Bill Gates Just Launched a Butter Made From the Same Chemistry as Diesel Fuel

"I wouldn't have been able to tell you that wasn't butter."

That's Bill Gates, in early 2024, in a YouTube video he published called "I couldn't believe that wasn't butter." He takes a bite, he chews, he smiles. And in two and a half minutes of video, he never once mentions vitamins, minerals, or nutrition. The entire conversation is about taste, scale, and market share. His exact phrase later in the clip is "mass adoption, mass market."

The product he's eating is called Savor. It contains no cream, no milk, no animal product, not even a plant. It is a "quote, butter" built from scratch in a factory using chemistry originally developed for the petroleum industry. And Gates just put ten million dollars into making sure it ends up in your food.

Who is actually behind this

Savor became its own company in 2022. Gates led the initial funding through his fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures. That fund is part of the Breakthrough Energy network, which has received $100 million from the BlackRock Foundation for its Catalyst climate program. Gates is also one of the largest funders of major global health organizations, the same organizations that have been pushing to reduce global meat consumption.

Here's the thing. This is the same man who happens to be the largest private farmland owner in the United States. He owns 242,000 acres across nineteen states. So he's buying up the land that produces real butter while funding the synthetic replacement. In my opinion, that is not a coincidence.

Mondelez International, the company behind Oreo, Cadbury, Ritz, and Toblerone, has not invested in Savor. But they are actively exploring how to use this synthetic fat inside their own products.

How they actually make it

To make Savor's "butter," they take carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas, heat them under pressure, and use a chemical reaction to build fat molecules from the ground up. The process is called Fischer-Tropsch synthesis. It was invented in the 1920s, but not for food. It was invented to convert gases into liquid fuel.

The largest application of this exact process in the world today is a plant in Secunda, South Africa, operated by a company called Sasol. That plant uses Fischer-Tropsch synthesis to produce 160,000 barrels of synthetic diesel, gasoline, and jet fuel every single day. It is the largest coal-to-liquids fuel plant on Earth. The same chemistry that fills tanker trucks with diesel is now being used to make what's going on your dinner plate.

And midway through Savor's process, what they have is a liquid slurry of hydrocarbons. Molecules that are chemically closer to gasoline than to anything you'd ever consider eating. It's only after further chemical reactions and oxygen injection that those hydrocarbons get converted into something edible.

Chemically identical is not nutritionally identical

Savor's main claim is that their fat is "chemically identical" to real dairy butter. At the level of a single fat molecule, that might technically be true. And the company will tell you that's enough.

But this is the trick. Real butter is a whole food. It contains things your body needs every day.

Real butter contains Vitamin A, which supports your immune system and your vision. It contains Vitamin D, which most people are already deficient in. It contains Vitamin K2, which directs calcium into your bones and out of your arteries. It contains butyrate, one of the primary fuel sources for your gut lining.

None of those nutrients are in Savor's product. They're calling this "butter," charging money for it, and serving it to people in restaurants. And it has none of the vitamins, none of the gut-supporting nutrients, and none of the fatty acids that make real butter one of the most nutritious foods on the planet.

Calling this product chemically identical to butter is like calling an empty house architecturally identical to a furnished one. Sure, the walls are the same. But everything that actually makes it worth living in is gone.

Nobody independent has ever tested it

You'd think a brand new food made from gas would be independently tested before it could be sold. That would be logical. Well, no.

Savor sells its product under something called a self-affirmed GRAS designation. GRAS stands for Generally Recognised as Safe. The key word is "self-affirmed." That means Savor itself, the company making the product, reviewed its own safety and decided it was fine. No mandatory FDA review. No independent testing.

The only people who have ever reviewed whether this product is safe to eat are the people who make money selling it. There are zero long-term studies on what happens when humans eat thermochemically synthesised fats every day for months or years. It has simply never been studied.

The American Butter Institute has formally lobbied the FDA to enforce the 1923 federal definition of butter, which states that butter must come exclusively from milk or cream. RFK Jr. and others have pushed to reform GRAS self-affirmation. No bill has been submitted yet.

The defense, and why it falls apart

Savor and its defenders will tell you the product is going to taste the same as real butter, and they are not wrong. When Savor launched a tasting event in San Francisco, over a hundred people lined up and supply ran out in the first hour. Michelin-star chefs have used it. People genuinely cannot tell the difference.

But that is exactly the problem. Taste was never the point of butter. Humans have eaten butter for ten thousand years, not because it tastes good, but because of what it does for your body. Strip out the nutrients and what you have left is the structure of butter without any of the substance.

Why this matters even if you avoid packaged food

You might be thinking this is a problem for fancy restaurants in San Francisco and nowhere else. That is not how this is set up.

Savor is not trying to sell you a tub of synthetic butter at the grocery store, where you can look at it, decide you don't want it, and put it back on the shelf. Their own CEO said the plan directly. They want consumers to see other brands' products on supermarket shelves that use Savor's fats as ingredients. You would never see the word Savor on any label.

Maybe I'm just a conspiracy theorist, but to me this indicates that, like Beyond Meat, the fake meat company whose share price has dropped over 99%, they know nobody would buy this willingly. So they're skipping the choice altogether.

If you eat out, this matters. The next time you order a steak cooked in butter, or grab eggs at a cafe, or pick up pastries from a bakery, the fat could be coming out of a Fischer-Tropsch reactor. Nobody is required to tell you.

This is the same playbook the food industry has run for a hundred years. They replaced tallow with seed oils. They replaced butter with margarine. Every single time, they told us it was progress. Every single time, decades later, we found out the industrial version was worse, and entire generations had already been damaged.

What I'm going to do is keep cooking with real butter, tallow, and ghee, the way I do every day. When I buy butter, I look for one ingredient on the back of the label: cream. That's it. If you eat out, ask what they cook with. The food industry has tried to replace real animal fats before. This time, you already know it's coming.