The slabs of butter atop sourdough at a recent tasting were smooth, creamy, and greasy, as you’d expect. But at this event in New York, the appetizers’ buttery feel came from a potent greenhouse gas, not fat from cow milk.
Fatty acids – compounds of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon atoms – are the building blocks of all the fats and oils in food. In nature, plants and animals produce them, but Savor, the California-based startup that organized the tasting, is replicating those molecules with methane captured from coal mining or natural gas drilling.
The methane-butter-laced mushroom steaks and butter-braised cabbage also on offer make for a “really bizarre meal,” Savor co-founder Ian McKay said – one that he says will be available at American restaurants and bakeries in the coming months.
The company, which is backed by billionaire Bill Gates, is part of a growing slate of startups tapping everything from fungus to sawdust to make more environmentally friendly fats and oils. Traditional agricultural businesses are facing tougher scrutiny over their impact on the planet, with regulators rolling out new laws such as the European Union’s ban on food items linked to deforestation.
At the same time, some types of fat are becoming scarcer and more expensive as climate change decimates the crops used to make them. The cost of cocoa, for example, more than doubled last year from 2023 after erratic rainfall patterns and increased temperatures wreaked havoc on plantations in West Africa.
Alternative fat startups say their products can fill that gap while cutting back carbon emissions.
This is not the first time that tech companies have attempted to solve the environmental problems associated with industrial agriculture. Not long ago, makers of alternative proteins attracted billions of dollars from investors. So far, though, sales of plant-based “meat” are stalling. Beyond Meat Inc, one of the leading plant-based food companies, lost more than 90% of its market valuation over the past six years.
But compared to their troubled alternative protein cousins, “alternative fats have a lot of room to succeed,” says Priera Panescu Scott, a researcher with Good Food Institute, a nonprofit think tank.
Fake meat products have partly struggled because of their taste and texture tend to fall flat. Since fat is the secret ingredient that gives meat and dairy products their unique flavor and mouthfeel, plant-based protein producers are willing to pay for alternatives, she says. Cargill, for example, has teamed up with Spanish startup Cubiq Foods, which makes an alternative fat made from vegetable oil and water that the global conglomerate plans to add to its plant-based burgers.
A roasty aroma that comes from soil
A biotech scientist by training, James Petrie set out to replicate the roasty aroma of pork, chicken and beef at Nourish Ingredients, which he co-founded.
“Everyone says the flavor is in the fat, but what type of fat is it?” Petrie recalls asking. After pinpointing the right fatty compound in meat, he and his team found an analogue in a type of single-cell fungus that lives in soil. Engineers at the Canberra, Australia-based startup now grow the fungus in a bioreactor and process their harvest in controlled temperatures and pressure to modify its aroma and taste profile. The final product, according to Petrie, is a cream-colored powder that can be used as a food additive. Nourish Ingredients also produces a milk fat alternative from another microorganism.
Petrie says his company’s products cost around the same or less as the artificial flavors currently used in plant-based burgers and other alternative proteins. But before they hit the shelves, they need to be vetted by food safety watchdogs. The company is seeking regulatory approval in Australia, Singapore, the EU and the US, among other places, Petrie says.
That process can take time. Governments around the world lack an established regulatory framework for alternative fats and oils. That, in turn, slows down products’ journey to supermarkets and restaurants and adds to their cost, industry experts say.
Finding a substitute for palm oil
Several companies are focused on replacing palm oil, whose production often involves clearing vast swathes of forest to make way for plantations. In 2024, Indonesia cut down more than 77,000 acres of forest – the equivalent of about 90 Central Parks. Replacing palm oil with a synthetic alternative could reduce roughly as much carbon emissions as what South Africa releases in a year, according to a 2023 study published in Nature.
New York-based C16 BioSciences converts yeasts into alternative palm oil through a fermentation technique not unlike what’s used to brew beer. Aio, based in Tallinn, Estonia, is deploying a similar process to make the oil from forestry waste such as sawdust.
Cofounder Nemailla Bonturi says Aio’s sawdust-based palm oil alternative can serve as a drop-in solution to replace the real thing. By integrating the novel oil into everyday items such as soaps and body moisturizers, the startup aims to bring its products to consumers in Europe next year.
But with conventional palm oil being sold at below $1 per kilogram on average last year, Scott of the Good Food Institute says “it is very hard to compete with.”
A serving of CO2 butter
In addition to methane, Savor also uses carbon dioxide captured from factories to make synthetic butter. For now, anyone who wants to try its products has to do so at a tasting like the one held in New York. Single Thread, a three-Michelin-star restaurant in California that tested the butter with vegan and lactose-intolerant customers, will have it on its menu soon.
Kyle Connaughton, the restaurant’s chef, has conducted numerous blind tests of the novel ingredient. Whether it was used to saute vegetables, bake croissants or make hollandaise sauce, Savor’s product rendered pretty much the same results in flavor and texture as conventional butter, he says. “In most ways, it really does mimic it.”
On some occasions, it even makes the cooking easier. While regular dairy butter tends to burn above the temperature of 175C (350F), Connaughton says he can cook with the synthetic butter in higher heat without worrying about the burning.
Savor makes several metric tons of synthetic fats per year in its factory in Illinois, says Kathleen Alexander, the startup’s cofounder. The company will launch a series B funding round this year and gradually increase its production to reach the factory’s designed annual capacity of 1,000 metric tons, she adds. That’s a big jump for Savor, but only a fraction of global butter production, which stood at more than 11 million metric tons last year.
Even if that plan materializes, Savor’s synthetic product will cost between 10% and 50% more than conventional milk fat, according to Alexander. While fine dining chefs can afford that premium, ordinary consumers probably cannot.
But those high-end products are crucial stepping stones for the startup to scale up and eventually be able to compete against regular butter, said McKay as he watched his team hand out chocolate bonbons made with Savor’s synthetic cocoa butter.
“That’s our big hope,” he says.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)