They want to make palm oil in a laboratory. Without palm trees.

A handful of startups are trying to reinvent one of the most ubiquitous yet environmentally destructive ingredients in our diets: palm oil.

Palm oil is found in bread, instant noodles, Girl Scout cookies, lipstick, Nutella and ice cream, to name a few. People all over the world use it every day for cooking. But to make all that oil, endless miles of rainforests around the world – areas along the equator that are vital for biodiversity and the fight against climate change – have been razed, burned and turned into palm oil plantations. This has had deadly consequences for species such as orangutans in Indonesia.

The new companies are taking their technology out of the laboratory and into real products. The material is made by fermentation (think breweries that produce oil instead of beer) and is not yet approved for food. But it’s starting to show up in things like cosmetics.

These startups are facing an uphill battle. The world is so awash with palm oil made in the conventional way, by growing palm trees, that it is relatively cheap to buy.

Food companies that use palm oil say they are trying to do better and have pledged to create more sustainable supply chains. While creating a substitute in a lab may be less labor-intensive than clearing forests and nurturing millions of trees, to compete on price and volume the startups will need access to massive manufacturing facilities. For now, the products they sell are still more expensive, the startups say.

I spoke with leaders from three companies: Thomas Kelleher, CEO of Xyloem, maker of Yoil; Shara Ticku, CEO and co-founder of C16 Life sciences, which counts Palmless (and Bill Gates as an investor); and Chris Chuck, co-founder of the British company Clean Food Group.

Here are their lightly edited answers.

How is your product made?

SHARA TICKU We make an oil that looks and functions like palm oil, but we make it from yeast, not trees. We consider it bio-engineered. It is natural. It is grown in a laboratory, just as beer or wine is grown in a laboratory.

CHRIS CHUCK We can easily process food waste, a carbohydrate source, and then feed it to the yeast.

TOM KELLEHER These yeast, if you give them too much sugar, they become fat. We feed them too much and they swell into a round ball made almost entirely of oil.

What motivated you to start your business?

TICKU I saw what happened when I was in Singapore about ten years ago. Smoke from the forest fires on Sumatran islands reached Singapore and made the air poisonous. Making more palm oil requires the planet to look completely different.

CHUCK In addition to deforestation, the population is growing, and not only are we adding more and more people to the planet, but we also have growing middle-class populations in India and China, who are demanding more and more nutritious products across a wide range of areas.

Will people go for it?

TICKU Components of our oil are all found in the human diet today. We have to go through the approval stages with the Food and Drug Administration. And regulatory approval means it’s safe for mass consumption.

Apart from regulatory approval, what are the other hurdles to selling this?

KELLEHER We have to make at least 100,000 liters per digester, and dozens and dozens of them. There are a limited number of companies in the world that have this option. We are actively seeking a strategic partnership with at least one company capable of production scale and already familiar with the palm oil sector.

CHUCK We are talking about very large factories. For us, we can retrofit existing equipment, such as you find in breweries. Then you can scale up quickly.

What other applications do you think for the technology?

KELLEHER I would like to see us have an alternative to fish oil, to shea butter, and we have a way to do that using the yeast platform that we’re working with. We are already developing a fish oil substitute.

TICKU We work with food manufacturers to find out how our oil can improve their products. For example, we can make alternative cheese better. Our oil can make it melt better.

CHUCK We are trying to develop a new technology to curb the growth of the edible oil sector in general. There are differences between us and the other companies, but it is not ‘winner takes all’. This is bigger than one company. We have to solve a big, big challenge of the 21st century.