A company in Batavia, Illinois is making butter in a way you’ve never seen before. No animals, no plants, no oils; this butter is made from carbon. The sustainability-focused approach has the blessing and backing of Bill Gates.

The finished product looks, smells and tastes like the butter we all know, but it’s made without the farmland, fertilizers or emissions associated to conventional process.

The company’s pioneering tech uses carbon and hydrogen to make sticks of butter that anyone would recognize.

“This is pretty novel, to be able to make food that looks and tastes and feels exactly like dairy butter, but with no agriculture whatsoever,” said Jordan Beiden-Charles, food scientist for Savor.

To put it in simple terms, Savor says they take carbon dioxide from the air and hydrogen from water, heat them up, oxidize them and get a final result that looks like candle wax but is in fact fat molecules like those in beef, cheese or vegetable oils.

The entire process releases zero greenhouse gases, uses no farmland to feed cows, and despite its industrial appearance, has a significantly smaller footprint.

Batavia and their home lab based in San Jose, California, are backed by billionaire Bill Gates who wrote in his blog, “The idea of switching to lab-made fats and oils may seem strange at first. But their potential to significantly reduce our carbon footprint is immense.”