How It's Made: Tea Town | City Desk

Tea time for Tulsa 

Milo’s is a third-generation, women-owned beverage company headquartered in the Birmingham, Alabama, area. The 76-year-old company operates three manufacturing plants: two in Alabama and one in Owasso (since September 2020). Tulsa Plant Manager Kequan Jimmerson says the company expanded here because of Tulsa’s central location and its culture of investing in people. Although the company has its own water filtration system, Tulsa’s good water quality also attracted Milo’s to the area.

Glass half full 

Milo’s has grown its product lines from sweet and unsweet tea to lemonade and other beverages, including zero-calorie sweet tea, a lemonade-sweet tea combination and peach sweet tea. The Tulsa plant ships nationwide, but primarily to the West Coast and upper Midwest. Milo’s has grown over 20% a year for more than a decade and in 2021 realized nearly 50% growth, according to leadership. The Tulsa staff, comprised of 190 people, has tripled in size in less than two years. 

Three ingredients 

Tea is freshly brewed daily with tea leaves imported from South America. To make Milo’s Famous Sweet Tea, the brew is blended with pure cane sugar and cooled before it is bottled and refrigerated on site in various sizes.

Jimmerson says the bottling machine can fill 125 gallons per minute. By the end of summer, production will jump to 375 gallons per minute. 

Brewing the best 

Jimmerson started with Milo’s 14 years ago as a forklift operator in Alabama. An emphasis on workforce development is one of the things he appreciates most about the company, in addition to its focus on people before profit. Jimmerson was recently off work for a medical procedure. “One of the owners reached out to me every week I was out, just to get an update on how I was doing,” he says. “They’re busy. And they would call and talk about whatever I wanted to talk about for however long I wanted to talk. It means a lot.”

‘Green’ tea 

The first company in Oklahoma to become Platinum TRUE Zero Waste certified, Milo’s diverts 98% of its waste from landfills. A multi-million-dollar wastewater treatment system also is in the works for the Tulsa plant.