Hertz Fellow’s Tech Company Produces Food Without Farms

What if your next croissant were made with butter that didn’t come from cows or crops, but was instead built molecule by molecule, without the need for conventional agricultural inputs? That’s the promise behind Savor, a new food-tech startup led by Hertz Fellow Kathleen Alexander. Her team has created a new, sustainable way to make fats and oils—core ingredients in everything from pastries to sautéed vegetables—and their feedstock is carbon.

The technology, which recently cleared U.S. regulatory approval, offers a bold alternative to traditional food production: one that dramatically cuts carbon emissions, reduces water use and frees up land for reforestation. Now, Michelin-starred chefs are cooking with the company’s products and major food manufacturers are taking note.

Alexander, a materials scientist turned CEO, says her ultimate goal is to steer the global food system in a radical new direction.

“The huge promise of what we’re doing is really about changing the relationship that our species has with the land on our planet,” says Alexander. “Right now, we use half the habitable land on Earth to grow food for humans. With a process like what we’re building at Savor, we can drastically shrink that footprint.”

Growing up, Alexander cared deeply about sustainability and initially imagined a future in policy or nonprofits. But she soon realized that many of the most powerful tools for planetary change were technical and that to make a difference, she needed to understand how things work at the most fundamental level.

That drive led her to MIT, where she was introduced to materials science—a field she hadn’t heard of before college but quickly became enamored with.

“All of our hardest sustainability problems are materials problems,” she says now. “It felt like a high-leverage way to apply technical skills toward change.”

She pursued a Ph.D. in materials science and engineering and was awarded the Hertz Fellowship along the way. The fellowship offered her more than just financial support; it gave her the freedom to explore multiple research directions and a community of like-minded innovators.

When she graduated from MIT, Philip Welkhoff—a 2009 Hertz Fellow and the Senior Fellowship Interviewer at the Hertz Foundation—helped connect Alexander with opportunities to work in sustainability in the Bay Area. Within a few years, she had helped 2014 Hertz Fellow Ian McKay found Orca Sciences, a climate-focused research and development incubator.

Traditional incubators, Alexander notes, often pressure startup companies to pick a single idea quickly and scale it before fully evaluating whether it’s the best solution. Orca was designed to be different.

“We wanted a place with more rigor than academia, but more freedom than a startup accelerator,” she says. “Somewhere we could flesh out and test ideas before committing to building them.”

One of those ideas pursued by Orca Sciences was deceptively simple: What if we could create food without farms?

Food takes energy to grow, harvest and process, and Alexander and McKay have documented the inefficiency of our current food production system. In some parts of the system, especially when converting fossil energy into animal calories, overall efficiencies can fall below 1%. That means it can take more than 100 units of input energy to produce just one unit of edible energy. Much of that waste is because of the natural inefficiencies in agriculture—plants and animals require lots of energy just to stay alive.

The team at Orca Sciences began exploring whether there were more efficient ways to produce calories—particularly fats—by sidestepping agriculture altogether. They mapped out dozens of potential approaches before zeroing in on a technology that assembles food-grade fats and oils, molecule by molecule, from alternative energy sources. The concept—which combines carbon, hydrogen and oxygen under high pressure and heat—was promising on paper, and early lab tests proved it viable in practice. So, in 2022, Alexander and McKay spun the concept into its own venture: Savor.

“I’m really proud of what we’ve accomplished in our first three years,” says Alexander, now the CEO of the company. “It’s exciting to finally be able to go out into the world and talk about what we’re doing.”

In late 2024, Savor secured regulatory approval to sell its first products as food ingredients in the U.S. The company also launched a pilot production factory in Illinois, and its butter alternative is now being used by three-Michelin-star chefs, top chocolatiers and artisan bakeries.

But the strategy isn’t just to appeal to the culinary elite. Behind the scenes, Savor is partnering with major food brands, targeting processed food applications—where fats play a central role in taste and texture. The product can replace palm oil or coconut oil in confections, dairy alternatives and baked goods—offering not only a sustainability win, but also improved consistency and performance.

For Alexander, the goal of Savor is much bigger than sales. She’s working to ensure that land spared from agriculture is rewilded, not repurposed. She’s in talks with groups like the Rainforest Alliance about how to tie reforestation efforts directly to the company’s growth.

“Ultimately, I’m still that kid who wanted to make the planet better,” she says. “Savor is a way to meet human needs while giving nature some breathing room.”

Her path to creating Savor, she says, is a testament to the kind of slow, deep-thinking work that the Hertz Fellowship—and Hertz community—embrace. It’s part of why Alexander continues to give back to the foundation regularly as a monthly donor and with her time as a speaker at Hertz events for current in-school Hertz Fellows.