Episode 86: Savor and the science of building a better butter

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. 

This week more Earth Month of Action! This week we’re diving into our food system one of the biggest places you can make personal change and we tend to think ONLY about eating less meat when we think about changing our eating habits and to be clear, that is, in fact, one of the biggest personal climate actions you can take especially cutting out red meat and cow-based dairy 

But this week we’re looking at a different part of the food supply that you may not have considered yet. 

Kathleen 

Yeah, I'm so excited to be here. So I'm Kathleen Alexander. I am co-founder and CEO of Savor. And we are working on what we like to say is like transforming how fats and oils are made for food.

Molly Wood 

I love this because I am sort of spending earth month talking about things that people can actually do and change. And food is such a thing that I think people are not always aware of and aren't quite sure how to do and change. And, and this is, and fats and oils are such a, such a, like a hidden minefield, let's say, how did you come to this solution? Why do you think of it as a climate solution?

Kathleen 

Mm-hmm.

Kathleen 

Yeah.

Molly Wood

you know, what made you want to tackle this problem?

Kathleen

That is such a fun question because I definitely did not come to the, I would say a lot of people in the protein space or maybe other kind of corners of the food system come to it from more of like a bottom up approach around something related to animal rights or these things that we all hear about, like how inefficient animal agriculture is. Whereas for me actually working in the food system and on fats and oils specifically was really a top down journey where I spent, I've spent kind of my whole career excited about and working in the intersection of like sustainability and technology and never on the food system actually. I think maybe similar to a lot of people, know, like not fully understanding all of the ways in which what I could, you know, how I can make a difference besides that, you know, like I kind of have driven in on this career path of like trying to use my job as that as the lever to to have an impact on sustainability. But a couple of years ago I was sort of taking a step back from what I had been working on and got really interested in the food system as this just incredibly high leverage mode in which we could have impact on climate and sustainability. And in this kind of like top-down search and learning about the food system, fats and oils actually kind of popped out as a unique macronutrient that isn't getting the same amount of attention that, for example, proteins are, but actually have an even larger environmental footprint and where the solution space available to us actually looks a little different than something like proteins or carbohydrates. And so it was this like kind of top-down, how do I have impact? Where are the opportunities there that brought me to fats? Over the years I have then had to of course like fall in love with fats and you know find all of the amazing ways that it turns out yes.

Molly Wood 

Girl, aren't we all in love with fats?

So what was it about fats and oils? Like you said, you know, there were, I love the story of the entrepreneur who goes looking for a solution and finds like a lot of different options and lands on something maybe unexpected. What was it that just stood out?

Kathleen 

Yeah, yeah, there's the sort of sustainability and impact side of the FATS equation. So they do just kind of.

can account for on the order of seven to 8 % of global greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed specifically to the production of calories from fat. And so there was like this, okay, well, actually this is a really big problem. And then from the sort of technical and solution space, fats actually have a pretty interesting just like molecular structure. So if you go and you like look down at molecules that make up, that are proteins, you look at molecules that make up carbohydrates.

and sugar as you look at molecules that make up fats. Fats are actually just a lot easier to make in terms from like a, there are a couple of different metrics you could use, but for many of those fats are actually pretty simple. And so that was kind of one of the things that sort of blew fats open as a solution space for us was just like your ability to solve this problem is a lot more tractable than a protein or a sugar.

Molly Wood 

Huh, so if you're trying to, it's way easier to grow a fat, let's say, than it is to grow like a petri meat or some sort of meat replacement, is that fair?

Kathleen

Mmm.

That for, I would say, our approach to making fats, which is actually not really a growth process. We have this kind of molecular construction process where we're actually going and like grabbing atoms, grabbing carbon, grabbing hydrogen and oxygen and kind of building those up into fat molecules. Your ability to do that with a fat is just substantially, it's substantially easier than it would be with a protein.

Molly Wood

Got it. Okay, and then define fats. Are you specifically talking about animal fats? Are you also talking about kind of vegetable fats? Like what are all the, what's the universe of things you can potentially replace?

Kathleen 

We are working actually across the whole landscape of fats and oils. So that includes animal fats, it also includes vegetable fats and things that look like kind of a combination of the two. So fats are essentially these molecules called triglycerides, which are this like.

Molly Wood (05:28.193)

which we may all be familiar with from our heart reports.

Kathleen (05:31.056)

Exactly. Yeah. It's funny. You tell people like, well, we make triglycerides and they're like, wait, aren't those bad? Like, isn't that what I get? You know, we get measured for and it's like, actually that's also just the fat you eat. That's the name of that molecule. but it's made up of this like glycerol backbone and then these three different fatty acids. And the set of different fatty acids in a fat are what dictate its properties. And so our kind of solution platform is really about being able to tune those properties of a fat.

And that's what's been able to allow us to make fats that really functionally get you the same performance you would want to see in a beef tallow, in a lard, in a milk fat or butter, as well as the properties you would want to see in a confectionary fat like a cocoa butter, palm oil.

Molly Wood 

I'm gonna get to your butter replacement and an on-air taste test in a minute, but let's talk more about the process. Because if you go to your website, you see this, like we're making fats from carbon. And I just, that's what you gotta tell us about. How do you do that?

Kathleen 

Yay.

Kathleen

Yes.

Kathleen

Yes, this this kind of phrase that I use sometimes about like molecular construction is really what's underlying the overall process. And it's actually not so different than what happens today in agriculture, right? Like right now, if you want to make a fat, the typical way to do this is to like plant a plant that's going to produce a fat molecule for you. like a soybean or an oil palm tree, you plant that and that plant inside its body is going to like go pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It's gonna extract hydrogen from water and then it's gonna take apart those atoms, the carbon dioxide, the water, and it's gonna reassemble them into these new molecules, whether again, it's a carbohydrate or protein or a fat. And we actually do that very same thing where we start with carbon dioxide and water or we can actually also start with methane as a source of carbon.

kind of first assemble those into fat molecules just by building them up thermochemically. So it's pretty similar in terms of like the inputs and outputs to how, you know, where food comes from today, just not happening kind of in a biological system. And one of the things that's actually kind of fun and exciting about that is that the underlying the underlying sort of chemistry that we are leveraging here is actually.

Kathleen 

some of the most ancient organic chemistry that ever existed on this planet. So this is kind of this really fun story where if you go back like about three and a half billion years on this planet, you've like passed like when cells existed, like this is before biology, this is before DNA. But if you go down to kind of like the bottom of the ocean and you're...

like in this sort of like pressurized condition that you have at the bottom of the ocean, there are these like hydrothermal vents where hot hydrogen can escape into this like pressurized ocean environment. And those conditions actually were what gave rise to like the very first organic molecules. Some of those organic molecules being fatty acids and that's actually, that's the same chemistry like this like, you know, pressure, temperature, heat, all of that is what enables us to make facts with our process outside of biological systems. So there's even like a book, it's got this professor in the UK who we've met, wrote a book called Transformer, where he talks about this like ancient chemistry that like may have given rise to life itself. And it's kind of fun that that is like sort of what we're, you know, that is like what we're leveraging here, which is yeah, an exciting little story.

Molly Wood 

That is awesome. Also, I'm trying to figure out how the Meg fits into this story. know there's a way. You never know when the Megalodon is gonna pop up on this podcast. So what kinds of fats can you make and are you making?

Kathleen 

Exactly, exactly.

Kathleen

Yeah, so as we said, we can make this whole kind of platform of fats and oils and this question as a result of that when you have like a startup You have this question of like, okay. Well, where do we start? have limited resources we've got to build a company here and We are actually kind of what you will see from us Most often first and kind of most publicly facing is that we have worked really hard to make a very high-performing butter They so what goes into that butter is this first this very high-performing milk fat which is what is kind of core that comes out of our process and then we have to formulate that to turn it into a butter. Butter is kind of an exciting place to start because it's something that has, I sometimes like to say this, it's like the most charismatic of the fats, right? So here you are.

Molly Wood 

It's a charismatic megafauna in the fat world.

Kathleen 

Right? Exactly. Like here you are and you're like a fat company and you know it's I would say in terms of things that are like really gonna get people excited where you have like a cult following I would say butter is a pretty good one and right?

Molly Wood 

You

Molly Wood

People get hardcore about butter, it's very true.

Kathleen

Exactly. So on the one hand, the bar is high. There's a lot of people you got to convert from various, you know, butter religions and factions. But at the same time, there it's something that people care about and something people can get excited about, something where people can really actually identify with performance on. So, for example, both on like having a butter just like plain on bread, right? Like you can judge that experience yourself and also being able to see like, wow, this butter.

really can make an amazing croissant, really can make an amazing pie crust. And you can personally judge that. Whereas if you have, for example, a replacement palm oil or replacement vegetable oil, for me, at least it's harder as a consumer to really see beyond that the source is different, like, is, I getting like true functionality from this fat? And so that's been kind of a fun place for butter to be a starting point for us to really kind of prove out with the very best, you know, especially we focused on pastry chefs in the world.

and chocolatiers, like if these folks can get excited about the butter we're making and can stand by it, then I think that that, you know, even the hardest core of butter enthusiasts out there could get excited too.

Molly Wood 

So when you say exciting, has it also been a little terrifying? Like how long did it take to get the butter right before you were like, okay, we're calling in the pastry chefs.

Kathleen

That is such a good question. It has definitely been a very vulnerable process. And for us, and terrifying is probably a good word to have used there, for better or for worse,

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Kathleen 

because our company sort of spans the energy sector and the food sector. And we started out with a team that was pretty heavy on the physical sciences and not as experienced in food. And the result of that was that pretty early on we did start.

getting external feedback on the fats that we were making and trying to, and kind of just building this muscle of getting feedback on, know, is this as good as what you use right now? Is it, you know, what could it, where are the properties where it's falling short? What do you like? What do you not like? So I would say that terror was like a little bit...

muted by having the opportunity to have lots of experience kind of engaging with folks. But certainly when you have, again, some of the best pastry chefs in the world now trying this stuff, think the bar is quite high. fortunately, I think we have just been repeatedly impressed and grateful for the patience and excitement that we have seen from many of those partners where they, in addition,

It is not true that the very first butter that all of these chefs received met their expectations of something that they would put on their menu. But I think they saw the opportunity in terms of the true sustainability win, the versatility of the platform, and then were willing to really lean in with us and help us get to that bar.

Molly Wood 

So, and we should clarify now, like this is just somewhat newly in market commercially. The butter product was launched March 20th.

Kathleen 

Yeah, exactly. So we are just in this very early stage of our launch where we are producing our butter in certified facilities where it can then be sold as a result of that. What you'll actually see from us is first we're doing a number of just kind of activations over the next couple of months where you'll be able to

People out in the world will be able to come try our butter and a cuisson, try our butter and chocolates. And then later in the summer is when it will actually start showing up on menus at places like Single Thread up in Healdsburg.

But we have a couple of partners here in the Bay Area, especially there's one partner we love, Jane the Baker, who makes these amazing croissants with our butter, another partner, 165, that has a exactly, you've got the box there, chocolatier partner for us. And we felt like...

just in terms of accessibility, dedicating some of our product early on to these activation events where really a way broader swath of people could come kind of engage and try for themselves felt like a really good use of our resources on our way to also, of course, being on menus at some of the most fun restaurants to get to go try as well.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, totally. many, before I try the chocolate, how many fancy restaurants have you eaten at lately as you explore all these partnerships? Well played, by the way. Top-down solution. Well played.

Kathleen 

you

Kathleen 

Exactly, yes. yeah, it has been a new world to participate in this past year, meeting kind of really these just highest tier, most impressive culinary partners in the world. And I think we're, yeah, we're so grateful for those partnerships. I think, but also look forward to being able to continue to scale and get down to even more accessible locations in the coming years.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back ok first I know, I know, I hit you with like super high-end chocolates and barely available croissants but that doesn’t mean you can’t start looking for more sustainable fats and oils NOW and get comfortable with the idea of butter replacement, right? 

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Kathleen Alexander CEO of Savor about using science to create a better butter.  

Molly Wood 

I wanna talk more about the process and the adoption, the market risk part of things, but I do, you were nice enough to messenger me some of the chocolates, which I have not tried yet. So we are, I know, so I have been saving them for this, but I mean, they are really, so, you're saying like you're launching with some pretty high-end partners to start with, and these are like, I mean, these are art chocolates.

Kathleen 

wow, okay. Moment of truth.

Molly Wood

Right, they have the beautiful painting on them. Don't worry, those of you who are listening, there's a social video available for you. Okay, so as I try a bonbon, a bonbon, what am I looking for? You know, texture-wise, taste-wise, like what might be the tip-offs here?

Kathleen 

Mm-hmm.

Kathleen 

Ideally, this is going to be like just an amazing chocolate. that, like if we've done our job, that's the experience that you'll have is like, this is a very good chocolate.

Molly Wood 

Ideally nothing.

Molly Wood 

going in. this is a very good chocolate. Okay, so there is no butter in this chocolate. Like, sorry, animal butter.

Kathleen 

All right.

There is no, that's a vegan chocolate. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, so that ganache has our milk fat in it.

Molly Wood 

Okay, so this is the worst radio in the world. I know you all can hear me chewing and making little slurpy noises. The ganache in particular has like, the key, feels like the thing that is often missing with me in vegan foods is the oily mouth feel, like the fat. I know this is very obvious and on the nose, because what you're making is a fat, but this feels fatty. And that feels like the entire

Kathleen 

Yeah.

Molly Wood 

Like you have one job and it's to make fatty fat.

Kathleen 

Yeah, to make that mouth feel. I'm glad you used the technical term. I was so excited when I learned, when I started learning about how we characterize fats in food and that you find all of these like very fun measurements you have to do like things like mouth feel. But it is, it's.

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood

But it's real.

Kathleen 

It's real and it's so important actually to like your satiety experience, your, that your like sensory and pleasure experience. When we first started making chocolates with these partners, I like was still, but was like very obsessed with how good they were and was like constantly telling people to eat these chocolates and they're so good. And then, but I started to question myself cause I, I had been vegan at different times in my life and I'm not currently. And I was like, maybe just maybe vegan, maybe this is just the chocolate.

Molly Wood 

It's so good.

Kathleen 

Maybe I'm giving us too much credit here. But then I went and I ate a bunch of vegan chocolates and I was like, actually no, these are way better.

Molly Wood 

No, those are, yep, it is in my opinion indistinguishable and I'm not by any means a chocolate expert. I like someday hope to try the croissant to compare, but I would not, I would a hundred percent not know the difference and confidently just serve that and not expect anybody to be like, is this vegan chocolate? Cause sometimes you really can't, when you can tell, you can tell.

Kathleen 

I totally agree. And that was early on when we were figuring out how to enter the market. The kind of value proposition of like making vegan foods better was kind of was one of the core things to what we were thinking through as we.

as we kind of look at scaling and have matured as a company, that's still something that's really important, but actually we sort of see it as just something you kind of get for free when you replace as much of the fats and oils footprint as you can, including obviously the tropical oils being a really big one as well.

Molly Wood

Right. So does that mean you're not necessarily, this is a great segue into adoption and marketing. Does that mean you're not necessarily calling these vegan as their big selling point?

Kathleen

Mm.

Kathleen

Honestly, for most of the partners that we're working with.

they're more interested in sort of like the not and the like allergen free aspect of it as opposed to specific. mean, certainly there are some partners where it being vegan is one of the things that is core to their mission. But I would say for a lot of partners, it's more about, you know, in the near term being allergen free or even for like our large brand partners, there's like supply chain and certainly sustainability aspects to to the value proposition. But the vegan part of it has

It's actually one of these things, we had these dinners as you know, and it was like halfway through at some point that someone was like, oh wait, is this vegan? Like, it just hadn't even occurred to them that that was like part of what was gonna be true about the food that we were serving.

Molly Wood

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, totally. So you brought up tropical oils. And before we talk much more about the process, I do want to say I think that's something people are also not very familiar with. So talk about the climate impact. We've certainly talked about dairy and butter and cheese being kind of like liquid meat. But there's this whole other side of fats and oils that feel they come from plants. How bad could they be? And we're vaguely aware that they're bad. But tell us how bad.

Kathleen

Yes, that has actually been one of the kind of important pieces of our sustainability story is that the transition, for example, in the protein space from meat to plant-based requires for the most part using tropical oils, whether it's coconut oil or in some cases palm oil. And...

You have certainly moved the needle in doing some of that transition, but there is so much work still to go and a big piece of it is because of where the fats are coming from in those formulations. So if you look at that, said like seven to 8 % of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to fat calorie production. About half of that is actually plant oils. And a big chunk of that is related to plant oil.

specifically in the tropics. So that includes palm oil that actually a big piece of that is soy oil in places like Brazil as well. And so the contributions specifically to these tropical oils are a big piece of that is actually about land use change. And so the deforestation, whether it happens today or five years ago or 20 years ago.

it can get accounted slightly differently in terms of like what you see in a register of what the emissions impact is associated with different fats and oils, but that.

kind of land use, kind of land clearing and agricultural land utilization in the tropics is a huge driver for climate change and global emissions, as well as course biodiversity loss. And so for us being able to come up with a solution where we can produce fats that perform functionally, that meet the functional needs of those tropical oils, because they are incredibly functional, and

Kathleen 

and they just only grow in this very special part, these very special parts of the world, if we can meet those functional needs with our technology where we need just what is essentially a zero land footprint, a zero water footprint, like a very low emissions footprint, if we can meet...

know, the functional needs on with so much less intensity in terms of production. The opportunity there is just enormous in our view, and that is the opportunity from saving, you know, current primary forests from future deforestation. And even for us, the opportunity to look at, OK, if we can replace this much palm oil or soil oil production with our process, could we rewild or reforest those lands that we have already sacked?

and that is such a motivating factor for our work.

Molly Wood 

I think of that part of this as, and frankly, the animal fats too, in many ways, as not only a climate solution, but an adaptation and resilience solution. On a recent episode, we talked about coffee and how the price of coffee keeps going up in part because the growing environments are so much more stressed. And when I think about food that we make, it's...

Kathleen

Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood

versus the way that we think about growing food, that to me feels like future-proofing our survival.

Kathleen

100%. When we talk about like what is awesome or what is exciting about what we're doing, the kind of dimension of that that different that kind of lines up for different people can change. For some people it's about animal rights. For some people it's about sustainability. For some people it's about, my god these fats just taste so good. But also I think for a lot of people and maybe increasingly should be, this kind of paradigm shift in how we think of feeding ourselves and how we think of our role and relationship to this planet is incredibly, I would say, powerful for this technology in terms of certainly being able to adapt to a climate changing planet in 100 years, having a new way of making food is important, but also being able to go beyond this planet. We don't currently have land use efficient ways of feeding ourselves that really enable, I think, future generations of our species to go further. And that we see this technology as being one piece of that broader equation about who we are in the universe.

Molly Wood

I want to fast, I just want a time machine to go be having your chocolates on the spaceship.

Kathleen

I can't wait. Let's definitely do that.

Molly Wood

I know, like the sci-fi part of this is just, catnip. Okay, so let's talk quickly about the process because sometimes when people hear mentions of heat and pressure, they think that sure does sound energy intensive, but you've also mentioned this being a much lower emission process. talk about, certainly comparatively I'm sure it is, but how are you making it as sustainable as possible?

Kathleen

Yeah, we actually kind of interrogated this pretty thoroughly before we ever...

founded Savor. There's a paper we published in Nature Sustainability called Food Without Agriculture, where we actually, this was part of that like top-down search I mentioned at the beginning, where we were looking across all of the different types of food, that's proteins, carbohydrates, and fats, and looking at all of the different ways that you could make those food molecules without agriculture. And the second half of that paper actually drills down in specifically to looking at fats and oils and the impact of associated with making those with sort of this like molecular construction, thermochemical process that we have that, you know, ultimately became the thing that SAVER is commercializing and compared that directly to agriculture, not even animal fats, but specifically soy and palm. And so there's maybe like a little bit of foreshadowing in that paper that was kind of part of us like coming to this conclusion of like, wow, if we could just do, if we could do one thing on this list, it would be, you know, commercializing this new way of making fats and oils. But the one of the kind of assumption challenging or like non-intuitive conclusions from that paper were that, we kind of really looked across, I told you, we need a source of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen to make these fats. And then we do need energy to drive the process. And you can get that, you know, from a coal power plant, from a nuclear power plant, you can get it from the U.S. grid, you could get it from totally clean energy. And we kind of swept the parameters of what are all the sources that I could get carbon, whether it's from air captured CO2 all the way to

Kathleen 

you know, coal, and what are all the ways I could get energy to drive this process? And then we mapped out across all of those, what is the life cycle emissions associated with making food, you know, with under those different scenarios? So carbon from coal, power from coal, carbon from natural gas, power from the grid, carbon from captured CO2, renewable power. What does that map look like? And how does that compare to agricultural production today where we have fertilizer production?

and fossil fuel usage and land use, among other things. And the, again, the kind of non-intuitive and fascinating conclusion from this was that if you use coal...

to get your carbon and you use energy from a coal-fired power plant in order to build up fats and oils, that has about the same carbon intensity as agriculture today. So if you can do anything less carbon intensive than a coal-fired power plant and coal-based carbon, then you have already moved the needle substantially. And so it really is, it's that whole equation of life cycle emissions

that goes into agricultural production today that makes it so intensive that actually a process like ours, where we have such a higher energy and carbon utilization efficiency than you have in agriculture, that you're really able to unlock true emissions reductions in ways that again are somewhat not intuitive when you're like, wait, but this is this kind of big intensive process. And what you just don't account for is that actually agriculture today, if you look at

like the energy from the sun's photons that make it into your food, it's like a sub 1 % efficient process. So you like cover half the land on this planet with like essentially a solar panel, right? That is like half, you know, less than 1 % efficient. And so that was sort of like this jumping off point for like, we could really do better.

Molly Wood

Right. So that even if I'm going to simplify that a little bit so that even if you have and I think we find this with agriculture in general, even if you have a relatively even if you did it in the most energy intensive way, it sounds like you're saying it's still orders of magnitude better given all of the factors that go in. And also, you can do it in an energy efficient way, or at least you could. You can certainly use renewable energy whenever possible.

Kathleen

Exactly. mean, we so we did this map of like, what are all of the ways in which you can do this in terms of the space that we operate in and like project our models for we happen to be a mission driven company. And so we specifically are focused on the part of that map where we're able to have the biggest impact. And that's a mixture of, you know, cost and emissions that go into it. But we don't really find ourselves living in like the coal part of that map so much as but but but again, for these like questions around adaptation. We have some colleagues that like work kind of in some of the extremes of like, you know, understanding the survival of humanity under a bunch of different scenarios. And if they have a scenario they're looking at, that's like, what if the sun goes out? Which, you know, is like an extreme scenario, but how would we feed ourselves? well, in that case, like coal in a coal-fired power plant might be the least of our problems. And we'll have a lot of other problems, but.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, totally. God, I really want to hang out with the people at your company. I mean that absolutely sincerely, everyone. Where do you get the carbon generally?

Kathleen

you

Kathleen

Right now we have sort of two different sets of partners where we're sourcing our carbon feedstocks from.

One is from the sort of new and emerging power to liquids ecosystem where carbon is being captured typically from point sources. So existing cement plants, power plants, ethanol plants, things like that. Those are sources of CO2 and there are, there's this whole kind of industry that's emerging that's called Power to X, Power to Liquids. It's got a bunch of names, but where essentially green hydrogen is brought in to react with that captured carbon dioxide and make high value products.

kind of a customer in that ecosystem of those renewable molecules. That is kind of an up-and-coming ecosystem and is part of about like half of our feedstocks come from there. In addition to that, methane is a totally viable feedstock for our process and there's other and a kind of other track of the ecosystem that's using methane either from fossil sources or potentially from renewable sources. So that's again still kind of more of an emerging market.

And again, in those cases, it's a slightly more mature industry, but about half of our feedstocks come from those upstream suppliers as well.

Molly Wood 

Okay, then finally, let's talk about consumer adoption because that is, well, actually, it related to and before we even get to consumer adoption, there's the marketing part, which I want to ask you about. There's also the economics. So how does this pencil out in terms of, know, butter, is already a little too expensive right now.

Kathleen 

Yes. that butter, would say one of the other reasons to like have butter be an interesting go to market is that it is a little bit more expensive than some of the cheapest fats and oils. you know, butter is, you know, maybe right now say like 10 times more expensive than palm oil, but often it's like five times more expensive than palm oil. So that makes it an interesting sort of go to market opportunity for us. This specific kind of technical approach that we are scaling was selected really based on being able to compete on cost with those very cheapest commodities at world scale. So we wanted to find a solution where we could compete with, you know, one dollar per kilogram palm oil at world scale. We are not at world scale today. We have a little pilot plant, so we are not cost competitive there yet. But being able to see a path there was really critical to believing that this technology had the chance to make a difference. We sort of did it in the order of like

Okay, does the LCA work out? Okay, the economics get you there where you don't need a green premium in order to really achieve those gains? And then maybe because we didn't start out in the food industry lastly, we were like, and then does it taste good? But fortunately, all the energy has gone into that question, I would say for the last couple of years. so that.

Molly Wood 

Haha

Fortunately it does.

Kathleen 

that cost competitiveness proposition is huge for us as a kind of long-term solution in this space.

Molly Wood

Okay, and then finally, consumers, there's just weirdness about food, right? And so when you're trying to say this is a made food product, then people want to know what chemicals are in it and is that healthy? And is it GMO, which by the way, we're all going to need again, so we don't die. But there's, think that there's no question that it is a marketing challenge.

Kathleen

Yeah.

Kathleen

Yes, I would agree. There is no question that this is marketing challenge. This has been sort of existential for us as an idea even before we became a company. It was like, even if this process that we drew on paper works, even if you could have huge impact, even if you could compete on cost.

Molly Wood

Mm-hmm.

Kathleen

At the end of the day, this is food and people have a relationship with their food and they like to have agency over the foods that they eat. And is it ever going to be something that will be exciting to people? And that has actually just been an area where I have been surprised. I mean, a piece of that is us being thoughtful about asking, you know, doing a lot of consumer research, trying to understand the, really understand the food system at a deeper level. And one example of this is like, you see this word natural, right?

over the food system. And early on we were like, hmm, what's our relationship with that word? How do we fit in to a world that's looking for something called natural from its foods? you know, through, again, consumer research and really understanding this space more, we kind of came to understand that actually, like, when people say they want natural foods, what they really mean is they want, like, safe and ethical foods and foods that are good for them. Because this word natural is actually like a stand-in for meaning of whole body of things that are not, that are like, have slightly different meaning than actually what that true word natural means, right? Or like that it's like poorly defined. And so we have worked really hard to make sure that we can meet that underlying need around an ethical and safe and delicious and good for you and nutritive food source. I think you see something similar in this kind of questioning around that term, like ultra processed foods, where people are like,

Molly Wood 

Right.

Kathleen

there are these foods that are complex and they're good for me and then you did this thing where you processed them a bunch and now you took out maybe some of the things that were good for me and you made them, you you made them like less healthy and so there's this like questioning around that. Whereas for us, we're like, we actually sort of...

don't even like live in that world where we, because we started out with something very simple and then we built up something complex from it and we made these like complex foods that there was processing to get there in both cases, just like there's processing to get to like all the supplements in the supplement aisle that you like eat intentionally for health reasons. So anyway, there's been like a lot of a lot we've had to do to kind of decode, okay, here are the words that people use to say what they think they want and then what's underneath that and how do we address it and then how do we communicate about it.

Molly Wood 

Right.

Kathleen 

it.

Molly Wood 

OK, so where can people in the short term try this? Is there a bonbon for all? Or some?

Kathleen 

Yes, and towards the end of May, there is going to be an event actually at 165 where with some the next iteration.

Molly Wood 

Wait, say what 165 is for people who are not in the Bay Area.

Kathleen 

Oh yeah, 165 is a wonderful Michelin-starred restaurant in San Francisco that you should maybe just make a special trip to San Francisco to go try 165. And they're the chocolatier that we have been working with there. We're doing activation with them where you will be able to come and get some of our chocolates.

Molly Wood 

Amazing, wonderful. And then just look at it. Look at keep an eye out for stores near you eventually. The website is [savor.it](http://savor.it/) where you can keep up on things.

Kathleen 

for you.

Yes, yeah, savor it is how you can remember it.

Molly Wood 

Love it. Yep. Kathleen, thank you so much for the time. This is delightful.

Kathleen 

Thank you so much, Molly. This was super fun.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening.

That’s technically it for our Earth Month series but it’s certainly not the end of your opportunity to advocate for climate friendly behavior in your own life to make small changes that add up fast or to start your own company, why not? 

And actually next week I’m kicking off a new miniseries yes, I love a theme featuring an unexpected way to fund climate startups Kickstarter and a couple of the cool companies that got their start that way. 

Until then email me your thoughts and suggestions to in at everybody in the pool dot com and find all the latest episodes and more at everybody in the pool dot com, the website. And if you want to become a subscriber and get an ad free version of the show, hit the link in the description in your podcast app of choice.

Thank you to those of you who already have. Together, we CAN get this done! See you next week.