palm-oil-alternative
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Shiru Built an "Amazon for Proteins" - and It Wants to Kill Palm Oil
A protein biochemist got tired of ingredient hunts that take 15 years. So she built a search engine for nature's proteins - and its first product is a fat that behaves like butter without the palm oil.
Shannon Nangle
Shannon Nangle is a microbe-wrangling scientist turned CEO who co-founded Circe Bioscience to make fats, oils, and even chocolate out of thin air. Her company feeds carbon dioxide, water, and electricity to engineered microbes that grow like plants and excrete valuable molecules, producing food and industrial ingredients in a carbon-negative way. Spun out of Harvard's Wyss Institute in 2021, Circe made what it calls the world's first gas-fermentation-derived chocolate and has raised over $17 million to scale a manufacturing process Nangle spent six years building.
Savor
Savor is a San Jose food-tech company making real fats - butter, oils, cocoa-butter analogues - from carbon, hydrogen and oxygen instead of cows, palms or coconuts. Backed by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, it commercialised its first carbon-derived butter in 2025.