Traditional Medicinals, a maker of herbal teas, is set to break ground Tuesday on a manufacturing plant in Franklin County.
The move comes five and a half years after the project was first announced, a delay that the company’s CEO attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic and taking time to “ensure we had the right plan in place.”
The company will invest $47 million to build an approximately 125,000-square-foot facility at Franklin County’s Summit View Business Park.
It will create 57 jobs over three years at an average annual pay of about $70,000, Joe Stanziano, CEO of Traditional Medicinals, said in an interview.
“We will have the ability to make our whole portfolio of 60-plus herbal tea products. Obviously we’ll ramp up to that, but it will be mainly a core herbal bagged tea manufacturing facility,” Stanziano said.
Sonoma County, California-based Traditional Medicinals, founded in 1974, makes teas using a variety of herbs and plants such as chamomile, hibiscus and nettle leaf. It also makes herbal lozenges and capsules.
The company, which employs 236 people, distributes its products throughout the United States and in Canada and Mexico. It also has some other international sales through natural product distributors and online marketplaces.
It sold more than 780 million tea bags in 2024, earning $170 million in revenue, which was a 15% increase in revenue from the year before, according to a company spokesperson. 
Stanziano said he anticipates the plant will be running by summer of next year, and after getting the equipment fully set up, the plant should be entirely operational by winter of 2026.
The project was first announced in January 2020, when Ralph Northam was Virginia’s governor and before the first COVID-19 case was confirmed in the commonwealth.
Stanziano said that “everybody’s learned a lot” since then, including by navigating the coronavirus pandemic.
“It gave us time to really make sure we were very confident to be able to design exactly what we need, to ensure we had the right partnerships, ensure we had the right plan in place, and quite frankly for us, continue to understand the future needs of our business,” he said.
The company has previously worked with other manufacturing plants on the East Coast and in Canada, but the Franklin County location will be Traditional Medicinals’ second dedicated manufacturing facility, after its home base in California.
Stanziano said it’s important for the company to have an East Coast facility, and its access to the Port of Virginia will help as it brings in herbs from more than 35 countries.
“Our customer base east of the Mississippi [River] will be better served from this facility going forward,” he said.
The project is supported by a $350,000 grant from Virginia and a $245,000 grant from the Virginia Tobacco Region Revitalization Commission, which supports economic development projects in formerly tobacco-dependent localities.
Traditional Medicinals moving forward with its new facility is an economic development win for Franklin County, which is working to bring businesses to the 550-acre Summit View Business Park off U.S. 220 between Rocky Mount and Boones Mill.
ValleyStar Credit Union was the first business to locate there, breaking ground in 2019. Stik-Pak, which makes flexible packaging for powdered food products such as drink mixes, opened a new 50,000-square-foot facility at the park in 2021.
Dani Poe, Franklin County’s economic development director, said it shows the value of Summit View Business Park’s infrastructure improvements and is “a clear sign that long-term planning is paying off.”
“We’re excited to see site work begin soon, and with an ambitious construction timeline, we look forward to production starting within the next 24 months,” Poe said.
At a Franklin County Board of Supervisors meeting last month, officials announced that the county had approved a performance agreement with Traditional Medicinals and construction would commence soon.
“We’re excited as staff and really appreciate the relationship and the partnership that we have made with Traditional Medicinals,” said county Administrator Chris Whitlow.
Drake Sadler, Traditional Medicinals’ co-founder and current board chair, addressed the audience at that meeting, saying that he and others at the company “believe that we’ve been called to do this work.”
“We’ve been taking our time with it, and now we’re ready,” Sadler said.
