The race is on to find more sustainable, functional, or healthy alternatives to animal and tropical fats (coconut, palm, cocoa). But does the next generation of “designer fats” fit the bill?
While several startups in the novel fats space are coaxing microbes or animal cells to produce some of these more saturated fats, San Jose, Calif.-based Savor is deploying a thermochemical approach which it claims is more scalable, whereby it takes a carbon source and a hydrogen source, heats them up and oxidizes them to create fatty acids.
AgFunderNews caught up with VP commercialization Chiara Cecchini at the Future Food-Tech summit in San Francisco as the company launched its first product from its pilot facility in Illinois: animal-and-plant-free butter.
Milkfat, cocoa butter, lard, beef tallow, liquid vegetable oils…
According to Cecchini, labeling is still to be determined for the butter alternative, which has self-GRAS (generally recognized as safe) status in the US, and is targeting baking, confectionery and dairy applications. A cocoa butter equivalent will follow soon.
“We take carbon and hydrogen and we apply very high pressure and heat oxygen into the mix to create fatty acids at a facility that used to be an oil processing facility,” explained Cecchini.
“You can think of fatty acids as the building blocks of fats and oils. And so at that point, you have this library that you can play with to build whatever you want on the other end. And then we build them into triglycerides that enable us to create all these different recipes for different applications in the food industry.
“We’re very flexible, so it’s very important for us… to have partnerships with players who know what they need and what they want.”
To date, Savor has developed multiple prototypes that replicate the functional properties of milkfat, cocoa butter, lard, beef tallow and liquid vegetable oils, she said.
“Savorʼs approach unlocks both scalability and flexibility in producing animal-equivalent fats in a way that no other current solution is poised to. As a result, this makes them inseparable from the coming food system transformation.” Costa Yiannoulis, cofounder and managing partner, Synthesis Capital
Metric tons of fat
Savor, which has raised $33 million to date from backers including Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Synthesis Capital, has been collaborating with upscale restaurants and bakeries in the San Francisco Bay Area but is also in talks with large CPG companies.
The 25,000-square-foot pilot production facility in Batavia, Illinois, has the initial capacity to produce metric tons of fat, said the firm, which has 10 pending and issued patents covering its process “from feedstock to final products as well as several families of product formulations.”
B-roll courtesy of Savor.
