Milo's Tea uses OneStream as a transformative tool to enable better financial planning that saves time and money

Executive Summary

Milo's Tea, a family-owned, certified women-owned beverage company on track to reach $1 billion in retail sales in 2026, outgrew its legacy Finance systems before it outgrew its markets. Spreadsheet-heavy processes, fragmented data, and limited drill-down visibility meant the FP&A team could not move at the pace of a business expanding across all 50 states, 60,000 retail locations, and three large-scale manufacturing facilities. Partnering with OneStream gave Milo's a single, unified platform that Finance and accounting could maintain without heavy IT support, with line-of-sight integration across the P&L, cash flow, and balance sheet over a multi-year horizon. The results were tangible and fast, but the most meaningful outcome for CFO Emily Backstrom was a Finance team that is energized, spending time with business partners rather than buried in manual forecasting processes.

Key Takeaways

1. Explosive growth exposed the limits of manual, spreadsheet-driven Finance faster than Milo's anticipated. With expanding distribution, increasing product complexity, and a mandate to 10x the capabilities of every function, Milo's needed a CPM platform that could scale at the same pace as the business. Legacy systems offered no path to that level of agility, making platform replacement a strategic necessity rather than an incremental upgrade.
2. OneStream became Milo's single source of truth across planning, close, cash flow, and scenario modeling. The shift from fragmented, siloed processes to one unified platform gave Finance the visibility and governance it previously lacked. Scenario planning that was too cumbersome to attempt in the old environment became a core capability, and the Finance team was freed to deliver the insights the business needed rather than managing manual data assembly.
3. Implementation partner selection and downstream data governance are the lessons Milo's wants to share. While the results have been transformative, Milo's is candid that bottlenecks moved downstream as the system improved, surfacing new questions around data quality and process transparency. The team credits the AIT implementation partnership as critical to their success and encourages other OneStream customers to exchange lessons learned rather than treating implementation as a solved problem.