Zero Acre Farms, headquartered in San Mateo, is on a mission to “give the world an oil change.” The company aims to help restaurants and home cooks replace conventional cooking oils with what CEO and co-founder Jeff Nobbs says is a more healthful and environmentally sustainable choice: oil made from fermented sugar cane.
Called “the oil of the future” in a June 2024 Food and Wine article, Zero Acre’s oil is versatile, according to Nobbs.
“You really can use it for everything. You don’t need one oil for salads, one oil for cooking, one oil for frying,” Nobbs said. “You can just have one oil to rule them all.”
Zero Acre Farms was launched about five years ago. Its oil is available to order directly and can also be found in restaurants across the country.
“Our focus is on those restaurant partnerships and how we can help them bring healthier fats into their restaurants. Those healthier fats tend to be better for the environment as well. Everyone wins,” said Nobbs, who is also the co-owner of the San Francisco and Oakland restaurant Kitava. “We work with everyone from mom-and-pop independent restaurants to chains to high-end Michelin-starred restaurants, and we’re proud of every partner.”
Bay Area chefs using Zero Acre oil in their restaurants include chef Stuart Brioza, co-owner of San Francisco’s State Bird Provisions, The Progress and The Anchovy Bar (Brioza’s recipe for rice-crusted trout appears on Zero Acre’s website); and chef Kyle Connaughton of Healdsburg eatery SingleThread. Chipotle has been an investor, and Zero Acre has also had a partnership with Shake Shack.
Brioza called it his “workhorse” oil – ideal for vinegrettes, mayonnaises, aiolis, sautes and marinades, taking the place of grapeseed oil, his former favorite for those recipes.
“Its uses are almost immeasurable. In our kitchen we go through a lot,” he said.
Brioza described the taste as largely neutral, with a pleasant hint of buttery and toasty flavor, as opposed to grapeseed oil’s stronger taste and more perishable nature.
“I look at mayonnaise as a litmus test,” he said. “Several years ago, I made five different mayonnaises using different oils – the same exact recipe to the gram.” He did a blind taste test with his staff, and the mayo made with Zero Acre oil received the highest marks.
“Zero Acre for me has been just a really good, consistent product,” he said.
Zero Acre’s roots
The company stems from Nobbs’ longtime curiosity about environmental and wellness issues.
“I’ve always been very interested in food and health and sustainability,” he said. “When I was a kid, my nickname was ‘Nature Boy’ because I was always out exploring things with my dad.” Nobbs’ father was an environmental scientist, his mother was a nurse and his grandfather was a doctor.
“This sort of blend of health and nature has always been the lens that I look at the world through,” he said. When Nobbs was in his early 20s, he lost both of his parents to cancer. “That kind of led me down this path of, why people get sick, what we can do about it,’” he said. He became even more interested in the relationship between food and health, and in food oils in particular.
“There are a lot of aspects of how food affects our health, but the one that seemed to have this disproportionately large impact compared to people talking about it and doing anything about it was the oils that we consume, especially the way that we consume them, which is, we cook the heck out of them, we deep-fry them, we use them for days or even weeks on end,” he said.
When those oils oxidize, they break down into known toxins. But on any given day, more than one-third of Americans eat fast food, which is typically fried, according to Nobbs.
“Nearly three-fourths of the restaurants in the country have fried food on the menu, so it’s no wonder that these oils are now 20% of our calories in the U.S.,” he said.
Seed oils in particular – including canola oil, corn oil, peanut oil, sesame oil, soybean oil and others – are commonly used in cooking, especially in restaurants. Seed oils are relatively neutral in taste, have a fairly high smoke point (the temperature at which an oil emits smoke), are affordable and, because they’re liquids, easy to use.
However, they’re also high in polyunsaturated fats. When fried, “those are the types of fats that tend to break down into toxic aldehydes, into transfats, into a bunch of other stuff we don’t want to be eating,” Nobbs said. Some have chemical antioxidants added to prevent them from quickly going rancid, among other issues, according to Nobbs.
“What we were looking to do was to have something that conventional oils offer in terms of the good, but with none of the bad,” Nobbs said. Zero Acre oil, he said, is free from synthetic antioxidants and chemical extraction, low in polyunsaturated fats and boasts a high smoke point. According to the company, Zero Acre oil has “35% more healthy monounsaturated fats than olive oil” (and though it comes from sugar cane, there is no sugar left in the oil after the fermentation process.)
Research on fermenting sugar cane for oil has been going on for the past century or so, Nobbs said, with an increase in interest in recent decades. When he learned about it, “the light bulb sort of went off,” he said.
“We found the right manufacturing partners and supply-chain partners (the sugar cane is grown in South America), built out a team and all that to make it happen, and brought it to market a couple of years ago,” Nobbs said.
Going green
Environmental sustainability is also part of Zero Acre Farms’ mission. The name refers to the goal of decreasing the amount of land used to produce cooking oil.
“Vegetable oils, kind of broadly speaking, which includes soybean oil and canola oil and the rest, they take up about 30% of croplands globally, and since the 1960s they’ve taken up more land than basically every other food combined,” Nobbs said. Most are annual monocrops and, in the U.S., some are subsidized, such as soy, corn and cotton.
“They have this disproportionally bad environmental footprint. Not only are they inefficient, in that they need a ton of land just to produce a little bit of oil…they’re also quite bad from an emissions standpoint and so they’ve got to go,” Nobbs said. “It doesn’t make sense to clear all this land to grow an entire plant just to press its tiny seed for some oil and then rip it all out of the ground, including its roots, every year just to do it all over again.”
Sugar cane uses 87% less land than canola oil (and 99% less water than olive oil), according to Zero Acre’s website.
“It’s also a perennial crop, so it’s not uprooted every year like an annual monocrop is, and it gets its water primarily from rainfall, not irrigation, so kind of across the board – emissions, land use, water use – all the numbers are really good,” he said.
Nobbs said people may not be aware of how prevalent cooking oils are in daily life.
“I think a lot of people think, ‘Oh this doesn’t affect me, this isn’t an issue,’ until they start looking at the ingredients lists of everything in their kitchen and their pantry and their fridge, and they start asking restaurants what oils they cook with,” he said.
The debate over the merits and possible dangers of seed oils has been simmering in recent years, with the likes of Christopher Gardner, professor of medicine and director of nutrition studies at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, writing in an MSNBC opinion piece that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had joined “the seed oil conspiracy theorists.” Gardner added that “there is an overwhelming body of scientific evidence confirming this family of oils is more healthful than harmful in moderation.”
And in a March 13 interview in Stanford Medicine’s Scope publication, Gardner said most claims about seed oils are misguided and that other dietary changes – such as avoiding ultraprocessed foods – will lead to bigger health benefits than focusing on seed oils. (Nobbs has argued that media coverage of the seed oil debate has been flawed.)
To Nobbs, the very fact that cooking oils have increasingly become a topic of debate at all is a good thing.
“We are very excited about the momentum right now, even if it’s controversial,” he said. “People talking about oil is like a dream come true for us.”
More information is available at zeroacre.com. Instagram: @zeroacrefarms.
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