- December 4, 2025
-
-
Loading
Loading
Inside a warehouse in north Manatee County, a dozen employees are manufacturing thousands of water filters each month. Called Epic Water Filters, the company occupies 12,000 square feet inside an industrial park in Palmetto, near SeaPort Manatee. The facility features lab, production and warehouse space.
The water filter company was founded in 2015 in Boulder, Colorado, where its finance and marketing departments are still based. Its manufacturing operations in Manatee began in the last five years, prompted by necessity during the pandemic. At that time, Epic Water Filters co-founder Joel Stevens says production became challenging due to supply chain issues.
“Suddenly, we couldn't get our filters; we couldn't service our customers,” Stevens says, adding products they needed from China or Mexico were out of reach. “That's when we set this whole place up and started investing in machines and personnel to manufacture in the United States.”
To handle onshoring and increasing demand, the company seeks to double its staff in the next year-and-a-half and expand into a larger space.
While Stevens declines to disclose revenue, he says: "We grew 30% last year, and we expect to see double-digit growth this year as well."
With 16 employees — 12 in Manatee, four in Boulder — Stevens says the company sought to have its own facility for a core entrepreneurial reason: quality control. “We just wanted to control the supply chain, control the quality,” says Stevens, who moved to the region a few months ago.
The company selected the Gulf Coast of Florida to open a facility because “there’s an abundance of engineering talent in the water filtration industry here,” Stevens says. In addition, it can locally source components that go into its products. For example, Epic Water Filters uses TMF Plastic Solutions to make the outer casing and caps for its bottle filters and Sunshine Automation & Tooling to help with the design and upkeep of its machines; both companies are located in Manatee County.
“We’ve built up a good supply chain,” Stevens says. Another benefit for Epic from having its own supply chain is that it can create recyclable filters, whereas previously, customers had to discard the materials.
Currently, Epic Water Filters produces about 30,000 water filters a month. Its output will likely increase to 50,000 in the next two years due to the upcoming release of its new filtered water pitcher in mid-December called the XP, for Extra Performance.
“We think it’s going to be the best pitcher on the market,” Stevens says, “and we have that much demand.”
The XP will filter "contaminants most pitcher filters don't do, including parasites, bacteria, viruses, PFAS [forever chemicals] and fluoride as well as heavy metals," Stevens says.
Pitchers, Stevens says, make up “the bulk of our business.” The company also sells filters for water bottles and has an under-the-sink system clients can order too. He says it started onshoring with bottle filters, then under-the-sink and "now we're onshoring our largest part of our business, which is our pitcher filter." It used to be made in the United States and assembled overseas, but now all processes are handled domestically.
Epic’s proprietary filters consist of two parts, according to Stevens: a pleated nano-fiber material and carbon fiber block.
“We’re always trying to make water healthier,” Steven says.
While many competitors only have one filter component and are “trying to filter water as fast as possible and just trying to change the taste,” Stevens says, “we’re always after more contaminants.”
After all, he says, the company is "called Epic" not "mediocre water filters."
Epic Water Filters claims it can eliminate 99.9% of contaminants. To verify this, the business has an on-site lab where it tests its filters.
“There are contaminants that make you sick over time, then there's the contaminants that make you sick tomorrow,” Stevens explains. “On the outside of our filters, we try to get rid of the contaminants that are going to make you sick tomorrow — like the bacteria and viruses. Then on the inside of the filter, that’s where we use carbon fiber block [to] get rid of the stuff that can make you sick over time — [like] lead and chlorine,” or heavy metals.
For successfully removing contaminants, Epic Water’s Pure Pitcher was named CNN’s best water filter pitcher for 2025 and the best overall water filter pitcher in 2024 by Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit dedicated to environmental health.
Customers use Epic Water Filters products “all over the world,” Stevens says, everywhere from in their homes to remote places where they go camping.
Clients buy Epic Water Filters products directly from the company’s website or through Amazon as well as at some mom-and-pop hardware stores in Boulder, Stevens says. The company’s reach is global.
“We sell not only in the United States, but we sell in Canada, we sell in Australia,” Stevens says. “We have distributors in Singapore, and we are signing up a distributor in the UK” who will sell Epic Water Filters products in Europe.
While exports make up about 5% of overall sales right now, Stevens says during a November interview, the hope is that in 2026 and beyond, that number will increase to 15% to 20% of sales.
Stevens projects adding 15 to 20 employees in the next year to year-and-a-half to Epic's payroll. One source of assistance with employment has been Manatee Technical College, he says, since it teaches skills like factory automation.
The company’s next steps will also likely include moving to a 15,000 to 20,000-square-foot space that can accommodate 18-wheelers, a luxury the current property does not offer. Epic may stay in Manatee County or move closer to Sarasota.
“We'd love to have six bays, to have six containers here all the time,” Stevens says.
Stevens and his partner “bootstrapped this whole company, so we don't have outside investors," he says. "At some point, we might look for outside investment … to help us grow faster.”
