Caraway Tea Company, a U.S.-based tea and herbal manufacturer, is leveraging affordable automation technologies to modernize its production lines and improve efficiency without the high costs typically associated with large-scale industrial automation.

 

As a small business operating in a highly competitive food manufacturing environment, Caraway Tea Company has adopted a practical, in-house approach to automation—designing and building custom production solutions using accessible technologies such as microcontrollers and modular components, including systems based on Arduino.

Rather than investing in expensive, proprietary automation systems, Caraway Tea Company has developed purpose-built machines tailored specifically to tea manufacturing. These include custom tea bag counting conveyors that automatically count and stage tea bags for insertion into retail pouches, reducing manual handling and improving packing consistency. The company has also engineered compact machines designed to portion and pack loose tea into small-format pouches, supporting a variety of product configurations.

"Our goal is to be efficient, adaptable, and competitive without taking on the cost structure of much larger manufacturers," said Michael Caraway, Founder of Caraway Tea Company. "By building our own automation solutions, we can improve throughput and consistency while remaining flexible enough to serve customers with specialized or short-run production needs."

This approach allows Caraway Tea Company to automate targeted steps within its production process—such as counting, staging, and portioning—while maintaining hands-on oversight of blending and quality control. The result is a hybrid manufacturing model that combines traditional tea expertise with modern production tools.

Caraway Tea Company continues to refine and expand its automation capabilities as part of its ongoing focus on operational execution. By adopting scalable, cost-effective technologies, the company is able to support private-label and co-packing customers with reliable production while remaining responsive to changing market needs.