A family business since 2019
It all started with alcalina. And a health problem we could not ignore.
Bionobo began with a thyroid issue in our family. It pushed us to look beyond the answers immediately around us, and deeper into how other cultures, particularly in the East, had traditionally approached health and healing.
What the search found
Once medicine. Then forgotten.
That search led us to fulvic and humic minerals: natural substances with more than 3,000 years of traditional use, once valued as medicine, and largely forgotten in the modern West.
Where it starts
We were looking for help, not a product to sell.
The more we learned about these ancient minerals, the more we wanted to experience them properly. But in 2019, finding a genuinely high-quality fulvic and humic mineral product in Europe was almost impossible.
What was available was often weak, diluted or poorly explained. There was no meaningful standard for origin, concentration, extraction or molecular integrity.
So we began looking outside Europe for the real thing.
“Fulvic minerals” could mean almost anything. And the quality was generally average at best.
What became alcalina
We did not want just fulvic minerals. We wanted the best version we could find.
We contacted producers, studied extraction methods, compared materials, and learned how dramatically quality can change depending on the source and the process.
The deposit
Two years in alkaline water, and nothing forced.
Eventually we found an exceptional mineral deposit in the Mississippi River Valley, and a specialist who purified it slowly in alkaline water for around two years, without harsh chemical extraction, and without breaking apart the natural relationship between its fulvic minerals, humic minerals and trace elements. That became alcalina, the first Bionobo product.
How Bionobo grew
One discovery led us to the next.
Once we understood how much origin, time and processing could change a natural material, we could no longer look at supplements the same way.
We began searching for other ancient tools that had kept their original integrity.
- Three-year fermented kōso, from Japan.
- Rare shilajit, purified in cold mountain water and dried slowly in the sun.
- Medicinal plants and mushrooms.
- Naturally complex whole foods.
A note from the family
alcalina was not created to begin a product line. It was brought to Europe because it was the product we wanted for ourselves.
We have tried hundreds of ingredients, compounds and suppliers since. Most never became Bionobo products. The ones that did earned a permanent place in our own lives.
What we learned
The name of the ingredient is not the standard.
Two products can carry the same ingredient on the label and be completely different things. Four questions decide which one you are holding.
Where it comes from
The deposit, the slope, the seam. Two materials with the same name can begin in completely different ground.
How it is extracted
Water and time, or heat, acid and solvent. The method decides what survives the journey out of the rock.
Whether it was rushed
Heated, isolated, diluted. Every shortcut leaves the label intact and takes something out of the bottle.
Whether it stayed whole
Natural molecular complexity, still assembled. Nobody prints this on a label, and it decides almost everything.
Long before it reaches the bottle.
This is where the Bionobo standard starts.