Press kit

Solar Foods is a food tech company founded in Finland in 2017 with a vision: to create sustainable solutions to the global food crisis. Solar Foods’ first product is Solein®, a food grown out of thin air.

Grown out of a natural microbe in a bioprocess that uses carbon dioxide and electricity, Solein production is decoupled from the demands of traditional agriculture. This is why Solein can be called the world’s most sustainable protein: it uses 100 times less water and 20 times less arable land than plant protein production, and creates only a fifth of the carbon emissions of plant protein.

Solein can be produced virtually anywhere: deserts, Arctic regions, even Mars. This is why Solar Foods is also exploring the possibilities of Solein as a space food. In 2023, the company was one of the winners in Phase II of the Deep Space Food Challenge, a competition held by NASA and CSA that seeks innovative solutions to feed astronauts on long space missions.

Solar Foods received its first novel food approval for Solein in September 2022 in Singapore. In May 2023, Solar Foods and Singaporean restaurant Fico held the world’s first official tasting of Solein. In June, Fico’s Solein Chocolate Gelato was unveiled for ordinary consumers.

Solar Foods’ first commercial-scale production facility Factory 01 is set to begin operations in April 2024 in Vantaa, Finland. Solar Foods has filed for novel food dossier for Solein in other key markets such as the EU and UK and plans to seek GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) status assessment for Solein in the United States. Solar Foods is looking to bring the novel protein to consumers’ plates around the world in the coming years.

A vision of the future of food: the Solar Foods Manifesto

How the first taste of Solein in Singapore came together

Demystifying the bioprocess behind a protein grown out of thin air