A Bill Gates-backed startup Savor is claiming that its synthetic “vegan” fat, made without the use of livestock or the crops needed for margarine, could help save the planet.

Savor believes that its butter is better, because it doesn’t require the plants, animals or chemicals used to make butter, margarine or other fat products.

The California-based company are using carbon dioxide from the air and turning it into butter in the lab, But fail to provide information on the nutritional value or the unwanted chemicals contained within the fake fat.  

Expose News reports: They seem to be missing the point, perhaps deliberately so, that food is supposed to be nutritious.

A new type of dietary fat could soon be on sale in the US as researchers and entrepreneurs race to develop the first synthetic “foods.”

According to New Scientist, US startup Savor has created a “butter” product made from carbon, in a thermochemical system closer to fossil fuel processing than food production. “There is no biology involved in our specific process,” says Kathleen Alexander from the company.

In a Substack article published in December 2023, Alexander wrote: “The fats we make at Savor can be produced from fossil fuels like natural gas or from captured CO₂ and green hydrogen … We could not be more excited to bring these new fats to the world.”

Savor calls them “zero carbon fats” and “carbon neutral fats.”  They don’t get the irony.

How Does Savor Make Zero Carbon Fats?

“The Californian startup has gone to the basics of chemistry to build its product. According to its website, like any molecule, fat also has a fixed chemical formula. It uses carbon dioxide as a starting point to build fat molecules using heat and hydrogen,”  Interesting Engineering explained without giving further details, which is not surprising as Savor’s website doesn’t seem to have any. 

However, we were able to find some details about their process in a presentation given at the Good Food Institute conference held in September 2023.  In a session titled ‘Commercial innovation of alternative fat ingredients’, Savor’s Director of Business Development Chiara Cecchini presented the diagram below to show the process they use to make the synthetic fats that they want us to eat.

Notice the input begins with paraffin wax and CO₂.  Cecchini explained: “We start from an input which is basically CO₂ and green hydrogen in the form of paraffin and then we take those paraffin waxes and we basically oxidise them.”

Yummy, vegans’ mouths must be watering.

Interesting Engineering continued:

Savor is confident that its technology can be used to make butter and multiple other animal-derived fats, such as milk and cheese. The company also plans to use this approach to make ice cream and edible oils. 

Another highlight of this tech is that it is highly scalable and could rapidly be deployed to replace animal-derived fats. The only hurdle would be convincing people to adopt a product made using revolutionary tech into their daily lives. 

This is where Gates is hopeful he can make a difference. “The idea of switching to lab-made fats and oils may seem strange at first,” Gates wrote in a blog post earlier this year. “But their potential to significantly reduce our carbon footprint is immense. By harnessing proven technologies and processes, we get one step closer to achieving our climate goals.“

‘Eat fossil fuels’: Bill Gates-backed company makes butter out of thin air, Interesting Engineering, 10 July 2024