Not many businesses today have been around for 30 years, but after more than three decades, Mountain Rose Herbs is still going strong. The secret to our success is simple: we’re always working to improve ourselves, fine-tuning our quality control processes, sustainability efforts, and customer service while also giving back to our community. In recent years, we realized we had outgrown the capacity of our regional organic herb mill, resulting in bottlenecks that interfered with our ability to achieve our goals. So we decided to build a mill of our own!
On September 27, 2018, we officially opened our own brand-new organic processing facility. This exciting event marks a whole new chapter for Mountain Rose Herbs, empowering us to effectively give more while taking less. Bringing our bulk herb processing in house will allow us to take our quality control to the next level, get customers the botanicals they love more quickly, and create local jobs—all while reducing our environmental impact!
Our dedication to sustainability was a big driver behind the new facility.
“A focus of ours is striving for a carbon-neutral business model," said Shawn Donnille, Vice President and co-owner. "Having our products cut and milled right next to our receiving warehouse instead of shipping them to California and back will dramatically reduce our carbon footprint.”
In addition to being more environmentally friendly, the state-of-the-art facility gives us full oversight of how our organic raw botanicals are handled, helping to ensure that only the finest quality offerings reach our customers (and that they do so as quickly as possible).
“Our new processing facility gives us the ability to meet our high standards for cutting, powdering, and sifting each botanical to our unique specifications for sale and/or blending,” said Chief Operations Officer, Jennifer Gerrity. “It’s exciting, because it allows our quality control team to oversee the processing of our botanicals while speeding up our turnaround time from two months to a few days, resulting in fresher herbs becoming in stock faster.”
The Mountain Rose Herbs leadership team is also excited about the opportunities the new organic processing facility will create for citizens and other local food and beverage businesses in our Eugene, Oregon community.
The new mill has already created eight new jobs and more staff will be added as the workspace continues to be developed. On a broader scale, other sustainably minded regional companies are also looking forward to the possibility of processing their organic botanical ingredients close to home. Local business owner Sean Kelly of WildCraft Cider Works has expressed interest in having Mountain Rose Herbs help process the wildcrafted botanicals used in his ciders.
There are still many collaboration and community enrichment opportunities to explore, and we are so grateful to the customers who empower us to continue to learn, grow, and forge ahead into new plant-powered adventures!
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