Most claims about drinking water ask you to trust a laboratory. This one does not. You can run it on a kitchen counter with a bowl of green gram, and you will see the answer inside a week.
TÜV SÜD ran it properly first, over fifteen days. Same seed, same light, same conditions, three separate growing systems — a sprout maker, damp cotton, and cocopeat. The only variable was the water: Crompton Rhion Biofier on one side, a reverse osmosis purifier on the other, both drawn from the same supply on the same day.
Same seeds. Same conditions. Only the water was different.
Start with germination, the simplest measure of all — how many seeds actually wake up.
- In the sprout maker, nine seeds in ten germinated on Biofier water. On RO water it was eight in ten.
- On cotton the gap was wider: nine in ten against seven in ten, across all three repeats.
- In cocopeat, Biofier water produced 80–90% germination against 70%, and shoots of about 15 cm against 9.4 cm by day seven.
Then the seeds themselves. Green gram takes up water before it does anything else, and the Biofier seeds took up more of it — heavier by roughly seven per cent on day one, and by nearly sixteen per cent by day three.
By day seven, the difference was already growing
This is where it stops being subtle. Shoot length was measured daily from day four in the sprout maker, averaged across ten seeds and three repeats.
- Day four: 9.3 cm on Biofier water against 5.9 cm on RO.
- Day five: 10.3 cm against 6.5 cm.
- Day six: 12.8 cm against 7.6 cm.
- Day seven: 14.2 cm against 10.0 cm — 42.1% more growth.
On cotton the same pattern held at a smaller scale: 8.7 cm against 5.8 cm by day seven, a 49% difference.
More minerals in the grown plant
Length is visible but it is not the interesting part. The sprouts were then broken down — whole plant, shoot, cotyledons and seed coat — and analysed for moisture, protein, crude fibre and mineral content by AOAC methods and ICP-OES.
In the whole plant grown on Biofier water, magnesium was 84% higher (652 against 355 mg/kg), potassium 66% higher (3,839 against 2,319), manganese 54% higher and phosphorus 33% higher (1,294 against 976). On a dry-weight basis the whole plant carried 37.5% protein against 27.8%, and more crude fibre too. The cotton-grown plants told the same story: calcium 271 against 79 mg/kg, magnesium 275 against 147, potassium 1,112 against 702.
The report’s own summary is blunt about it: Biofier water “consistently performed better than RO water in promoting green gram germination and early plant development”, with “greater retention and uptake of essential minerals”.
Why water would make any difference
A seed is not drinking H₂O. It is drinking whatever is dissolved in the water, and using those dissolved ions to build tissue. The same study measured the two waters before the seeds went in: the RO water carried 105 mg/L of dissolved solids with 7.5 mg/L of calcium and 4.6 of magnesium; the Biofier water carried 152 mg/L with 11.9 of calcium and 6.0 of magnesium, and more than twice the alkalinity. The seed on RO water simply has less to work with.
That is the whole mechanism. Nothing is added to Biofier water. Rather less is taken out of it. What was in the four waters →
What the study does not show
This is a plant study, not a human health study. It demonstrates that, under controlled conditions, two water compositions produced measurably different germination, growth and mineral uptake in green gram. It was run ten times in internal labs and three times at TÜV, and the direction held every time. It does not prove a health benefit in people, and it was not designed to.
Running it yourself
Two identical jars. A handful of green gram in each, rinsed. Fill one from your current purifier and one from a Biofier, drain and rinse twice a day with the same water, and keep both in the same spot. Photograph them on day four and day seven.
Home conditions are not laboratory conditions, and one run of a home experiment is an anecdote rather than evidence. What it is good for is checking whether the direction the certified study found shows up on your own counter. It generally does.
Report references: TÜV SÜD / TUV India TUV(I)/5149/26-27/0062606999, 5210/26-27/0062607162-7165 and 5969/26-27/0072602226-2252, dated 10 August 2026.
