California-Based Start-up Claims Dairy-Free Lab Made Butter Tastes 'Like Real Thing' (image@Pixabay)

A California-based start-up came with a complex process of butter making. The company claims that the process eliminates the need for the animals while making its dairy-free alternative taste just as good.

Savor, the start-up company backed by Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates, has been experimenting on creating diary-free alternatives to ice-cream, cheese, and milk by utilising a thermochemical process that allows it to build fat molecules, creating chains of carbon dioxide, hydrogen and oxygen. It has now announced a new animal-free butter alternative.

While the world is grappling to reduce meat and dairy consumption, which is taken as a key method for humanity in reducing the environmental impact it has created, and livestock production has become a significant source of green house gases, Savor says its products will have a significantly lower carbon footprint than animal-based ones. It claims that the butter they make comes in at less than 0.8g CO2 equivalent per kg, whereas, the real unsalted butter with 80 percent fat has standard climate footprint of 16.9kg CO2 equivalent per kg.

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“We are currently pre-commercial and working through regulatory approval to be able to sell our butter. We are not expecting to be able to move forward with any kind of sales until at least 2025”, said Chief Executive of Savor, Kathleen Alexander.

While meat and dairy alternatives have become more and more popular in recent years, but some fall short in terms of flavour. Savor says the flavour of its butter is more exact.

“So far, we had informal taste panels with tens of people. We expect to perform a more formal panel as part of our commercialisation and scale-up efforts”, said Alexander.

The question now lies on if the buyers will take in such synthetic fats. Making people to give up their favourite dairy and meat items for “experimental” foods can be a real challenge.

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Advocating for the initiative through an online blog, Bill Gates wrote, “The idea of switching to lab-made fats and oils may seem strange at first. But their potential to significantly reduce our carbon footprint is immense. By harnessing proven technologies and processes, we get one step closer to achieving our climate goals. 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. And most important, it tastes really good – like the real thing, because chemically it is”.