German life-science startup Evanium launched its dual-coating system earlier this year to meet significant demand for tech that can disrupt the status quo in botanicals bioavailability.
“Botanical ingredients are getting more and more popular with consumers. But one fact that is often overlooked is many of these plant compounds have very low bioavailability,” David Ofner, co-founder and CTO, told NutraIngredients. “Most compounds are very lipophilic so they don’t mix well with water… The second fact is they have a very densely packed crystalline structure and this makes it difficult for water to break it up and dissolve it.”
Built around a dual‑coating system, Optisolv combines an inner cyclodextrin-based core — a ring-shaped starch molecules, masking the hydrophobicity of the compounds—with an outer shell of sunflower, lecithin and starch.
While it is common for a cyclodextrin core on its own to crystalize during processing, this dual-coating structure improves permeability with all-natural ingredients, he explained.
“There are lot of of encapsulation techniques and carriers on the market,” Ofner said. “You have on one hand liposomal or phospholipid-based systems which are popular with consumers because they’re fully natural, but they don’t achieve high performance levels in terms of solubility or bioavailability.
“Then you have pharma-grade systems which use synthetic emulsifiers or polymers and they achieve great performance results, but they are not natural.”
Optisolv aims to achieve “the best of both worlds”, he explained.
Ofner and his co-founder and CEO Felix Rolka launched the company seven years ago with the plan to deliver a flavonoid-rich supplement, but they diverged into encapsulation technology when they realized the big industry opportunity was in solving the botanical bioavailability conundrum.
After launching its first Optisolv-powered ingredient, Optisolv curcumin, with German manufacturer Hevert-Arzneimittel, in 2025, the company has built its portfolio to include four ingredients: Curcumin, berberine, boswellia, and passiflora.
The co-founders told NI the team has been working in stealth in the lab since 2019 and Vitafoods was their first opportunity to exhibit and speak openly about their offering.
“The Vitafoods response has been great,” said Rolka, “We’ve spent quite a long time developing our technology and now we are ready to show the market what we are able to do.”
