Bill Gates Vouches for This Lab-Made Butter Made Out of Thin Air- Says It Tastes Like the ‘Real Thing’

Imagine not regretting hurting a cow just because you crave buttery food. Enter vegan butter! While several dairy products have been replaced by their vegan alternatives, there's a much better innovation that used fewer resources to make butter- so few that it's nothing more than thin air. A startup company called Savor has severed the ties between biology and chemistry to artificially manufacture fats out of its core elements– carbon dioxide and hydrogen. The initiative is a part of the umbrella organization, Orca Sciences which has ties with former Microsoft CEO, Bill Gates. The billionaire signed up a hefty check to invest in the company’s green endeavors, per IFL Science.

The primary motive for Savor is to cut down on greenhouse gas emissions produced by the agricultural sector. Therefore, they are developing ways to efficiently utilize the very abundant carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from the water. The initiative intends to rule out the exploitation of plants, animals, and farmland to meet the demands of edible fat production. “The process doesn’t release any greenhouse gases, and it uses no farmland and less than a thousandth of the water that traditional agriculture does,” Gates wrote in a GatesNotes blog dedicated to the butter innovation. The tech-savvy was particularly impressed by the taste of Savor’s artificial butter and compared it to the “real thing.” 

The 69-year-old businessman explained that he could barely cut the differences between real and artificial butter when tasting Savor products. “Most important, it tastes really good—like the real thing, because chemically it is,” he said. Gates is a big fan of cheeseburgers, thus, his interest in animal fat alternatives. “Why I’m making big bets on novel fats and oils,” a note on the blog post stated. The billionaire claimed to have tried many of the meat and dairy replacements in the market knowing how the manufacturing process of these products affected the natural world. 

Nevertheless, any alternatives failed to satisfy his taste buds to replace the real cheeseburgers. He called animal fat the secret ingredient to the “richness, juiciness, unique mouthfeel, and overall flavor” a real cheeseburger has. But that craving is a detriment to the environment at large. The agricultural industry contributes about 8.5% of emissions out of the total 51 billion tons of greenhouse gases globally, as per the blog. The production of fats and oils from animals and plants accounts for about 7%. Hence, the Savor innovation of butter from thin air gathered support from Gates and with no compromise to taste and feel. The only real challenge that remains is to reduce the manufacturing costs of artificial butter to make it attractive to consumers on a large scale.

The billionaire noted that Savor has the potential to slash the prices because the pivotal steps in their fat production process are already used in other industries. Fats are composed of carbon and hydrogen atoms in varied chains, the building blocks of the compound. Therefore, the startup uses biochemical processes to restructure the CO2 and H atoms into identical molecules of animal and plant fats. Besides that, Savor is also aiming to produce alternatives for palm oil- a widely consumed oil across the globe.