Savor: “Our Technology’s Versatility Enables Infinite Customization of Fatty Acid Profiles” – vegconomist

Savor is a pioneering company in the alt-fat space, creating sustainable and customizable fats, oils, and butter by directly converting carbon gases into pure fat molecules.

Pierre Coeurdeuil manages Strategic Partnerships at Savor, and works with world-class chefs, bakers and brands to bring innovative, highly sustainable and customizable fats, oils and butter to market. Prior to Savor, he orchestrated launch for a world-first kind of plant-based cheese, was an advisor to food and beverage CEOs in the San Francisco Bay Area, and co-founded dessert manufacturer Petit Pot. Pierre is originally a food manufacturing engineer and emigrated from France in the early 2010s.

In this interview, Pierre discusses Savor’s groundbreaking technology, the company’s mission to revolutionize fat production, and the collaborative efforts driving innovation in the industry.

Can you tell us a bit about Savor and your mission in the alt-fat space?

Savor represents a revolutionary breakthrough in sustainable food production, creating pure, versatile fats directly from carbon without conventional agriculture. Founded in 2022, we have produced the world’s first fats molecularly constructed from point-captured carbon dioxide (CO₂), green hydrogen (GH₂), and methane (CH₄). Our proprietary process fundamentally reimagines food production by transforming the most basic building blocks of life—carbon gases like CO₂ and methane—directly into complete fat molecules through controlled heat and pressure.

This direct carbon-to-fat conversion bypasses the lengthy, resource-intensive agricultural cycle entirely, drastically reducing the land, water and agricultural inputs required to make conventional fats. Our technology’s versatility enables infinite customization of fatty acid profiles, allowing us to create everything from incredibly dairy-like butter to sustainable palm oil alternatives. Our carbon-based butter performs like cow’s butter in applications including croissants and baking, with a taste so authentic that it’s practically indistinguishable from what people know and love.

We celebrated our commercial launch in March, marking three years of intensive research, development, and regulatory approval, and we have secured partnerships with prestigious establishments like Michelin-starred SingleThread and ONE65, and beloved bakeries like Jane the Bakery in the San Francisco Bay Area. Additionally, large CPG companies are working on ingredient innovation projects leveraging our unique customizable fat capabilities. We also opened a 25,000-square-foot pilot production facility in Batavia, Illinois, with an initial capacity to produce metric tons of fat starting this year.

How does your CO₂-based process work, and what makes it unique in the industry? 

Savor turns carbon, hydrogen and oxygen into functional fats through a process that combines heat and pressure. The underlying process makes use of some of the most ancient chemistry on the planet.

To truly tell this origin story, we have to go back about 3.5 billion years to the bottom of the oceans on what scientists call pre-biotic earth. This is before life, before cells, before DNA. The ocean floor was rich with hydrothermal vents, where hot hydrogen gas escaped from the earth’s crust and mixed with dissolved carbon and oxygen on mineral surfaces.

Under these conditions, the earth’s first organic molecules were created, and among these were a special class of molecules: fatty acids. Fatty acids are special because their unique structure, with one part being repellant to water and one part being attracted to it, causes them to self-assemble into membranes and even spheres. And it is believed that these thermal conditions and the formation of these first organic molecules ultimately created the conditions that gave rise to life itself on our planet. And that’s the starting point for Savor. We recreate these conditions to produce the same fatty acids that earth created before the first organisms evolved.

The first commercial product that you launched is butter. What made the company choose to start with that application?

Of all the conventional fats to launch first, we chose butter for a simple reason: it’s very challenging. With chemically complex milkfats and a precise melting profile, butter leaves no room for error. Butter is also culturally significant and spans countless culinary applications from sweet to savory. By reimagining this demanding ingredient, we wanted to establish a baseline for how more sustainable fats can be made and enjoyed.

How did working with chefs and foodservice operators shape your go-to-market approach for the butter?

Savor first began working with chefs in mid-2023, when our earliest butter alternative prototypes were finally ready to meet the real world. We knew from the start: food choices are cultural choices. And chefs are the keepers and creators of food culture. If we were serious about changing what ends up on plates, we had to start with the people who shape what’s possible in the kitchen.

The San Francisco Bay Area’s chef and restaurant community welcomed us in with curiosity and high standards. They tasted, tested, grilled, emulsified, baked, and seared—and gave us the feedback only professionals can. Their input helped us refine not only our butter, but our entire approach to flavor, texture, and performance. By early 2024, chefs like Juan Contreras of Michelin-starred Atelier Crenn came on board. Their involvement marked the beginning of deeper collaborations that shaped our R&D and culminated in our commercial launch.

These chefs weren’t just testers—they’ve been co-creators of the future we’re building.

How did the collaboration between Savor, Thimus, and Alamance Foods come about? What were each partner’s main goals in the project?

The collaboration started through a combination of existing partnerships and serendipitous timing. Alamance Foods and Thimus had already been working together for six months, with Thimus’s solution helping Alamance accelerate new product development and formulation. The partnership with Savor emerged at Expo West in March, when I had the opportunity to meet both Mohan Valluri, Executive VP of Alamance Foods, and Mario Ubiali, CEO of Thimus, at Alamance’s booth.

Mario, who was familiar with Savor’s work, made the introduction, and the synergy was apparent. Mohan had long envisioned creating a carbon-neutral whipped topping as a world-first innovation. After testing various novel proteins, he identified fat as the missing component—exactly what Savor could provide. With Mohan’s leadership driving the initiative, our three companies committed to presenting a joint innovation project at Future Food Tech, despite having only three weeks to prepare.

The result of that sprint was our presentation at FFT Chicago on June 2. Each partner brought distinct objectives to the project. Alamance aimed to demonstrate how a legacy manufacturer could innovate with speed and agility, leveraging their market position and distribution capabilities to potentially deploy innovations across every grocery store and café in the US.

For Thimus and Savor, the newer companies in the partnership, the goals were to accelerate this joint project while increasing industry awareness of our respective technologies and products. Our initial proof of concept, developed in record time, serves as a compelling MVP. The product already performs comparably to both palm-oil-based and dairy-based whipped creams. Thimus’s tasting analysis of 54 participants revealed promising results, with the Savor based whipped topping showing superior aftertaste preference compared to palm oil—a critical factor in repurchase intent.

This first test has established a clear roadmap for rapid improvement through fine-tuning both Savor’s fat technology and Alamance’s formulation, with Thimus’s platform enabling faster iteration cycles.

How does this type of sensory data influence your internal R&D and iteration process?

The sensory data from Thimus helps both Alamance and Savor “fail fast” and iterate quickly: instead of relying on large and often slow tasting panels (sometimes relying on trained professional tasters, used to detecting very subtle changes in formulations or taste), these tests can both be faster, easier to organize, and evaluate not only the pleasure given by a food product (look and taste), but an additional range of emotions (aftertaste, preference, intensity of the emotion), all without bias because it is read directly as brain signals.

For the purpose of commercial product development, this data is both robust enough and with enough definition for quick, agile, and reproducible decisions to keep, abandon, or improve on a new product.

Are you currently working on any other product types or functionalities?

We have developed multiple prototypes that replicate the functional properties of milkfat, cocoa butter, some palm oil products, lard, beef tallow, and liquid vegetable oils.