Mountain Meadow Herbs expanding, building new cafe

It all started with a new mother and her concern that traditional medicine wasn’t giving her and her baby everything they needed to thrive. She started a business in the Flathead Valley manufacturing and selling her own herbal extracts, espousing their health benefits and sharing stories of success while expanding her product line.

Nearly two decades later, Mountain Meadow Herbs near Somers is expanding to include more office and conference space, a café and a new, larger retail showroom.

David Amrein purchased the company in 2008 from founder Kathy Garber and moved into the current building, a 23,000-square-foot space on Montana 82, soon after. He’s investing about $1.25 million in the expansion, which he and Chief Executive Officer Todd Malo are hoping will help the company integrate more with the community and expand its local footprint and market base.

Right now the in-house retail space consists only of a few display shelves tucked in a room among other office workers who field calls for online orders. After the new space is finished, the company will have an expanded retail store to go along with a public café space and conference room that can be rented out by community groups.

Amrein and Malo have a specific vision for the space and the function it will serve in both the community and their business model. They want people who walk in to be enveloped in the scent of their high-quality herbal products, helping them realize how nice it would be to have more of them in their lives.

Their café includes plans for a drive-thru coffee window, where people can stop and order a coffee with herbal flavor shots and let some of the smell of the interior seep out the window of the facility and into their car.

Amrein also purchased an adjacent 20-acre piece of property a couple of years ago, and his hope is that if this expansion goes well he could continue to expand into that space in the future.

Right now the company operates an experimental herb bed where 10 to 15 different herbs are grown, but Malo said they would like to expand that to something more substantial.

Amrein also would like to eventually put a spa on the property that features an array of herbal treatments with products they make, and perhaps even “hobbit” homes they can rent to people who want an all-encompassing experience.

While the business has been growing in recent years, much of that growth has happened in specific markets. Garber grew up amid an Amish community and originally tailored the product specifically toward those communities. To this day, over half of the products they make are sold to Amish, Hutterite and Mennonite communities and almost all of their sales come from wholesale deals or online orders as opposed to sales from their retail space.

Malo and Amrein said selling to those communities sometimes makes for unique sales experiences. Amrein said they receive a lot of orders through the U.S. Postal Service with checks included, and in some communities where cellphones aren’t ubiquitous, people travel to a pay phone to place orders. He makes sure they have measures in place to accommodate all callers on busy days with those folks in mind.

Running a business that sells herbal supplements requires a well-honed lexicon. Certain words are off limits, and on the company’s website they don’t make broad claims about their products. Rather, it is put in terms of which part or parts of the body will be likely to see renewed vitality. They also sell fertility mixes for both men and women. Both men said they have received a lot of feedback from people who said they had trouble conceiving until they tried a Mountain Meadow Herbs product.

“We are responsible for a lot of babies,” Amrein said.

More product information, including a catalog, can be found on the company’s website at www.mmherbs.com.

Reporter Peregrine Frissell can be reached at (406) 758-4438 or pfrissell@dailyinterlake.com.