US food-tech start-up Savor has announced the commercial launch of its vegan butter, made without animal or plant ingredients, instead constructed directly from carbon dioxide.

The launch – claimed to be the world’s first launch of fats molecularly constructed from point-captured CO2, green hydrogen and methane – follows several years of intense R&D, culinary innovation, production scale-up and regulatory assessments from the California-headquartered company.

Savor celebrated its achievements this month with special dinners in San Francisco and New York City, US, where guests were among the first in the world to try its butter replacement ingredient. Select restaurants like Michelin-starred SingleThread and One65, and bakeries including Jane the Bakery are set to be among Savor’s first customers this year.

Kathleen Alexander, co-founder and CEO of Savor, said: “Savor was founded to find the most sustainable way to feed humanity. Truly sustainable solutions can’t just reduce our environmental footprint, they have to be affordable, approachable and craveable.”

She said that Savor’s proprietary technology is the industry’s “only technology with the potential to replace palm oil and other widely used fats with a very low-carbon equivalent, within the next decade”.

“Savor's method of producing fats and oils offers differentiated scalability and versatility, allowing us to create rich, delicious ingredients while reaching price parity with conventional fats more rapidly,” Alexander explained.

Check out The Plant Base's feature on butter and spread innovations here, featuring an interview with Savor's CEO Kathleen Alexander!

The technology has attracted the attention of multinational consumer packaged goods companies, Savor said, whose R&D teams are working on ingredient innovation projects that can leverage the start-up’s ability to create customisable fats and oils. The company is actively negotiating joint development agreements with some of the partners, who Savor said have been ‘particularly impressed’ by the versatility and tunability of fatty acid profiles produced by Savor’s platform.

The commercial launch follows a series of recent milestones for Savor, including the achievement of self-affirmed GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) designation from the FDA, allowing legal sales in the US market.