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A note before you begin: this is a long read – about 12 minutes. It tells the full story of how PhilNONI came to be, beginning with a teenage boy in Eastern Samar, Philippines with no money, no parents, and no plan except to walk. If you’re short on time, please bookmark the blog. It rewards a full read. |
There is a boy standing at the edge of a road in Balangkayan, Eastern Samar.
He is somewhere in his early teen years. Both of his parents are gone. His two older brothers, the ones who might have guided him, protected him, shown him what it looked like to become a man when everything else had fallen away, are also gone.
What remains is an older sister, two infant siblings who cannot yet fend for themselves, and the boy himself.
Old enough to understand that something must be done. Young enough that no one would blame him for doing nothing.
He is not going to do nothing.
He has heard that there is a school. That it is in Baybay, across on the island of Leyte then called the Baybay National Agricultural School (eventually Visayas Agricultural College,) where a person could learn something real about the land and what it yields.
That to reach it, a person must walk for two days. He has no money for transportation. He has no one to walk with. What he has is the understanding, carried in the body rather than the mind, the way children carry the things that will define them, that education is the only door that cannot be taken away once you walk through it.
So he walks.
From Balangkayan, through the terrain of Eastern Samar that faces the Pacific and takes the full force of everything the ocean sends. Across to Leyte.
Two days. Not on roads — there were almost none. What existed in Eastern Samar and across Leyte in the early 1950s was a network of foot trails the locals called agianan — narrow paths worn into the earth by farmers, hunters, and travellers over generations. Wide enough for one person, or a carabao. Unmarked. Maintained by no one except the villages they connected, whose residents occasionally cleared the encroaching brush. Direct in the way that trails are direct — straight over ridges, through forest, across streams — not winding like roads seeking gentler terrain.
He would have crossed the San Juanico Strait on a wooden pump boat from an informal dock with no terminal, no schedule, and no guarantee of passage at any particular hour.
On the Leyte side, Tacloban had some roads. But once he turned west toward the mountains — toward Baybay on the far coast where the Visayas Agricultural College waited — the roads ended. The highway that today connects Tacloban to Ormoc to Baybay did not exist. What existed was the trail. Cooler under forest canopy than any open road, but rougher, harder to follow, and unforgiving of wrong turns.
In the 1950s, the trail was the highway.
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Education is the only door that cannot be taken away once you walk through it. |
We do not know everything about those two days. We do not know exactly where he slept or what he ate or whether the road frightened him.
What we know is that he arrived. And that when he arrived at the Visayas Agricultural College in Baybay, he worked as a houseboy, tending pigs, earning his keep in labor rather than money so that he could sit in a classroom and learn.
The boy's name was Tito Contado.
He was born in 1936 in Balangkayan, Eastern Samar in a coastal municipality on the eastern edge of the Philippines where the Pacific is never far and the land asks everything of the people who live on it.
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He earned his Bachelor of Science at the Visayas Agricultural College at the same institution where he had first arrived as a houseboy, tending pigs in exchange for the right to learn.
From there, he went on to complete his Master of Science at the University of the Philippines Los Baños.
Then something happened that places his story in a category beyond ordinary achievement. The Rockefeller Foundation, one of the world's most rigorous and selective scientific philanthropies, whose agricultural scholarships in the mid-twentieth century were explicitly designed to identify exceptional scientists from developing nations capable of transforming their countries' futures selected Tito Contado for a scholarship to pursue his doctorate at Cornell University in New York.
The boy who had tended pigs in Baybay to earn a seat in a classroom was now being told, by one of the world's most distinguished institutions, that his mind was worth investing in.
The Rockefeller Foundation did not award these scholarships out of charity. They awarded them out of judgment in the considered assessment that a particular person, given the right resources, would do something that mattered.
He completed his PhD in Agricultural Extension and Adult Education at Cornell and returned to the Philippines, joining the faculty of the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture in Los Baños (UPLB).
In 1978, he joined the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome starting first as a Program Officer, then as Senior Officer, and eventually as Chief of the Extension, Education and Communication Service the organization's most senior technical role in agricultural knowledge transfer.
Over his twenty years at the FAO, he implemented or supervised development programmes in more than 120 member countries and visited fifty of them across every continent on earth. He had also previously served as Consultant for Regional Planning for UNICEF in Indonesia.
In November 1998, Dr. Tito Contado retired from the FAO and came home.
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He came home with a specific question on his mind. Having spent two decades watching developing nations struggle to translate agricultural knowledge into economic products — to move science out of the laboratory and into the lives of ordinary people — he wanted to understand why Filipino researchers so rarely made that journey.
Why the knowledge stayed locked in institutions. Why the marketplace went unserved. Why a country so abundant in natural resources so often left those resources untouched.
He had just months to sit with that question before it became secondary to something far more urgent.
In June 1999, Dr. Tito Contado underwent sextuple heart bypass surgery.
Recovery from a single bypass is long and uncertain.
Six bypasses is a surgery of an altogether different magnitude. It is one that confronts a person not just physically but existentially.
The body that had walked two days through Eastern Samar and Leyte, that had studied by whatever light was available in Baybay, that had navigated the corridors of the FAO in Rome across two decades of international service; that body had now been opened and rebuilt on a surgeon's table.
During his recovery, Dr. Contado began consuming noni fruit juice regularly.
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Noni — Morinda citrifolia, known in the Philippines by its local names: apatot, bangkoro, nino, lido, depending on where in the archipelago you stand. It grows wild along the coastlines of the Philippine islands and has done so for longer than anyone has been keeping records. Polynesian healers used it for over two thousand years.
Filipino coastal communities — communities very much like the one in Balangkayan where Dr. Contado was born — had their own traditions with it, passed down through generations in the quiet way that useful knowledge travels when it has no institution to carry it.
The fruit is unglamorous. Lumpy and pale, with a smell that most people find challenging and a taste that takes patience to acquire. It does not announce itself. It had never needed to.
But Dr. Contado noticed something. The recovery that might have diminished him — that might have drawn the curtain on an active life already so remarkably full — was not diminishing him.
He felt, with the instincts of a trained agricultural scientist who had spent twenty years evaluating evidence in the field across fifty countries, that something in what he was consuming was working.
A different man might have left it at that. Taken his noni juice, been grateful, and said nothing more about it.
Dr. Contado was not a different man.
He was the boy from Balangkayan who had walked two days alone through Eastern Samar and Leyte because he understood that knowing something was better than not knowing it. He was the man the Rockefeller Foundation had identified as someone who, given the right resources, would do something that mattered.
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He was not built for leaving things unexplored. |
He spent two years researching noni. He studied its phytochemistry, its traditional uses across the Pacific and Southeast Asia, the emerging scientific literature, the production possibilities in the Philippine context.
He sent samples abroad for laboratory testing. He studied the natural fermentation process through which the juice had traditionally been extracted. He examined methodically what preserved the fruit's bioactive compounds and what destroyed them. He asked the questions that a career in agricultural science had taught him to ask, and he followed the answers wherever they led.
In 2001, having satisfied himself that the science was sound, Dr. Tito Contado registered Phil. Morinda Citrifolia, Inc. with the Philippines Securities and Exchange Commission. He was sixty-five years old. A multiply bypass survivor. A retired United Nations official. A Rockefeller scholar. A grandfather.
He was starting again.
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What he built over the following two decades was, on its surface, a noni juice company.
But the substance beneath it, the thing that gave it its particular character and its unbroken standards across a quarter century, was something that cannot be manufactured or acquired by a competitor with a larger budget.
It was the judgment of a man who had spent his entire life in service of the idea that knowledge, properly applied, changes lives.
The production standards Dr. Contado established were uncompromising from the very first bottle: one hundred percent locally sourced Philippine noni fruit, naturally fermented without additives, without preservatives, without added water or concentrates of any kind.
The same method that traditional Philippine communities had used for generations — validated now by the science he had spent two years verifying, and by the twenty years of international agricultural expertise he had accumulated before it.
He eventually brought in Dr. Florita S. Maslog — a PhD microbiologist, Fellow of the Philippine Association of Medical Technologists (FPAMET), and Fellow of the Philippine Academy of Microbiology (FPAM) — to oversee quality control and production.
A scientist of formidable credentials in her own right, Dra. Maslog had co-founded the Silliman University Medical Technology Programme alongside National Scientist Dr. Angel Alcala.
She brought to PhilNONI the rigor of a microbiologist whose standard was not 'good enough' but 'correct.'
Decades into her tenure, she would publish peer-reviewed research in the Silliman Journal specifically isolating the phytochemical compounds present in Philippine noni — the only published scientific study of its kind on a local noni product anywhere in the country.
One agriculturist. One scientist. One uncompromising standard. Not One single reformulation in twenty-five years.
The product reached Mercury Drug. Then export markets: the United States, South Korea, Hong Kong, China, Dubai, Switzerland.
Awards followed: Best New Health and Nutrition Product at the Natural and Organic Products Asia Awards in Hong Kong in 2014. Recognition from the Philippine Medical Association. Nomination for multiple Philippine Top Choice Awards for Excellence.
And through it all, something that Dr. Contado considered at least as important as any award: over thirty coastline farming families in the Philippines — harvesting a fruit that had previously carried zero commercial value, growing wild on the same kind of shores where Dr. Contado himself had grown up — found in PhilNONI a reliable and dignified source of livelihood.
Sixty tonnes of noni fruit a year. Millions of pesos in income flowing to communities that the mainstream economy had largely passed by.
The wild plant of the Philippine coast transformed into a multi-million peso commodity earning foreign exchange for the nation.
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There is something worth sitting with in all of this.
Dr. Tito Contado did not set out to build a supplement company. He set out, as he always had, to follow the evidence wherever it led and then do something useful with what he found.
The Rockefeller scholarship and the Cornell PhD and the FAO career and the bypass recovery and the two years of noni research are not separate episodes of a fortunate life. They are the same story, told across different decades and different continents, in the same voice.
The story of a boy from Balangkayan, Eastern Samar, who had lost everyone who might have carried him and chose to carry himself instead.
Who understood, before he was old enough to articulate it, that the only thing worth walking two days for was the chance to learn something true.
Who was recognised by the Rockefeller Foundation as someone capable of changing something important.
Who spent the rest of his life in Los Baños, in Rome, in 120 countries across every continent, and finally back in Los Baños, Laguna proving that assessment correct.
When that man came home. When his body was tested as it had never been tested before. When he found something growing wild on the shores of the country that had given him so little and asked so much in his earliest years, he did what he had always done.
He studied it carefully.
He proved it rigorously.
He shared it openly.
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That is what is in every bottle of PhilNONI. Not just noni. |
The story of what one Filipino did with nothing but two days, an education earned with sweat and effort, a Rockefeller scholarship, and the will to arrive.
And then to keep going, long after most men would have considered the journey complete.
About PhilNONI
Phil. Morinda Citrifolia, Inc. (PMCI) was founded in 2001 by Dr. Tito E. Contado in Los Baños, Laguna. PhilNONI produces 100% pure, naturally fermented Philippine noni juice, capsules, and tea — all FDA-registered, all preservative-free, all made from locally harvested fruit and quality-assured by Dr. Florita S. Maslog, FPAMET, FPAM. Available nationwide at Mercury Drug and online at philnoni.com.ph.
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Continue reading To understand the science behind PhilNONI — the peer-reviewed research, Dr. Maslog's published studies on Philippine noni, and what makes this product different — read: 'Why Trust PhilNONI: The Science, the Scientists, and 24 Years of Philippine Noni.' |