Feeding the future: Finnish startup turns electricity and CO2 into edible protein

The planet faces the dual challenges of accelerating climate change and a growing population. Plant and animal agriculture has struggled to keep up, contributing to the problem.

Innovative solutions to food production are not just desirable; they are essential, and plenty of food innovators are looking to address this growing need.

But they’re different from Finnish startup Solar Foods, which believes it has found a novel solution to both problems: Solein, a nutritious powder with a similar nutrition profile to dried meat. It includes all the essential amino acids a human body needs, dietary fiber, and a host of essential vitamins.

What’s more, producing Solein uses only a fraction of the energy cost of plant or animal agriculture, has a relatively minuscule production footprint, is far quicker to produce than other protein sources, and can theoretically provide an infinite supply of food using electricity and air.

If this sounds like science fiction, Solein is already in production and could be on your kitchen table by year’s end.

What is Solar Foods?

Solar Foods began at Finland’s National Research Institute, where a team of scientists from diverse disciplines started piecing together an idea for a new kind of agriculture.

“We are a classical example of how new things emerge from the intersections of scientific disciplines,” Dr. Pasi Vainikka, co-founder and CEO of Solar Foods, told Interesting Engineering . Vainikka, who worked on energy systems research at the Institute, learned from a colleague about a microorganism that doesn’t use sugar as an energy source, instead relying on hydrogen to metabolize carbon dioxide.

These discussions sparked the realization that electricity could provide hydrogen for these organisms to reproduce with only a tank of water and the carbon dioxide in our air. “If the organisms would be edible, then we could convert electricity to food,” Vainikka said. “And, here we are, some eight, nine, almost 10 years after those first thoughts.”

Solar Foods, founded in 2017, invested more than 42 million Euros to build its first biomass factory, Factory 01, as a proof of concept. In that factory, a 20,000-liter fermentation tank can produce 160 tons of edible biomass a year, enough to produce six million meals.

The science behind Solein

Solar Food’s groundbreaking approach involves growing these microorganisms in large fermentation tanks, which can be filtered out and dried into a fine powder, offering a sustainable alternative to traditional agriculture.

“These hydrogen-oxidizing microbes utilize dissolved hydrogen in a water-based media,” Vainikka explains. “We mix in gases, CO2 and hydrogen, and the microbe has the ability to utilize hydrogen passing the cell as a source of energy to start to reduce carbon dioxide, which is its source of carbon as it is for photosynthetic plants.”

As these microbes feast on the dissolved carbon dioxide, they reproduce exponentially. After fermentation, the resulting biomass is filtered out and dried into a rich powder high in protein, dietary fiber, fats, and vitamins. This whole food can be used as an ingredient in any number of dishes.

This method of producing protein is especially innovative because it decouples the mass production of food from traditional agriculture. “Our approach enables us to grow the organism based on non-agricultural products or sugars, disconnecting its production from the environmental impacts of agriculture,” Vainikka added.

Addressing our most pressing environmental concerns

The environmental benefits of Solar Foods’ process can’t be understated. Agriculture is responsible for significant habitat loss and greenhouse gas emissions, with industrialized animal agriculture especially damaging.

“If we take the Paris Climate Accord seriously, it tells us we need to be, as humans, carbon neutral after a couple of decades, or even carbon negative,” Vainikka said, “and it doesn’t happen if we don’t do anything about industrialized agriculture, and specifically industrialized animal keeping, since 80 percent of the environmental impact from the food system is due to animal-based production.”

That makes Solar Foods’ Solein particularly important, as its goal is to replace animal meat as a protein source. What’s more, Solar Foods’ production process uses just one percent of the energy of industrial animal agriculture for the same amount of food, so if Solar Foods is successful, it could drastically reduce carbon emissions from animal agriculture while providing a nutritious substitute.

Scaling up Solein production

However, energy is still a concern when scaling up production. “Half of our production cost is electricity,” Vainikka explained, but even so, the overall environmental impact is about one-tenth that of plant-based protein production and just one percent of meat production.

With the dramatic decrease in the cost of renewable energy sources like solar or wind power, any further decrease in renewable energy prices could directly reduce the cost of Solein for customers, making it more accessible globally.

Solar Foods’ critical challenge is scaling up production to meet global demand. The company’s Factory 01 has already demonstrated its proof-of-concept, but to become commercially viable, Solar Foods has a lot more work to do.

“These are novel foods, and you need regulatory approval, which takes some time,” Vainikka said. “We’ve had regulatory approval in Singapore for a year and a half, we know that we’re going to have regulatory approval during the autumn in the US, so we will have a product out in the US this year—small scale, but still—and the EU is very bureaucratic, so we will know later how that will go.”

“But most of the planet is kind of released by the US regulatory approval,” Vainikka added, “many of the other countries accept [US FDA approval] as a basis for their national approval.”

Of course, regulatory approval is only one consideration for scaling up production. The most important will be manufacturing capacity.

Solar Foods is securing contracts with potential customers to ensure a solid revenue stream and make a larger factory viable. Vainikka said that by 2026, Solar Foods aims to have a factory with several fermenters, each with 200 cubic meters or more capacity.

This facility will mark a significant milestone, enabling the company to become profitable and substantially impact the global protein market.

Overcoming cultural and market barriers

While Solar Foods’ protein’s technological and environmental benefits are clear, market adoption presents challenges. Cultural perceptions of alternative proteins vary widely. “The first taste is everything,” emphasizes the Vainikka, “and so if you can get people to taste it at least once, that one you shouldn’t mess up.”

To help ensure that Solar Foods succeeds in winning people over to its product, the company has invested a lot of time and resources into perfecting its taste and texture.

“We have also invested quite a lot in a restaurant in our factory, where we bring guests to get them to taste our ice cream product as quickly as possible,” Vainikka said. Ice cream made from Solein is already being served in a Michelin-star restaurant in Singapore, and according to Vainikka, the response has been very positive.

The future of food production?

Looking ahead, Solar Foods envisions a future where protein production is sustainable, efficient, and disconnected from the environmental impacts of traditional agriculture. Their technology addresses the pressing issues of climate change and food security and offers a glimpse into a world where food production is harmonized with the planet’s ecological limits.

Changing traditional farming methods will be challenging as these practices have deep cultural roots worldwide. However, Solein has major advantages. It can produce a lot of nutritious food using very little space and energy. This is hard to ignore, especially in places that often struggle to have enough food.

With the climate crisis only set to worsen over the next few decades, Solar Foods’ Solein offers a compelling solution to a number of problems where we have made little tangible progress so far.