Solar Foods facts for kids

Solar Foods is an exciting company from Finland that started in 2017. They create a special kind of food ingredient called Solein. It's a new way to make protein, which is super important for your body and helps you grow strong! Solein is a type of single cell protein, which means it's made from tiny living things, similar to how yeast is used to make bread.

Discovering Solein: A New Food

Solar Foods makes a unique food ingredient called Solein. It looks like a fine flour and is full of good things for you! About half of Solein is protein, which is great for building muscles. It also has some healthy fats and carbohydrates, giving you energy. People who have seen it say it looks and tastes a lot like regular wheat flour. Solar Foods planned to launch Solein for people to try around 2021.

How Solein is Made

Making Solein is a really clever process! Imagine taking air, water, and some special nutrients. Solar Foods actually uses carbon dioxide (CO
2) from the air! They mix this CO2 with water, nutrients, and vitamins. For this process, they need electricity, but they use clean, renewable energy from their partner, Fortum.

After mixing everything, a natural process called fermentation happens. This is similar to how yeast helps bread rise or how bacteria make yogurt. During fermentation, tiny living things turn the ingredients into Solein. It's a bit like brewing, but for food!

The Big Impact of Solein

Many people believe that Solein could change how we produce food around the world. It could be a huge step forward! Solar Foods thinks that by about 2025, making Solein might even be cheaper than getting protein from other sources, like soya beans grown in South America.

One amazing thing about Solein is how little land it needs. Experts say that the way Solar Foods makes Solein is about 20,000 times more efficient with land than traditional farming. This means you can make a lot more food in a much smaller space!

However, some people, like Michael Le Page from the New Scientist magazine, have thought about this more deeply. He pointed out that the 20,000 times improvement is mostly for the factories themselves. If you also count the land needed for solar panels to create the renewable energy, then the land efficiency is still better, but more like 10 times better than regular farming. Even with these questions, Le Page said that the possible benefits of this technology are so huge that we should invest a lot of money to learn more about it.