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Dr. Philip E. Nelson, Scholle Chair Professor in Food Processing at Purdue University, was awarded the 2007 World Food Prize for his innovations in large-scale storage and transportation of fresh fruit and vegetables using bulk aseptic food processing.
Born in 1934, Nelson grew up working on his family's 500-acre farm near Morristown, Indiana and their tomato canning factory, a task that directly inspired his later scientific work. The seasonality and perishability of the tomato crop limited canning factories to operating at peak capacity only for a short period of time after harvest, a problem that Nelson wrestled with in his research on food preservation technologies later as a PhD student at Purdue. Nelson knew that any successful method that could prevent post-harvest spoilage of tomatoes would be a great boon to the food processing industry and the consumer.
As a Purdue professor, Nelson teamed with William Scholle of the Scholle Chemical Company of Chicago to combine Scholle's bag-in-box technology (originally used store battery acid) with Nelson's aseptic technology to revolutionize the storage and transport of perishable foodstuffs. The technology was first applied so that tomato canneries could store unprocessed tomatoes in large quantities for long periods and package them for consumers only as needed.
What began as a business fix for American tomato canneries became salvation for starving people in developing countries and the work leading to the World Food Prize.
In the 1970s, Nelson worked in India as part of a National Academy of Sciences team trying to solve the food spoilage problem that ruined 50 percent of all food produced in that country. Nelson immediately began developing technologies to help India to preserve food for domestic distribution and consumption and for export and sale overseas. His pioneering technology made possible the economical and safe delivery of nutritious food to the poor and undernourished, significantly increasing the availability and accessibility of food worldwide.
Nelson was awarded the Institute of Food Technologist's prestigious Nicholas Appert Award in 1995 and later served as IFT president (2001-02). In 2007, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels established the Philip E. Nelson Innovation Prize, recognizing outstanding Hoosier scientists for their discoveries, research and inventions. To quote Charles Sizer, Vice President of Research, Universal Food and Beverage Company, “Dr. Nelson’s discoveries have become the predominant method for the preservation of perishable products in Third World countries, and thus was born the ‘Aseptic Revolution.”