What quality control actually looked like, for years, one batch at a time
By Florita S. Maslog, PhD
Scientific Advisor Emeritus, Philippine Morinda Citrifolia, Inc.
Adapted for general readers by the PhilNONI editorial team from Dra. Maslog’s account, and reviewed and approved by the author.
The two studies I have written about here were unusual events. A question came up, I designed an experiment, and eventually the results were published in a journal. That is the part of science people tend to hear about.
This is about the other part. The unglamorous, repetitive, every-single-batch part that never gets published anywhere — and that matters far more to what ends up in your bottle.
For years at PMCI, my job was quality control. That meant one thing above all: making sure that every batch we released was the same as the last one, and that nothing left the building that should not have.
It starts before the fruit arrives
People assume quality control begins at the factory door. Ours began earlier than that — in the coastal villages where our noni is gathered.
I ran seminars for the fruit gatherers themselves. How to tell which fruit is ready. How to handle it. How to begin the fermentation properly before it is ever delivered to us. These were not formalities. A batch that arrives wrong cannot be fixed later by any amount of laboratory work, and the people who determine whether it arrives right are not chemists — they are families on the coast who have been gathering this fruit for a long time.
Teaching them was, in a real sense, the first quality control step. Everything after it is verification.
What happens when a delivery arrives
Every delivery is inspected before anything is accepted — the vehicle, the sacks, the physical condition of the fruit. Sacks are washed down before they come inside. Nothing enters the production area simply because it showed up.
Then comes sorting, done by hand. Our staff go through the raw material and remove anything that does not belong — and in an agricultural product arriving from the field, things do not belong more often than you would like. Plastic, twigs, twine, stones. This is slow work and there is no machine that does it as well as a careful person does.
The fruit that passes sorting then goes for testing before it is allowed to go any further.
The tests, and why we repeat them
At every stage — raw material, mid-process, and finished product — we run the same core checks:
- Microbiological testing, by standard plate count, to confirm the material is clean to specification.
- pH, which for our juice sits in a narrow acidic band.
- Brix, a measure of dissolved solids, which tells us the juice is what it should be.
- Sensory checks — odor, taste, color. Amber, pungent, unmistakable. After enough years, you know immediately when something is off, and then you go find out why.
These are not run once. They are run again at each stage, and repeated weekly during ageing, on every tank, until the juice is ready. The same four checks, over and over, for years.
That repetition is the entire point. A single good test result tells you about one moment. Doing the same test on every batch, at every stage, for years, is what lets you say the product is consistent — and consistency, not any single impressive result, is what quality control actually means.
The instruments themselves are calibrated annually by DOST. An uncalibrated instrument does not give you wrong answers loudly; it gives them quietly, and you will believe them.
Fermentation, ageing, and bottling
Our juice ferments naturally, over months, in sealed drums and then in bulk tanks for ageing. No starter cultures are added, and no heat is applied to speed it along. It takes as long as it takes.
During ageing, testing continues weekly on each tank. When the juice is finally ready, only the upper, clearer portion is drawn off for bottling. What settles below — the latak — goes to capsule production, which I have written about separately.
Bottles and caps are washed and sterilized before filling, by methods appropriate to each material. And before any batch goes to market, samples from it are tested one final time.
The cabinet of bottles nobody drinks
There is one more step, and it is my favorite, because it is the one that seems least useful and turns out to matter most.
From every batch, we set aside two or three bottles. They are labelled and kept in a designated cabinet. Nobody sells them. Nobody drinks them. They simply sit there.
Those retention samples are how we can go back years later and answer a question we did not know to ask at the time. When I studied how our juice held up over five years on a shelf, I was not testing a hypothetical — I was opening bottles that had been sitting in that cabinet since the day they were filled. That study was only possible because someone, years earlier, had done the boring thing of setting bottles aside.
Who checks the checker
In-house testing is necessary but not sufficient. A laboratory that only ever grades its own work eventually starts believing itself.
So samples also go out to third-party institutions for independent assay — including DOST, BIOTECH at UPLB, and accredited commercial laboratories in Metro Manila — for product registration requirements, annual HACCP inspection, and nutritional analysis required by the FDA.
Our procedures were written to conform with Good Manufacturing Practice, under the oversight framework of the National Food Authority, the Food Development Center, and the FDA. I wrote those guidelines myself, and then I was the one who had to follow them.
What this does and does not tell you
Quality control tells you that a product is consistent, clean, and what it says it is. That is all it tells you, and it is not a small thing — but it is worth being clear about the limits.
None of this speaks to what noni does in the body. Testing pH and plate counts tells you nothing about health effects, and I would not want anyone to read it that way. This is about manufacturing discipline, not medicine.
What it does mean is this: when you open a bottle of PhilNONI, it is not the first time anyone has checked. It is the last of many times.
Read Dra. Maslog’s published research →
No approved therapeutic claims. This product is a food supplement and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.
MABISANG PANG-KALUSUGAN / PAALALA: Ang produktong ito ay food supplement at HINDI GAMOT, at hindi dapat gamiting panggamot sa anumang uri ng sakit.