. And with this scenario number one I see it’s less volatile because now I’m getting into 7,000 acres. So now anything I have coming off it, number two is it’s almost like an angel investment or I guess you would say venture capital, not early stage, but it’s something where there could be a tremendous backend on it as well if everything goes as planned. So that’s very, very interesting how that’s done.

Josh:
Yeah, thanks Charles. Yeah, we, we would like to definitely a private equity style investment. Yeah, and the returns that we’re forecasting, we, we believe they could even be conservative, but we’re forecasting eight x net returns, so an eight x net equity multiple for our investors through 2026. And you know, it could, it could be sooner than that, it could be a better return. I mean it’s obviously based on a set of assumptions and comparable companies that have executed transactions in the market, but it’s, we, we think it’s a really exciting opportunity and, and even being the largest producer in Columbia today, we think we’re just getting started

Charles:
With your, I have one question because you have a lot of these countries and I’ve, I’ve heard from other people that invest in developing countries and they would say that as that country becomes wealthier and Columbia definitely has become wealthier over the last decades and this is helping them, which is great for the people, but it’s also that for, do you see that with labor going up in cost in the sense that it doesn’t make sense anymore or does it have to go very high for it to be, you know what I mean, to make, to change returns or anything like that? Does that make sense?

Josh:
So do you, do you mean like if labor continues to rise, the cost then would that make the returns the same as

Charles:
Right what I’m saying? Yeah, exactly. So I’m saying is that you have it when you’re in developing countries, you know, like say you’re making t-shirts and you go to one cheap country, then you go to another cheap country and another one, and as they get wealthier you’re moving your production. You know what I’m saying? So I’m saying this, obviously you can’t move, you know, trees and whatnot, but I’m seeing is that, is there as Columbia, as Latin America gets wealthier with more money coming down there, expats, investors like yourself and your company going down there, do you see that labor costs, let’s say are increasing faster than what we’d see, like regular inflation here And that’s, you know, you know what I’m saying? Yeah. And is that how that’s going to affect, say, eight years down the road? You know, obviously this is not happening this weekend, you know what I mean? Like, you know, eight years down the road is what we’re talking about for a time horizon or six years what you were saying, but

Josh:
Yeah, so we, we don’t see labor costs rising at a rate faster than you’re seeing in the us So okay, inflation is not going through the roof by any means. Now, while the com the country we believe is doing well economically, we don’t see the cost to pay employees getting even close to what you would have to pay someone in a developed country like the us And even if it did at that point adjust it for inflation, the US would be yeah, of course hire. And, and then there’s other things. It’s not just the labor cause we’re not, I know your t-shirt example is just an example, but the product itself is grown there. So we can’t, the climate here in the US does not allow coffee special, at least co specialty coffee to, to be grown in in the manner. And so I, I don’t think that in the next eight years or six years, whatever the example was that, that it would become less attractive if, as if it did, if foreign investment continues to flow into the region, which we are seeing a lot of it, I would say assets would become more expensive.

Josh:
So the land that mm-hmm <affirmative>, the land would become more expensive, the labor would probably become more expensive as well. But as an owner of <laugh> 6,000 something acres, you know, if more foreign investment comes into the region and then prices are going through the roof, I’d say that’s a good thing for, for someone who’s early. Cause we believe we were pretty early we, that we were early on in, in the boom, at least in the country there, that

Charles:
Yeah, that’d be great for you, you guys, it’d be great for your investors and then definitely great for the people on the ground there in Columbia that you were helping. Yeah. With adding jobs and building some wealth for themselves, that’s consistent. So that’s awesome. So let’s talk about just as we’re kind of closing up here and you’ve been involved in all different types of alternative assets and traditional investments and kind of questions we ask every guest. And number one would be like what kind of common mistakes do you see let’s say real estate investors slash agriculture investors make?

Josh:
Well, I guess if we’re talking about real estate or I guess we’re talking about passive investing here, I mean for the purpose of this show I would encourage people to diligence the asset manager and their track record and really get to understand the team and, and those who are behind the projects. I’ve heard some other investors with our of ours who have said, Wow, you guys are so communicative, this is not, this is way better than fill in the blank experience. So, you know, I would really kind of vet who you’re investing with if you’re a passive limited partner. I mean, a lot of this stuff is done over the internet, hearing people on podcasts, seeing presentations. So you know, if there’s a newsletter, subscribe to it. Make sure you get comfortable ask the right questions and, and make sure that the management team ha is capable of, of executing on its vision.

Josh:
Because all private investing is based on a set of assumptions, whether it’s a piece parcel of real estate or an operating business. If it’s real estate, you say, Okay, we’re gonna buy it for this much. We’re gonna do value add, this is how much we’re gonna spend, this is what we expect to be the back end. But if the team is not capable of executing on that business plan, then so much for your business plan. So I think step one would be to, to really do your due diligence on, on the team and of course thoroughly review the offering materials, the investor presentations. Those are really important things. For more active investors. I would say people who are doing this on their own and not through professionals and trying to be passive misjudging costs, <laugh> and mis making assumptions that are incorrect. Like, Oh, the mortgage is this much and my cash flow is $200 a month, my, I’ll make $200 a month. Okay, well what about repairs, capax reserves, vacancy, you know, really underwriting the right way if you’re doing it yourself. I, I think that that’s important. And then those are the main things I

Charles:
Would say. Yeah, no, like great ones. The last one’s great. Cause that’s, I definitely, people don’t add in all their, they think it’s gonna be rented the whole time and never have vacancy. So Josh, what do you think are the main factors that have contribute to your success over the years?

Josh:
Yeah, I mean, solid education, hunger to learn more. Surrounding myself with intelligent people who help lift me up, seeking out knowledge and mentors when you can. And then, you know, always striving to do better and asking questions and being humble. I mean, those are all things that I think contributed to my success.

Charles:
And then how can our listeners learn more about you and your business?

Josh:
Yes, please find us on our website@legacy-group.co and you can contact us investor dot relations@legacygroup.co. And I would love to hear from you and speak to any of your listeners about your individual needs, their investment strategies, and tell ’em more about what we do at Legacy Group in the Green Coffee Company.

Charles:
All right. Well, thanks Josh for coming on and looking forward to connecting with you here in the near future.

Josh:
Yeah, thanks Charles. This is great. You have a great day.

Charles:
You too. Talk to you soon.

Charles:
Hi guys! It’s Charles from the Global Investors Podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you’re interested in get involved with real estate, but you don’t know where to begin, set up a free 30 minute strategy call with me at schedulecharles.com. That’s schedulecharles.com. Thank you.

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About Josh Ziegelbaum

Josh currently serves as Director of Investor Relations at Legacy Group and is based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He is responsible for managing investor communications, onboarding, individual and commercial clients, as well as overall support of company initiatives. The dynamic work experience Josh has gained throughout his career gives him a unique perspective on both sales and operations.

Prior to joining Legacy Group, Josh worked as Vice President of Business Development for Lifeafar Capital, a boutique private equity and asset management firm where he led his team’s capital-raising efforts. Before that, he was a Private Banker for Wells Fargo with a focus on complex credit needs and investments in public securities. During his time at Wells Fargo, Josh climbed through the ranks and received multiple internal recognitions and awards for his efforts. He most recently managed a book of business for high-net worth individuals and business owners in Miami Beach. Josh is originally from New Jersey where he studied economics at Rutgers University, and received a Series 7 license in 2017. He is known for his passion around building deep relationships with his clients and for consistently acting in their best interests.

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