This Startup Is Trying to Make Juicy Steaks Out of Thin Air

Lisa Dyson and John Reed, the former a physicist and the latter a materials scientist, were working together at the Department of Energy’s Berkeley Lab and had a common goal: They wanted to help curb climate change, and they knew one way to do that was to look at the food on our plates. In 2008, this decades-old concept inspired Dyson and Reid to found Kiverdi, which uses recycled carbon dioxide to make products like microbe-based alternatives to palm oil and citrus oil. In 2019, they spun off Air Protein, a California-based startup that aims to make meat out of thin air. Air Protein cultivates hydrogenotrophic microbes inside fermentation tanks and feeds them a mix of carbon dioxide, oxygen, minerals, water, and nitrogen. First, the process itself is carbon-negative, as it uses carbon dioxide to make the protein, and Air Protein aims to eventually pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through direct-air capture plants.