Kathleen Alexander wove through a crowded room to reach the cash register at San Francisco-based One65?s patisserie.

There, the co-founder and CEO of Savor watched her company’s chocolate bonbons get purchased by consumers for the first time. As the September evening wore on, Alexander saw hundreds of the candies — made in partnership with One65 — fly off their trays.

Savor, a San Jose-based food startup founded in March 2022, makes cooking fats like butter, palm oil and cocoa products from carbon, without any animals or plants — while aiming to mimic each original product’s taste and texture, Alexander and co-founder Ian McKay say. Savor’s recreation of butter in a lab is a significant accomplishment, because it’s chemically closer to cow butter than any vegan option on the market, both say.

The startup has $33 million in funding from billionaire Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and food tech investing firm Synthesis Capital. Its intention isn’t to fully replace cows or sprayable avocado oil, say McKay and Alexander: It’s to create another option for farmers, chefs, food manufacturers and customers to help alleviate the agriculture industry’s strain on the environment.

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Agriculture is one of the world’s largest pollution contributors, and fats account for 7% of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to the company. More than a third of U.S. agricultural land is used to feed cattle, so needing fewer dairy cows could free up more farmland for fruits and vegetables, Savor’s co-founders say.

And palm oil production has been linked to worldwide tropical deforestation, which Savor wants to help decrease, says Alexander. “We wanted to save the world,” she says. “The fact that we do make these foods that are just so delicious, that I can’t wait to share with the people I love, is a very special thing.”

But bonbons aside — Savor and One65 have only made “a limited number,” according to the startup’s website — you probably won’t see products containing the startup’s cooking fats on grocery store shelves until at least 2029, Alexander says. The scientific achievement of creating the fats is only the first step on a years-long road toward building Savor into a commercial success.

Using nearly 100-year-old science to recreate butter without cows or plants

McKay and Alexander, both 38, met in 2017 through the Hertz Fellowship — a prestigious award program that connects doctoral students in applied science, engineering and math with funding and connections.

McKay, a chemical engineer, came up with the idea for Savor based on nearly century-old science. German scientists in the 1920s used heat and pressure to turn gas into liquid or solid hydrocarbons, and a chemist at Sunoco injected oxygen into those solids to create edible fats in the 1930s.

Alexander — a “hardcore materials scientist,” says McKay — tried to make those fats taste and feel exactly like the ones made from plants and animals, in a way that was quick and inexpensive to replicate. She started running experiments on a single aluminum table in a lab in Seattle in January 2021. Her first attempt successfully created fatty acids, but literally exploded on the table, she says.

Over the next two years, she adjusted variables like temperature, airflow and mixing speed to consistently create edible fats and then hone their melting points — the key to making each product taste and feel like a traditional animal fat or plant oil, says Alexander.

In March 2022, the fellowship connected Alexander and McKay with Breakthrough Energy to obtain the seed funding that officially launched the company. And in March 2023, Savor’s ice cream melted as early, smoothly and slowly as traditional ice cream, says Alexander.

Around that time, McKay took a potential investor — a friend he knew was a picky eater — to their food lab, and made a burger with Savor beef tallow and butter. He accidentally overheated the skillet, and couldn’t find a spatula to flip the burger in time, he says.

“But the end result still tasted perfect,” says McKay, adding: “It was like the monkeys finding the obelisk in [’2001: A Space Odyssey’].”

Savor’s food safety testing matches the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s “rigorous” manufacturing and risk-prevention standards, Alexander notes. The startup currently operates under a self-affirmed Generally Recognized as Safe (GRAS) dossier from the FDA, and expects to secure a “no questions” letter by late 2026, which would mean the agency has no questions or health concerns about the product, she adds.

The challenge of making lab-grown cooking fats more affordable

Alexander and McKay’s current obstacle: making their cooking fats as affordable as possible.

Savor produces its fats in a 25,000-square-foot pilot facility in Batavia, Illinois, which it purchased in June 2024, eight months after its fundraising round with Synthesis Capital. But due to expenses, it only currently uses approximately 1% of the facility’s peak capacity, says Alexander.

Since Savor doesn’t have much incoming revenue yet, it can only afford to make small batches of products for individual events or potential partners to try, she says. The limited production nudged Savor into its current business model: Make cooking fats for partners to use as ingredients in their own recipes, like chocolates or croissants.

Michelin-starred restaurants SingleThread in Healdsburg, California, and Dirt Candy in New York, plan to use Savor butter in some dishes starting this fall, Alexander says. The butter “offers better flavor and more functionality” than other dairy-free alternatives says Kyle Connaughton, SingleThread’s co-owner and head chef.

Alexander hopes Savor can grow its revenue enough to increase production by inking more partnerships with established food brands. If Savor partnered with confectionary giant Mondelez, for example, it could supply its larger partner with animal-free butter or beef tallow — and Mondelez could sell vegan Cadbury eggs with boxes that read “featuring Savor ingredients,” says Alexander. (Savor participated in a Mondelez accelerator program in Fall 2024.)

Additional external funding would help Savor expand its production more traditionally, but “generalist” investors have lost confidence in food technology companies since 2022, says Costa Yiannoulis, managing partner and co-founder of Synthesis Capital and a Savor board member. In an oversaturated alternative foods market, too many startups made promises to investors that they couldn’t keep, he says.

The capital could return with advancements in food technology, says Yiannoulis. And in a political climate where some Republican lawmakers and Americans are increasingly skeptical of lab-grown food, Savor’s model of supplying ingredients to grocery store brands could help it reach commercial viability.

Savor’s chocolate bonbons, made in collaboration with San Francisco-based One65?s patisserie

Savor

Some experts preach caution on the potential health benefits of lab-grown cooking fats. Replicating the exact nutritional value of plant-based fats is near-impossible, for example, mostly because scientists still don’t fully understand the makeup of plant seeds and why they’re so healthy, says Walter Willett, a Harvard University epidemiology and nutrition professor.

But most people don’t get the majority of their daily nutrients from olive oil or avocado oil, notes Alexander. And the more Savor grows, the more progress it’ll make toward its environmental goals, like reallocating some farmland from cattle to to crop-growing and easing global deforestation, she adds.

“We have pretty clear evidence, both from the quantitative and qualitative work [conducted with third-party consumer researchers] that we’ve done, to give us confidence that a large percentage of people are actually pretty excited about the prospect of what we’re building, especially if we can deliver on price, health and climate,” Alexander says. (CNBC)