“Savor Foods Introduces Environmentally-Friendly Butter Made from Cardoon in the Bay Area”

SAN JOSE, Calif. — There’s something fresh at Berkeley’s Starter Bakery besides the bread and croissants, and owner Brian Wood says it’s a key ingredient.

“Butter is a critical part of croissants. For croissants, it’s really adding texture. It’s adding to the flaky characteristics of the crescent, and it’s adding flavor,” Wood explains.

But the butter he’s mixing into the recipe today, is different.

“It does look like butter. It’s it behaves a lot like butter. It has a nice plasticity to it has a nice flexibility to it,” he says.

The large, square layer of buttery fat that Brian is about to add to a run of his delicate croissants is actually a first of its kind. It’s not animal-based or plant-based, but created from a process using carbon.

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To help understand the science, CEO Kathleen Alexander took us behind the scenes at Savor Foods’ lab in San Jose.

She says the fats are created on the molecular level from captured carbons like CO2 and green hydrogen, or methane and water.

“Go to the core of it and think about, well, what is food? Food is molecules. Those molecules take the form of carbohydrates, of proteins, of fats. Those are made up of atoms, things like carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. What if you could go find sources of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen and build those up into these molecules that our bodies need for energy? What if you could do that? She explains.

While the process and sources are proprietary, she points to operations like methane capture at dairies in the Central Valley. But where the end goal there is to produce energy he end goal of Savor is producing fats that can be turned into foods.

“And so that was really the question here is we have much more efficient ways of converting energy from one form to another. Could we move the food system closer to the energy system and really leverage some of the gains that we’ve had in other sectors of the economy,” she says.

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And they say interest in the process is building, including several Michelin starred restaurants. With a main draw being flavor and sustainability.

Back at Starter Bakery, Brian Wood is doing the final shaping on a tray of croissants, baked with sustainable Savor butter.

“We put a lot of thought into that here with the ingredients that we source and add. And I think we’re probably on the forefront of some pretty interesting things,” says Wood.

Rising croissants, flavored with a rising level of innovation.

While Savor Foods is starting with butter, they believe the molecular process can be used produce a variety of foods in the future.