Milo’s Tea

I'd like to introduce Milo's Tea. Milo's Tea is a multi-billion dollar women-owned beverage powerhouse. And when it came to OneStream, they had real struggles. Struggles with spreadsheets, manual workarounds.

They had tried other tools, but the tools couldn't scale, couldn't meet their needs. And it's one thing to have the challenge meeting your needs today, but what they found is it was actually hindering growth for tomorrow.

So what I'd like to do now is welcome to the stage Milo's CFO to hear more about their story. Please welcome Milo's Tea, Chief Financial Officer, Emily Backstrom. Hello, Splash 2026. I am thrilled to be here to share Milo's journey with OneStream with you today.

For those of you in the room not familiar with Milo's, we are a family-owned, certified women-owned company known for crafting the number one selling refrigerated tea and the fastest growing lemonade in the United States.

And we are on track to be a billion dollar brand in retail sales by the end of this year. Pretty incredible. Milo's is the category leader in refrigerated beverages. We use high-quality, real ingredients, no dyes, no acids, no preservatives.

We're available in most major retailers across the United States, over 60,000 locations. We operate three large-scale, state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities, employ approximately 1,000 associates in the communities of Birmingham, Alabama, which is our hometown, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Spartanburg, South Carolina.

We're currently in our third generation of leadership. Our current CEO, Tricia Walwork, is the granddaughter of our founders, Milo and B. Carlton. Now, what you may not know is Milo's has not always been a tea company.

We actually were founded on the north side of Birmingham in 1946 as a hamburger stand right after World War II when Mr. Milo returned to the United States. The restaurant was so popular, the family began to franchise the restaurants over time in the 1980s.

But what they started to learn is that people were actually coming to the restaurant just to buy the tea. So they made their next big decision. They sold the franchise and capitalized our first manufacturing facility and started bottling sweet tea and selling it just down the road in the Piggly Wiggly in Birmingham, Alabama.

Now, fast forward to today, we're in all 50 states. We offer 11 flavors of tea and lemonade, and we aren't done yet. As a family-owned business, we think generationally about impact. We want to ensure we're not just delivering delicious beverages today, but we're doing our part to protect communities for the environment over time.

We are proud that our manufacturing facilities are certified platinum zero-waste operations. We donate 1% of our annual profits to organizations focused on education, sustainability, community disaster relief, and we're very proud we were named number three most loved workplace in America by Newsweek.

Over the last ten years, under Trish's leadership, we have exponentially grown consumer demand, and all functions of the company have been on a journey to step change our capabilities. We chose to partner with OneStream because with growth, expanding distribution, and increasing product and channel complexity, we knew we needed to have a more agile financial planning essential for a future success.

Now, before we partnered with OneStream, we did have manual, spreadsheet-heavy processes, systems that couldn't scale with our growth, and fragmented data and visibility. Maybe some of you are in the same situation.

Our legacy systems gave us limited visibility to drill down. We couldn't connect assumptions with results. And our close cash flow, CapEx, and cost accounting processes were just, frankly, very manual and time-consuming.

We lacked workflow, governance, and agility. In short, our FP&A team could not move at the pace of the business, and we were in a position to provide critical insights. So we knew we needed a different solution that could grow with Milo's.

And Milo's grows pretty fast. You know, inside of Milo's, we talk about we all need to 10 times ourselves in order to keep pace with the explosive growth of the business. Well, we needed a CPM tool that could also 10 times at that pace and grow with us as well.

The good news is what we found in OneStream is what we believe is a platform built for the long term. And why is that? First and foremost, OneStream is a single, unified platform, and it's built to scale over time.

We can grow with OneStream. It's a tool that our finance and accounting team can maintain without extensive support from IT resources. And we could see line of sight to having a very integrated forecast across the P&L, cash flow, all the way through the balance sheet and over a multi-year horizon.

We also saw the agility to do scenario planning, agility that just, frankly, was too cumbersome in our old manual system. And finally, we saw OneStream investing in our future capabilities. We just heard Jeremy talk about some of those just a moment ago.

And perhaps you're like the Milo's team who's here this week looking to learn more about sensible AI at this conference as well. So we did find OneStream to be a truly transformative platform for us. It's not just a budgeting tool.

Life with OneStream looks different. It looks streamlined, efficient, more visibility and insight, and supports our continued growth and complexity. We were able to see a lot of benefits very quickly.

It's intuitive. It's user-friendly. It's become our single source of truth. And as we think about it, we were able to see really remarkable results. You can see many numbers here up on the screen. But I will tell you, to me, what has been the most important win, it's the smiles on my finance team's face.

I have a finance team who's energized, who can unlock insights at the pace of the business. They're spending weeks, their time now with their business partners, not tied up in manual forecasting processes.

But let's be honest. We have lessons learned, too. We all do, right? The first is implementation partner selection is critical. And I have to give a shout-out to the AIT team, who I know is here, who has been just an incredible partner for Milo's through our transition to OneStream.

The second learning is bottlenecks moved downstream in the system. We were talking more about data and governance, transparency through the process. So we had lessons learned for sure. My ask is come talk to the Milo's team who's here this week.

Ask them more about our lessons learned and our growth journey with Milo's in OneStream. And in return, we would love to share with you one of our delicious teas and lemonades, which are on the front porch just down the hallway.

And we want to hear your lessons learned, too. We're going to be stronger by hearing all of our lessons learned together. So thank you in advance for that. And as Milo's continues our growth journey, new flavors, new channels, new formats, new platforms all around the horizon.

And as our team knows, we're on a journey not just to a billion-dollar brand, but a billion-dollar brand and well beyond. We will also continue our growth stream with OneStream. So what's next for us? As simple as it sounds, job number one is continued learning.

OneStream is not a one and done. We are on a journey to unlock the system's capabilities over time. The second is we have more to do in the space of cash flow and capital enhancements. Anyone who feels like they're ahead of the curve on that, please come find my team.

And then, as I mentioned, we are here at Splash to learn a lot about sensible AI as well. We look forward to learning more, too. So we are very grateful to OneStream, AIT. I have to say a thank you to my team for all the work that they have done.

It has been a true partnership that is helping us fuel our growth. So as we like to say at Milo's, let's grow. Thank you.