Savor and Helios AI Partner to Build Resilience Into the Future of Fats

Why now

The fats and oils behind everything from chocolate to baked goods come from a remarkably narrow slice of the planet. Two countries supply roughly 87% of the world's traded palm oil. Two more supplied close to two-thirds of its cocoa, until they couldn't. When a supply base is that concentrated, a single dry season stops being a regional weather story and becomes a line on your cost sheet.

The last five years made that concrete. According to Helios AI data, cocoa ran from about $2,100 per metric ton in mid-2022 to nearly $13,000 by the end of 2024, a six-fold move in under two and a half years. Crude palm oil is up 54% since 2023, and palm kernel oil, the lauric fat used in coatings and fillings, has more than doubled.

Here is the part most planning misses. Cocoa has since fallen about 50% from its peak and palm has steadied. The market has gone quiet. The climate risk behind the last spike has not. A strong El Niño is building in the Pacific, forecast to peak between November 2026 and January 2027, and because oil palm and cocoa are tree crops that lag the weather by the better part of a year, the damage from that peak lands in the 2027 harvest, not this one. 

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The 2027 harvest is only where it shows up first. The pressure underneath it runs for the rest of the decade: aging trees, replanting that has fallen behind, a shrinking band of land where these crops still grow well, and two-country supply bases with no room to absorb a shock. Public outlooks from the OECD-FAO and peer-reviewed climate research point the same way, with suitable cocoa land in West Africa projected to halve by mid-century and palm supply growth slowing to a fraction of its historical pace. Helios AI’s own forecasts point in the same direction, with no return to pre-2022 prices anywhere on the horizon it models. Each El Niño lands harder on a system with less slack than the one before. 

Today’s price relief is sitting right on top of the next risk window, and the trend behind it does not reverse. The gap between what the market feels now and what the data already sees coming is where a buyer gets to plan ahead instead of react.

"Our work is turning climate complexity into supply chain foresight, showing food companies where the system is under strain before it reaches their shelves. Savor is building one of the answers to that strain. Pairing our intelligence with their approach puts the risk and the response in front of buyers in one place."

Francisco Martin-Rayo, Co-Founder & CEO, Helios AI

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What this partnership is

For a food company buying fats, the hard part is not knowing that supply is risky. It is knowing how risky, where, and when, and having a real alternative when the numbers turn.

Helios AI answers the first question, forecasting climate, price, and supply disruption across more than 80 commodities in over 100 countries. Savor offers the alternative: fats and oils made from carbon, without animals, plants, or farmland, and so without exposure to any single growing region. Savor is now a Helios AI customer, using its intelligence to quantify the risk in conventional fat supply chains and help its partners bring that evidence into their resilience planning. For a Savor customer, that shows up as an earlier warning and a steadier plan: a dated read on where their fat supply is most exposed, and the option to shift that volume to a source priced on process rather than weather. It also moves in one direction on purpose, toward a food supply that stays affordable and dependable while taking less from the planet, which is the future both companies are building for.

"For a long time, the cost of a chocolate bar or a croissant has depended on the weather in a handful of places most consumers will never see. Helios AI gives food companies an early, specific read on that exposure and our job is to give them a supply that isn’t exposed to it in the first place."

Kathleen Alexander, Co-Founder & CEO, Savor

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Looking ahead

Resilience in food has mostly meant reacting faster to the last shock. Helios AI and Savor are after something steadier: a clear read on where the fats supply is heading, and a supply that does not move with the weather in the first place. We will keep showing that work as the season gives us more to show, starting with a webinar and the case study that follows.

About Savor

Savor believes in a future where we can enjoy the products we love without consuming our planet. Founded in 2022 and backed by leading investors like Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Synthesis Capital, the company's proprietary platform follows nature's own blueprints to create pure, versatile, and sustainable fats and oils directly from carbon without the need for conventional plant and animal agriculture. Savor's teams in San Jose, California, and Batavia, Illinois are obsessed with making top-quality ingredients that are scalable, infinitely customizable, and deliver exceptional performance across food and personal care applications. From butter to palm oil, Savor crafts high-performance fats without depleting the Earth's resources. 

About Helios AI

Helios AI powers teams that feed the world with personalized commodity intelligence. Backed by leading investors including W23 Global, Collide Capital, and Supply Change Capital, among others, Helios AI is a global AI platform purpose-built for the agri-food sector, predicting climate, price, and supply disruption across 80+ commodities and 100+ countries. Its platform combines 40K+ USDA reports, 500B+ climate and pricing signals, and 80+ crop-specific AI/ML models to forecast price movements and supply availability before the market moves. By transforming fragmented agricultural data into actionable foresight, Helios AI enables procurement, sourcing, and sustainability leaders at food manufacturers, retailers, and commodity trading firms to anticipate disruption, secure supply early, and build more resilient global food systems.