When Tricia Wallwork took the helm of her family’s seven-decades-old sweet tea business, Milo’s had 40 employees and one facility in Alabama that ran a single shift every few days. Now there are more than a thousand employees and three plants producing her family’s iced tea, 24-7.
“Milo’s really is this great American growth story,” says the 50-year-old Wallwork, granddaughter of Milo Carlton, who started serving the sweet tea at his hamburger shop in Birmingham, which grew into a fast-food chain in the 1980s. “Our hockey stick is real, and I know it because I lived it.”
A third-generation CEO, Wallwork runs her family’s $500 million (2025 estimated revenue) business. Under her leadership over the past 13 years, case volume has grown tenfold and the business has maintained a compound annual growth rate of more than 20% as it has transformed into America’s most popular refrigerated iced tea brand.
While many MAHA-Americans have turned to artificial sweeteners or completely eliminated sugar from their diets, Milo’s sweet tea is full sugar, with 26 grams of cane sugar per serving (“pure” and non-GMO, says Milo’s). The tea has found a loyal customer base—Milo’s produced some 200 million gallons last year or about 2 billion servings. It all proves that sugar consumption is “still alive and well” as one food industry investor puts it.
Still based in Alabama, Milo’s became the top-selling refrigerated tea brand in 2025, according to Nielsen IQ, with its gallon jug of signature sweet tea becoming the No. 1 selling read-to-drink tea across American retailers. The brand is also the top-selling liquid tea compared with any shelf-stable brands, too, when measuring based on dollars spent, not volume like bottle or cans purchased. Arizona iced tea, for example, has annual revenue estimated at $2 billion, but not all of that is from tea. And Milo’s lemonade is currently the fastest-growing brand in the country (“wildly exceeding what we’ve projected” says Wallwork). And the distribution goes far beyond the sweet-tea-loving South—Milo’s is sold in 60,000 retail locations, including 4,200 Walmarts as far as Alaska and Hawaii.
Milo’s brews its teas from real leaves in one of its factories in Alabama, Oklahoma and South Carolina that together can produce some 1,800 bottles a minute. Despite the expenses on manufacturing, profitability is strong. Forbes estimates annual EBITDA margins at 20%.
The Carlton family, including Wallwork, her father, Ronnie, stepmother, Sheila, and sister, Leslie, own 100% of the business. Forbes conservatively estimates the business could fetch $1.7 billion based on its profitability. And Wallwork says the family doesn’t plan to sell.
“We think that the challenges ahead are only solvable in generations, not in three to five year increments or quarterly earnings reports,” she says, pointing to the business being zero-waste certified and donating 1% of all profits to local education and environmental charities. “It’s about purpose and we feel we have a deep purpose to build this business so we can impact more individuals.”
Milo’s is on track to hit $1 billion in retail sales by the end of this year—a year ahead of when it was initially projected. Forbes estimates that would mark around $750 million in annual revenue. It will take a lot of sweet tea to get there, but Milo’s board member Michael Pellegrino believes Wallwork is ready.
“She’s always looking for best practices. She wants to build a world-class company,” says Pellegrino, who is also Sargento’s chief operating officer. “She’s a great leader who is never satisfied.”
When Milo Carlton returned from serving in the army during World War II, he married Wallwork’s grandmother, Bea, the next week. In 1946, the two opened up a small restaurant in North Birmingham, Alabama that served burgers, pies and sweet tea. It was open for forty years. Recalls Wallwork, “You either loved it or you didn’t.”
In the 1980s Wallwork’s father Ronnie joined his parents at the family business and started working alongside his wife, Sheila. The family then decided to franchise the burger counter concept in 1982. As locations started popping up across Alabama, the Carltons found themselves delivering burger sauce and sweet tea to about 20 franchises.
And after Sheila noticed a lot of customers buying sweet tea to-go, they started selling tea in neighborhood markets and local stores like Piggly Wiggly to promote the restaurant in 1989. The family decided to sell the sweet tea in jugs, which Wallwork says was “intentional. In order to signal to the consumer that they needed to treat it like milk because it contained no preservatives.”
And the sweet tea was in demand beyond the Milo-verse: Later that year, Ronnie delivered a shipment to Alabama’s first Walmart supercenter in Jasper, not far from Milo’s headquarters in Birmingham.
In 2002, the family decided to sell the restaurant business for less than $10 million—but the buyer didn’t want the tea business, so it stayed with the Carltons.
After spending high school summers working in her family’s small sweet tea plant, Wallwork became a vegetarian while attending Auburn University—“funded by burgers, which is ironic,” she notes—and, with her philosophy and Spanish degree, she then went to law school at the University of Alabama. “I was never going to join the family business,” Wallwork says.
But in 2004 at 29, after becoming disillusioned while working at a law firm for a few years, she decided to give the sweet tea business a chance and joined as general counsel and vice president. It was a small operation run by someone outside the family, with just two flavors and 16 employees manually filling each jug.
After a few years, Wallwork realized the beverage industry was for her, and she asked the rest of her family’s shareholders if she could take over as CEO. In 2012, the move became official, and Wallwork set out to overhaul what was then an estimated $40 million in annual revenue business, producing about 4.8 million cases of tea.
Sweet Gig: Milo’s opened a $200 million manufacturing facility in South Carolina last year that had 23,000 applicants for 129 jobs.
Milo’s Sweet Tea
As CEO, Wallwork soon expanded distribution at Walmart, landed new deals at major retailers such as Publix, Kroger, Dollar General, and kept hitting sales milestones. Wallwork says her early strategy was simply: “Sell, sell, sell. I was like, how can I get in front of the customer?”
“Every time the company doubles, I have to triple,” adds Wallwork. “I’m a very different leader than I was when I first started.”
And Wallwork has reinvested in the business, building two new manufacturing facilities in the past five years. The first opened during the early weeks of the pandemic (just in time for the biggest sales growth years of her CEO tenure) and the most recent was this past spring—a $200 million manufacturing and distribution facility in Spartanburg County, South Carolina that had 23,000 applicants for 129 jobs.
Melody Richard, Walmart US’s senior vice president of pantry, says Milo’s is one of the best brands it works with when it comes to fulfillment rates. It’s also “one of our most innovative suppliers bringing new products to life with us.” Richard even calls Milo’s one of Walmart’s fastest-growing brands, yet she says what really stands out is the leadership of Wallwork.
“Tricia is smart and innovative and committed to excellence and to driving results. But then she’s also leading with kindness and humility and pouring into others,” says Richard. “For me that is what I gravitate towards, and I want to be a better leader because I’ve met Tricia.”
Milo’s is now producing nearly 62 million cases of tea and lemonade with nine flavors and three size variations for each, but Wallwork says she still sees double-digit growth ahead, including for Milo’s core tea business and its top retail customers as well as with new distribution at convenience and club stores and through restaurant and foodservice wholesaling. This year, Milo’s will enter a new drink category while expanding its flavors to 11, launching more seasonal options and growing its zero-sugar line.
“We’ve built a growth company and we want to keep growing,” says Wallwork. “We have our foot on the gas.”