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Three companies have partnered on a project to create a first-of-its-kind whipping cream that does away with palm oil and relies on air, literally.
US food innovators Alamance Foods and Savor have teamed up with Italy-headquartered neuroscience firm Thimus in an effort that would expand the meaning of ‘airy’ when describing whipped cream.
At Future Food-Tech in Chicago this month (June 2-3), the three companies exhibited a prototype of a carbon-neutral whipped cream that eschews the need for palm oil, a highly problematic ingredient widely used in non-dairy versions.
It’s a combination of Alamance’s R&D, Savor’s gas-based fat, and Thimus’s sensory evaluation techniques, and it’s aiming straight for the $9B whipping cream market.
Whipped cream project part of Alamance’s innovation drive

Alamance has been around for over a century and is among the leading suppliers of whipped dairy products and alternatives in the US. It was one of the earliest producers of aerosol-based whipped toppings, and also makes non-dairy coffee creamers from oat, coconut and almond milk.
Thimus has offices in Italy, Canada, and the US, and uses EEG devices to assess people’s neurological reactions to different foods. It leverages the data to help companies develop successful products that meet consumer needs on a much faster timeline.
Savor, meanwhile, is a Californian food tech startup that makes animal- and plant-free fats that require no farmland. Backed by the likes of Bill Gates, it uses a thermochemical process involving point-captured carbon dioxide, green hydrogen, and methane.
“These gases are transformed into carbon chains called alkanes, which are then turned into fatty acids (the building blocks of fats and oils) and eventually into fats. This process is achieved through a controlled combination of temperature and pressure,” Savor co-founder and CEO Kathleen Alexander told Green Queen in March.
“The fatty acids are then purified and assembled to produce high-quality short-, medium- and long-chain triglycerides (SMLCT) to replace conventional fats in a variety of food applications – meaning that we can make substitutes for any existing fats and oils,” she added. “Where fluid oils are typically shorter-chain triglycerides and harder fats have more long-chain ones, we have a blueprint to make any of them.”
Among them will be the whipped cream Savor is working on with Thimus and Alamance, as part of the latter’s AFI Labs innovation space. “The companies partnered on a three-week sprint to create and test this innovative product,” the team explained on social media, suggesting that the success of the project has formed the base for a larger partnership.
Savor uses carbon to decarbonise the fat industry

At the food tech conference, taste-testers preferred the novel whipped topping over conventional palm-based formulations. “When you combine cutting-edge fat technology, world-class dairy expertise, and neuroscience-backed sensory evaluation, the possibilities for transforming our food system are endless,” said Savor.
Alamance had been searching for such a solution for years. “If anything were to happen from a supply chain resiliency standpoint, or a very drastic shift in consumer behaviour, we would want to develop and partner and always look at the forefront of what’s out there,” executive VP Mohan Valluri explained, as reported by the Triad Business Journal. “And that is really what got us thinking about this partnership.”
Palm oil is omnipresent in the CPG world because as a fat, it keeps for a long time, is solid at room temperature, has a high smoke point, has a neutral flavour, and is inexpensive. However, it does come at a cost to the planet.
Its production causes rampant deforestation in the planet’s tropical zones and has been directly linked to wildfires in Indonesia, and increasing demand is only making things worse. It’s a threat to wildlife and human rights, with Indigenous communities losing their lands and workers being exploited with poor conditions and pay.
The catch? Replacing it with other vegetable oils comes with its own problems, as doing so could have unintended climate consequences. It’s why many startups are using microbes and fermentation with a fraction of the emissions and land use to develop alternatives to the $70B palm oil industry, including NoPalm Ingredients, Clean Food Group, Palm-Alt, Äio, Time-Travelling Milkman, Kiverdi and C16 Biosciences (another Gates-backed company).

Savor, though, is ditching fermentation too, instead relying on thermochemistry and gases to develop fats that are “indistinguishable from products that use animal or plant-based fats”.
“This is true whether our products replace existing fats, or are customised to meet a specific purpose, or if they are integrated into more complex products like butter,” Chiara Cecchini, VP of commercialisation at Savor, told Green Queen.
The brand’s fat can be turned into the food ingredient companies like Alamance are looking for. In the near term, it is launching its carbon-based butter at several establishments in the Golden State, including Michelin-starred eateries One65 and SingleThread.
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