A Cernunnos Foundation position on the REAL Butter Act, and a request to Congress
Butter has a lineage you can walk back on foot. Behind the stick on the counter is a churn, behind the churn a pail of cream, behind the cream a cow, and behind the cow a pasture somebody mowed, fenced and paid taxes on. A farmer can point to the field it came from the way a trail guide points to the spring that feeds a creek.
In 2022 a company called Savor began writing butter a different lineage. Its process takes captured carbon dioxide, hydrogen and methane, applies heat and pressure, and builds carbon chains that become fatty acids, then fat. The company runs a 25,000-square-foot facility in Batavia, Illinois, launched its butter commercially in March 2025, and counts Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures among its backers. The finished product contains Savor’s fat along with water, sea salt, sunflower lecithin, natural flavor and beta carotene.
Why we listened
In 1995, Bill Gates published The Road Ahead. Over the next twenty years he built the future that book described, line by line, and became one of the wealthiest men alive doing it. Whatever one makes of the man’s conduct, a forecast that accurate earns a hearing. When Gates says a technology deserves pursuit, the Cernunnos Foundation gives that judgment some weight.
So when word came of a molecular match for butter made from methane and industrial chemistry, with Democrats and Republicans lined up against it, we went looking.
What we found
The product is real. Savor and Gates describe it as chemically identical to dairy fat, and those who have tasted it report no difference. We have not tasted it ourselves.
Two kinds of risk follow. The first is the one people reach for by instinct: a chemical or degenerative difference no one has detected yet. Long-term study will answer that in time. The second is already visible. Dairy is a staple, produced in volume, and the family farm model behind it is struggling. A fat that behaves the same in the pan and arrives on the market undisclosed, at a lower price, would land on those farms the way an upstream diversion lands on a riverbank town. The people downstream learn about it when the water drops. That is an economic risk and a food-stability risk, carried by the people least able to absorb it.
Savor has also named palm oil as a target. That application makes more sense to us, and we would welcome a serious effort there.
The fight in Congress
The political fight over this product centers on the label. On June 22, 2026, Representatives Tony Wied (R-Wis.) and Josh Riley (D-N.Y.) introduced the Recognizing Engineered Alternatives as Lab-Created Butter Act, H.R. 9387, announcing it on a Wisconsin dairy farm. The bill would require any product marketed as butter and made with fat from non-agricultural processes to carry the words “lab-created butter” before its name, and foods containing it to say so. Since 1923, federal law has defined butter as made exclusively from milk or cream, with at least 80 percent milkfat. Savor says it will label in compliance with FDA rules and that the bill partly misunderstands its platform.
The question of who vouches for safety sits beneath the labeling question. Savor self-affirmed its butter as Generally Recognized as Safe, which opened the door to market. It expects an FDA “no questions” letter in late 2026 or early 2027. Until then, the voice standing behind the product’s safety belongs to the company selling it.
Our request to Congress
The REAL Butter Act builds a fence around one pasture. We ask Congress to reconsider it and widen its reach, while the attention is here, into a federal standard for basic food labeling.
The standard is simple. You either sell the whole natural product as itself, or you label what it is. Each package answers three questions in plain language: what is inside, where it came from, and who says it is safe. That language is codified and set apart from branding, so the truth sits on the package in the same place and the same words regardless of whose logo surrounds it. No exceptions.
We ask for no limits on what a food may be. Inventors may build fat from air, protein from fungus, or sweetness from whatever chemistry allows. The only rule is that the package tells the truth in words a shopper can read standing in the aisle.
The patent question
Our deeper concern is the model behind the money. The Road Ahead laid out a plan to build a monopoly and grow rich from it, and that plan worked. We see the same pattern repeating in food and farmland. Too many people have gone hungry behind the fences of food patents for too long, and the power to own the means of feeding people should be taken back from Bill Gates and those who follow his playbook.
The Cernunnos Foundation works under a principle of propagation over possession: we publish our designs openly so others can build on them. We ask the same of anyone who proposes to replace a staple food. If you are going to put the dairy farms that help feed the world, and the industry around them, at risk, you will make the process open source, and you will tell people on the label what you are feeding them.
We trust that Bill is brilliant. We do not trust Bill beyond that.
— The Cernunnos Foundation
Sources:
- Food Dive, “Savor startup, Bill Gates, butter, palm oil” — fooddive.com/news/savor-startup-bill-gates-butter-palm-oil/743071/
- Green Queen, Savor facility, customers and FDA timeline — greenqueen.com.hk/savor-butter-carbon-animal-free-fat-alternative-facility-funding-one65/
- Green Queen, REAL Butter Act and Savor’s response — greenqueen.com.hk/?p=86153
- The Spectator Australia, Batavia facility — spectator.com.au/?p=10891702
- Rep. Tony Wied press release — wied.house.gov/media/press-releases/real-ingredients-real-standards-congressman-wied-introduces-real-butter-act
- Wisconsin Politics, American Dairy Coalition on the REAL Butter Act — wispolitics.com/?p=418823
- Quiver Quant, H.R. 9387 summary — quiverquant.com/bills/119/hr-9387
- Keller and Heckman, 1923 butter definition — khlaw.com/wisconsin-representative-introduces-real-butter-act-regulate-synthesized-butter-product-labels
- govinfo, H.R. 9387 bill text — govinfo.gov/app/details/BILLS-119hr9387ih
