SOLARSPOON aims to rethink how we make food by using the most abundant resources around us: sunlight, air, and water. Instead of relying on farmland, fertilisers or traditional crops, our project explores how living microorganisms can be electrified, powered by solar energy to produce essential nutrients like proteins and fats. By bringing together biology, renewable energy and advanced engineering, we seek to create a new kind of food-production system that is both sustainable and independent of agricultural land.
Our long-term mission is to make nutritious food accessible anywhere, even in places where farming is difficult or impossible. Whether for remote communities, future households wanting local production, or life-support systems in space exploration, SOLARSPOON envisions compact, solar-driven devices that can convert basic molecules from the air into edible ingredients.
Our team is developing innovative, fast and highly energy efficient solar-powered devices that bring microbes and electrochemistry together in one integrated system. Once complete, these devices will achieve energy conversion rates well beyond the capabilities of photosynthetic plants. Sustainability is at the forefront of our efforts: instead of feeding microbes with sugar - an expensive resource tied to agriculture - we aim to supply them with energy and nutrients derived almost entirely from sunlight and air.
The project is built around five major research goals: creating sustainable food-compatible light-driven anodes; electrifying protein-producing microbes; engineering new microbial partnerships to diversify food products; designing compact devices that bring all these components together; and ensuring that the whole system is sustainable, value adding and practical for real-world use.