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........

© Forbes