New ‘Butter’ Made From Carbon Dioxide Tastes Like the Real Dairy Product, Startup Says

Humans have been craving fatty foods for some four million years—a desire that could explain why most consumers continue to prefer animal products to vegan alternatives, putting high expectations on the flavor of plant-based foods. Now, though, a California-based startup called Savor has created an animal-free butter from carbon dioxide that it claims tastes just like the dairy version.

The secret ingredient is the same one that makes humans crave cheeseburgers and bacon: fat. But Savor’s team doesn’t need livestock to create this component. Instead, it uses a thermochemical process that pulls carbon dioxide from the air and combines it with hydrogen and oxygen to create fat synthetically.

This fat is then turned into butter by adding water, an emulsifier, beta-carotene for color and rosemary oil for flavor. In the end, “it tastes like butter,” Kathleen Alexander, Savor’s chief technology officer, says to New Scientist’s Madeleine Cuff.

The startup has held informal taste panels with tens of people, and they “expect to perform a more formal panel as part of our commercialization and scale-up efforts,” Alexander adds to the Guardian’s Mariam Amini. Billionaire and former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, who is invested in the company, also tried their creation on bread and with a burger—“I couldn’t believe I wasn’t eating real butter,” he wrote in a blog post earlier this year. “The burger came close, too.”

"I couldn't believe that wasn't butter"

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A team of researchers, including Alexander, published a report in the journal Nature Sustainability in December, exploring the possibility of food production without agriculture. They suggest this technique has the potential to drastically shrink the environmental footprint typically involved with food systems.

According to an analysis from the Breakthrough Institute, the livestock industry is currently responsible for anywhere from 11.1 to 19.6 percent of human-made greenhouse gas emissions. Lowering the consumption of animal products would consequently help reduce humanity’s negative environmental impact—though Gates writes that “our plan can’t be to simply hope that people give up foods they crave.”

By creating butter by using carbon rather than emitting it, the Savor team hopes to hit two birds with one stone. According to the Nature Sustainability report, the synthetic fat’s carbon footprint is less than 0.8 grams of CO2 equivalent per calorie. On the other hand, real unsalted butter with 80 percent fat produces 2.4 grams of CO2 equivalent per calorie, writes the Guardian.

Synthetic foods that don’t require agriculture could also free up land for conservation efforts and carbon storage. Gates claims Savor’s thermochemical process uses less than one-thousandth of the water used in traditional agriculture.

Savor hopes to make similar progress in finding synthetic fat alternatives for palm oil and coconut oil—highly popular foods that ordinarily require deforestation to produce.

Using synthetic fats could “produce large amounts of food while avoiding risks that threaten traditional agriculture, such as climate change, environmental degradation, pathogens and pests,” Juan B. García Martínez, research manager at the nonprofit Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters and a peer-reviewer of the team’s recent paper, tells New Scientist.

Moving forward, however, the startup will have to contend with a few challenges, such as reducing the price of their product and minimizing disruptions to agricultural workers. It is currently working on getting regulatory approval in the United States. And one important question remains: Will the merits of their technology, and the support of Gates, be enough to convince people to eat butter made from carbon dioxide?

“We want to engage with people about why we think it is good for the planet,” Alexander says to New Scientist. “The land use, and all of that stuff, is really important. But actually, you just have to make food that tastes really good.”

Margherita Bassi | READ MORE

Margherita Bassi is a trilingual storyteller and freelance journalist with a particular interest in ancient history, astronomy and human interest stories.