One day in the 1970s, Dariush Behnam, the founder of AQUANOVA, was once an engineer at a globally renowned industrial company, looked at the ingredient list on his son’s juice box. He saw a long string of artificial colorings with chemical names he could barely pronounce. That sparked a simple question: Could he replace those synthetics with natural nutrients?

He tried using beta-carotene—the stuff that gives carrots their orange color—but hit a wall. It’s fat-soluble, meaning it doesn’t mix with water. That “failure” actually turned into his biggest clue. He remembered how the human gut works: when we digest fats, our bile breaks them down into tiny water-friendly droplets called micelles. It’s a clever trick our bodies have used forever.

“It’s not about the ingredient,” he realized. “It’s about the order of steps. Instead of trying to force carotene into water, why not do what our intestines do—transform it before it even reaches the gut?”

He teamed up with researchers at the University of Hohenheim in Germany. They ran hundreds of trials, testing all kinds of conditions, hunting for that perfect tipping point where micelles form reliably. In 2003, they cracked it: the NovaSOL micelle technology was born. Later, it was validated and put into real products. That technology became the foundation of a German nutrition brand—also called NovaSOL.

Dariush’s son, Frank Behnam, eventually took over. He pushed the original vision even further, leading multiple clinical studies to prove just how well this micelle delivery works. Take their coenzyme Q10, for example. It uses a water-and-fat-friendly micelle system that shrinks the nutrient into tiny droplets just 30 nanometers across, so they pass through the intestinal wall much more easily. Their turmeric formula with NovaSOL technology showed 185 times higher bioavailability than ordinary curcumin.

*Study published in Molecular Nutrition & Food Research.

Back then, though, almost no one in China had heard of NovaSOL. The Chinese wellness market was all about “higher is better”—consumers compared milligram counts, but few stopped to ask: How much of this actually gets absorbed?

A Chinese team with deep experience in pharmaceuticals took notice. They’d seen too many cases where people kept upping their doses because they weren’t feeling better—and absorption was usually the culprit. When they first met the NovaSOL team, they didn’t rush into a deal. Instead, they spent three full years doing their homework. They went through every technical paper and production record since 2003, and built a complete quality system—from raw-material tracking to third-party testing—following pharmaceutical-grade standards. Their motto: “Safety is the baseline, effectiveness is the core, and good absorption is the key.” After three years, the evidence matched the theory.

Since partnering in 2016, NovaSOL products have served over 500,000 Chinese families every year. In 2025, the brand celebrated its 30th anniversary. Frank Behnam flew to China in person, bridging the meticulous German research spirit with China’s fast-growing health market.

The Germans spent thirty years perfecting one technology. The Chinese spent three years verifying one product. This wasn’t a simple import deal—it was two long-term players choosing each other.

*Data as of December 31, 2025, from internal sales systems.