Our Story
Our Story
There is a boy standing at the edge of a road in Balangkayan, Eastern Samar.
He has no parents. No older brothers to guide him. 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. Two days. Through the terrain of Eastern Samar that faces the Pacific and takes the full force of everything the ocean sends. Across to Leyte, where the Visayas Agricultural College in Baybay offered something real: a chance to learn what the land yields and what a person can build from it. He has no money for transportation. He has no one to walk with. He arrives anyway.
That boy's name was Tito Contado. He was born in 1936 in Balangkayan, Eastern Samar. He would go on to earn his MSc at the University of the Philippines Los Baños, his PhD at Cornell University on a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship, serve as Chief of Extension, Education and Communication Service at the United Nations FAO — overseeing programs in more than 120 countries across every continent — and return home in 1998 to ask a question that would define the final chapter of his remarkable life.
In June 1999, he underwent sextuple heart bypass surgery. During his recovery, he began consuming noni fruit juice. What he noticed — with the instincts of a trained scientist who had spent twenty years evaluating evidence across fifty countries — compelled him to investigate.
He spent two years researching noni: its phytochemistry, its traditional uses across the Pacific and Southeast Asia, the natural fermentation process that preserved its bioactive compounds. In 2001, having satisfied himself that the science was sound, Dr. Tito Contado registered Phil. Morinda Citrifolia, Inc. with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
He was sixty-five years old. A bypass survivor. A retired United Nations official. A Rockefeller scholar. A grandfather.
He was starting again.
Read the full story → The Boy Who Walked Two Days"
meet the FOUNDER
Dr. Tito Contado
Dr. Tito E. Contado founded PhilNONI in 2001 after two years of rigorous scientific research into Morinda citrifolia — the noni fruit that grows wild along Philippine coastlines. His credentials are among the most distinguished of any nutraceutical founder in Southeast Asia: a PhD from Cornell University (Rockefeller Foundation scholar), an MSc from the University of the Philippines Los Baños, and a twenty-year career at the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, where he served as Chief of the Extension, Education and Communication Service — the organisation's most senior technical role in agricultural knowledge transfer — and implemented development programs across more than 120 countries.
He brought to PhilNONI the same standard he had applied throughout his career: follow the evidence, prove it rigorously, share it openly. The result was a production process built from scientific first principles — 100% locally sourced Philippine noni, naturally fermented, zero additives, zero preservatives, zero added water — that has not changed in twenty-five years.
Overseeing founding quality control and production was Dr. Florita S. Maslog, PhD — Fellow of the Philippine Association of Medical Technologists (FPAMET) and Fellow of the Philippine Academy of Microbiology (FPAM). A co-founder of the Silliman University Medical Technology Program alongside National Scientist Dr. Angel Alcala, Dra. Maslog has ensured that every bottle of PhilNONI meets the highest standards of microbiological safety and consistency. In 2023, she published 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 in the country.
One agriculturist. One scientist. One standard. Not a single reformulation in twenty-five years.
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