Making Butter from Thin Air, Bill Gates-style
While everyone's arguing about plant-based burgers and lab-grown chicken, a small company in California just quietly figured out how to make real butter from literally nothing but air and water. And Bill Gates is so convinced it'll work that he's betting millions on it.
The company is called Savor, and what they're doing sounds like something out of a sci-fi movie. They officially launched their commercial butter in March 2025, making it the world's first animal- and plant-free butter created directly from carbon, without the use of conventional agriculture. But here's the mind-blowing part: it tastes exactly like real butter because it is chemically real butter.
How Do You Make Butter From Air?
I know this sounds insane, but stick with me. Savor's process involves taking carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heating them up, and oxidizing them to create fatty acids that then form fat.
Think about it this way: fats are just chains of carbon and hydrogen atoms. You can get these building blocks from water and air, then use chemistry to arrange them into fats that are molecularly identical to those found in animals and plants .
They then turn this synthetic fat into butter by adding water, an emulsifier, beta-carotene for color, and rosemary oil for flavor. The result? Bill Gates tried it on bread and with a burger and said, "I couldn't believe I wasn't eating real butter".
Why This Matters (Hint: It's Huge)
Here's why this isn't just a cool science experiment. Fat and oil production from animals and plants is responsible for about 3.5 billion tons of CO2—that's seven percent of all global greenhouse gas emissions Every time you spread butter on toast or eat anything with palm oil (which is basically everything), you're contributing to that.
Savor's method produces less than 0.8g of CO2 per kilogram, while palm oil from Brazil or Indonesia emits more than 1.5g per kilogram. Plus, their process uses no farmland and less than a thousandth of the water that traditional agriculture does.
The Food World is Already Freaking Out
This isn't just theoretical anymore. Michelin-starred restaurants like SingleThread and ONE65, plus beloved bakeries like Jane the Bakery, are already planning to use Savor's butter this year. Top chefs including Kyle Connaughton and Juan Contreras are testing it in their high-end creations.
Major consumer packaged goods companies are working with Savor on ingredient innovation projects because they can create customizable fats and oils. Think about that—they can literally design fats with specific properties for different foods.
This is Just the Beginning
Butter is just their opening act. Savor has plans for milk, ice cream, cheese, meat, and even tropical oils. Their technology can replace pretty much any fat or oil used in food production. They're specifically targeting palm oil, which is in everything from cookies to cosmetics and is a major driver of deforestation. Imagine if we could make all those products without cutting down a single tree.
The Money Behind the Magic
Savor has raised more than $33 million from Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures and other major investors. They were just named one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies of 2025.
They've opened a 25,000-square-foot production facility in Illinois that can produce metric tons of fat starting this year. They've already gotten FDA approval to sell their products in the U.S.
The Reality Check
Look, there's one big challenge: cost. As Gates put it, "The big challenge is to drive down the price so that products like Savor's become affordable to the masses—either the same cost as animal fats or less".
But here's why Gates is optimistic: the key steps of their fat-production process already work in other industries. The beauty is that you can synthesize fats with processes that don't involve biology. It's all chemistry, and you can operate at higher pressures and temperatures that allow excellent efficiency.
Why This Changes Everything
Here's what makes Savor different from every other food tech company: they've eliminated biology entirely. Plant-based companies are trying to make plants taste like animals. Lab-grown meat companies are growing actual animal cells. Savor said "forget all that" and went straight to chemistry.
Their CEO Kathleen Alexander talks about potentially allowing humanity to "divorce food production from agriculture" entirely This isn't about replacing one ingredient—it's about fundamentally rethinking how we make food.
The Bottom Line
As Alexander puts it, "Truly sustainable solutions can't just reduce our environmental footprint; they have to be affordable, approachable, and crav Savor ” Savor might be the only technology with the potential to replace palm oil and other widely used fats with a very low-carbon equivalent within the next decade.
We're not just talking about better butter if they can scale this and hit the right price point. We're talking about the possibility that we might not need farms, animals, or plants to feed the world. That's not just disruptive—that's revolutionary.
And the craziest part? It tastes exactly like the real thing because, chemically, it is the real thing. The future of food might literally be made of thin air. And honestly? That future might be closer than any of us thought.
