- We are heading to a secret laboratory
outside of Helsinki, Finland.
It looks sort of like a small-batch brewery, but in fact,
scientists here are breeding a whole new species,
one that they hope is going to feed the entire planet.
- Historically, we've understood food
something that is large enough
so that caveman could see and sense.
Now we are reversing, in a way, back in time
to more simpler species.
Nutritionally, we don't need to really compromise anything.
It is same kind of food as we've ever had,
but it's just single cells.
- This is the first site for the company, Solar Foods,
and the protein they're creating here
is made from, well, air.
- We're sometimes asked if Solein is synthetic.
It's actually quite the opposite.
It might be the most natural food we've ever had.
- Specifically, Solar Foods is making protein
using electricity and something the Earth has
in great abundance, carbon dioxide.
- It's the same with what plants do today,
using sunlight and carbon dioxide from the air.
- Solar Foods' mission is to disconnect
food production from agriculture.
This is Just Might Work,
a show about suprising solutions to our biggest problems.
- I'm Pasi, one of the founders and CEO at Solar Foods.
Solar Foods is a food tech company,
but primarily we are a clean tech company.
We are here for a environmental mission.
One third of the environmental impact to human action
is due to what we eat.
And about 80% of that is due to animal-based products.
We need to somehow remove animal from the food system.
- Solar Foods' goal is to detach
food production entirely from agriculture,
and for food production to no longer need vast amounts
of space or resources.
Their solution is Solein,
the most sustainable food ever produced by humans.
- The impact of Solein is about one-tenth compared to that
of plant-based proteins and about one-hundredth,
so 1% from animal products, specifically, meat.
- Solein's primary ingredients are simply air and electricity.
This means that not only does it pave the way
for more sustainable food production,
but it can be made in places that traditionally
have issues growing food; drought-ridden deserts,
isolated islands, or even in space.
And while fake meat alternatives might taste
like the real thing,
their biggest challenge to date is how to sustainably
and cheaply reinforce it with the reason we eat meat
in the first place - for protein.
- Solein is a single-cell protein that nutritionally
is somewhere between dried meat and dried soy.
What we are simply doing is we are growing this organism
in a fermentor.
It's similar to making beer or wine, but instead of sugars,
we feed the fermentor and the organism with hydrogen
that we make from water with electricity and carbon dioxide.
We also add some nutrients in the growth medium.
- We mix minerals like phosphorous, sulfur,
calcium, iron, potassium.
Normally plants, when they grow,
so they get these minerals from soil.
You can see, that it's quite bright yellow,
and the color comes from beta-carotene,
so it's basically the same as in carrots.
- We let this process run continuously,
take the product liquid out,
and dry the organism from the liquid.
And then you end up with a dried powder.
- It contain 65% protein, 5% fatty acids,
and then roughly 15% dietary fibers, and then some minerals.
- Solar Foods was not the first to discover
that protein could be extracted from carbon dioxide.
In fact, Solein's origins lie in deep space.
- The earliest research and the identification of this form
of life on this planet was done in connection
to space research in the 50s and 60s,
actually by NASA and Battelle, a research institute.
- They had the big project of taking the man to moon.
Also, there were some scientists looking how to feed people
on the long space voyages.
- It had very limited use for decades,
and now it seems it has a practical meaning.
The gas atmosphere of Mars is mostly carbon dioxide.
So basically, the main raw materials are already there.
- Solar Foods continues to work
on this original mission,
prepping plans to take Solein to Mars,
but the founders are primarily focused
on feeding spaceship Earth.
While Solein can be used as pure protein for survival
in extreme environments like space,
Solar Foods recognizes that to be adopted around the world,
Solein needs to appear seamlessly
into people's regular diets.
So it's been designed to have a neutral flavor,
so it can go into the foods people already eat,
like noodles or cereal.
- The idea is that it appears in the food system
as a completely new primary ingredient.
We don't expect anyone actually to eat dry powder,
but we integrate Solein into different kind of
food products, dairy alternatives,
or meat alternatives like Solein right here on top
fortifying noodles, or even in the broth
comprising a complete dish.
- The Earth we are living in,
it cannot sustain the way we are living.
- Carbon dioxide is an infinite source.
It is there available all the time in the atmosphere.
Today, we understand that as a byproduct
or a pollutionary emission,
but actually, it can be a very valuable
raw material in future that is freely available everywhere.
I'm breathing it out now.
Some countries have oil, some don't.
But now everybody has carbon dioxide
and an electricity resource.
So we can capture that and turn that back to food.
Therefore, in the future, if we grow real meat,
how it was produced will have nothing to do
with current form of
industrialized animal keeping or agriculture.
But as we see the prices of solar and wind electricity
going down, we're going to be cost-competitive
against all other proteins in the factory scale.
- This is just the pilot site for Solar Foods.
As they expand, so does a reality in which our pursuit
of nutrition no longer relies on deforestation,
desertification, or the depletion of our oceans;
but instead becomes a truly closed-loop system
working side-by-side with nature.