The herbal tea maker Traditional Medicinals said Monday that it has begun production at its Franklin County manufacturing plant.
The company first announced its $47 million, 110,000-square-foot facility at the Summit View Business Park in January 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Virginia. It broke ground on the project in July 2025.
The first product made at the Franklin County site was the company’s Throat Coat tea for sore throats. The tea features slippery elm sourced from throughout Appalachia, and the company has a partnership with Virginia Tech to research the slippery elm tree, according to a news release.
“This is just the start of what we hope will be a long and mutually rewarding partnership with Virginia,” Traditional Medicinals CEO Joe Stanziano said in the release.
The company said its Franklin County site has created 19 jobs thus far, all of which were filled by local residents. It has said it’s aiming for 57 total new jobs over three years.
The factory is its second after one in Sebastopol, California, and the company employs more than 230 people overall.
Stanziano said in an interview last year that the company chose Virginia to have an East Coast location for better distribution on this side of the country as well as to have easy access to the Port of Virginia for importing herbs.
The Franklin County factory is all electric, with no on-site fossil fuels, according to the news release. It has four bioswales, or drainage channels, that capture and filter runoff from the roof and parking lot.
Its construction brought something new to Franklin County: the county’s first tilt-up concrete building, which, as the name suggests, means it was made by building concrete walls horizontally and lifting them into place with cranes.
Dani Poe, Franklin County’s economic development director, said in an email Monday that Traditional Medicinals has been “intentional about building relationships, hiring locally and finding ways to connect with the community.”
Poe said that the company’s announcement also is a milestone for the Summit View Business Park, where Traditional Medicinals joined ValleyStar Credit Union’s administrative campus and Stik-Pak, which makes flexible packaging for powdered food products such as drink mixes.
“Years of planning and investment went into preparing the park for opportunities like this, and seeing a nationally recognized company now producing and shipping products from Franklin County demonstrates what that work can make possible,” she said.
Sonoma County, California-based Traditional Medicinals, founded in 1974, makes more than 60 kinds of teas using herbs and plants, including chamomile, hibiscus and nettle leaf. It also makes herbal lozenges and capsules. The company said it sold more than 780 million tea bags in 2024.
Traditional Medicinals distributes its products throughout the United States and in Canada and Mexico. It also has other international sales through natural product distributors and online marketplaces.
