Bob Moore, the grandfatherly entrepreneur who, along with his wife Charlee, used an image of organic heartiness and wholesome Americana to turn the artisan grain company Bob’s Red Mill into a $100 million-a-year business, died Saturday at his House in Milwaukie, Ore. He was 94.
His death was announced by the company without providing a cause of death.
Founded in Milwaukie in 1978, Bob’s Red Mill grew from the Portland area into a global natural foods giant, marketing more than 200 products in more than 70 countries. The Company’s product line includes a whole grain assortment, including ground sorghum flour, Paleo granola and whole grain pearl couscous, as well as energy bars and cake and soup mixes.
Over the years, the company has benefited significantly from the nutrition-conscious move away from processed foods and grains.
“I think that people who eat white flour, white rice or degerminated corn — in other words, grains that have had some of their nutrients removed — are missing out,” Mr. Moore said in a 2017 interview for an Oregon oral history State University. “I think our diet nationally and internationally probably reflects the fact that we’ve just allowed ourselves to be sold out to a certain extent.”
Despite the company’s explosive growth, Mr. Moore fended off numerous offers from grocery giants to buy Bob’s Red Mill. Instead, on his 81st birthday, he opted for an employee stock ownership plan introduced in 2010; By April 2020, the plan had placed 100 percent of the company in the hands of its more than 700 employees.
“The Bible says to treat others as you would have them treat you,” Mr. Moore, a devout Christian, said of the plan in a recent interview with Portland Monthly magazine.
While Bob’s Red Mill is an ensemble project in this sense, its marketing appeal is rooted in the cult of personality surrounding its hirsute founder.
Mr. Moore, known for his red vest and white beard, often drew comparisons to Santa Claus. (He was also known for his bolo ties and newsie hats.) His gently smiling face adorns the packaging of each of his company’s products, along with the slogan “To Your Good Health.”
“Everywhere I go, people recognize me,” Mr. Moore said in the 2017 interview, “and I always have someone to talk to.”
With its folksy, earth-toned packaging and strong emphasis on natural ingredients, Bob’s Red Mill managed to create an anti-corporate, back-to-the-land ethos reminiscent of the 1970s Whole Earth Catalog era is clearly aimed at former customers – hippies and coastal wellness devotees.
At the same time, the amiable, white-haired Bob and Charlee Moore, sometimes seen smiling in one of their two 1931 Ford Model A roadsters, projected a small-town coziness that evoked a lost world of barbershop quartets and sarsaparilla wagons perfectly tailored to the interior .
Holiness, it seems, was anything but an act. And it proved to be the building block for a nine-figure powerhouse.
Robert Gene Moore was born in Portland on February 15, 1929, the oldest of two children of Ken and Doris Moore. He grew up in San Bernardino, California, outside of Los Angeles, where his father also had some kind of job that had to do with grain: driving a Wonder Bread truck.
Bob was too young to enlist when World War II began, so he took a job in a warehouse for the May Company department store in Los Angeles. At the age of 16, he got his first insight into management when his boss promoted him to head of his own department in the store.
“I left his office – I didn’t walk out, I got kicked out,” he said on the NPR podcast “How I Built This With Guy Raz.” “I was just in seventh heaven.”
After a three-year stint in the Army helping build bridges and roads in the Marshall Islands, he returned to Southern California and met Charlee Lu Coote. The Moores married in 1953 and started a family with three boys.
Mr. Moore was still trying to decide on a career when one day, while driving along Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles, he saw a “Coming Soon” sign for a new Mobil gas station. Sensing a lucrative deal, he asked if he could buy it. The young couple quickly sold their house to raise the $6,000 they needed.
“The excitement of having my own business,” he said on the podcast, “is still with me.”
Within a few years, however, the couple had had enough of the smog and hustle and bustle of Los Angeles. They sold the gas station and moved to the ski resort of Mammoth Lakes in the southern Sierra Nevada, where they bought another gas station. It failed within a year.
Almost penniless, the Moores moved to Sacramento, where Mr. Moore took a job in the hardware department of a Sears department store.
In his mid-40s, he was managing a JC Penney auto repair shop in Redding, California, when he went to a library and came across a book called “John Goffe’s Mill” by George Woodbury, which chronicled the author’s recovery of a run family mill in New Hampshire.
“It’s a charming story,” Mr. Moore said in the Oregon State interview. The author, he said, was “trained as an archaeologist, and I myself am interested in such things. Biblical archeology has fascinated me for most of my life.”
“But most of all,” he added, “when George made the statement after he got his mill up and running that people were beating a path to his door for his whole wheat flour and his cornmeal, I read that and thought, ‘My Quality.’ ‘If I could find some millstones and a mill somewhere, I could certainly do the same.'”
He did exactly that. He began tracking down old 19th-century millstones and other necessary equipment and converted a Quonset hut on the outskirts of town into a mill for grinding various types of wheat and other grains. In 1974, he and his wife turned his new passion into a family mill that also employed their teenage sons.
Mr. Moore is survived by a sister, Jeannie, and his sons Ken, Bob Jr. and David, as well as nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. His wife died in 2018.
Business was good, but eventually Mr. Moore felt the urge to pursue a lifelong dream: learning to read the Bible in its original languages, including Hebrew and Koine Greek. He retired when he was about 50 and moved to Portland with his wife to pursue this course of study at a seminary.
However, Mr. Moore soon grew tired of the arduous work involved in learning ancient languages. “One day we were walking and reading vocabulary cards back and forth. We had Greek verbs on one side and nouns on the other,” he said in the podcast. “To my great surprise, there was a mill there. It had been there for a long time. And there was a “For Sale” sign in front of it. I could not believe it.”
“I looked through the window and could see bucket elevators, grain cleaners and all the mill equipment,” he continued. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”
When he dialed the number provided, the owner said he planned to demolish the mill to reveal the value of the property underneath.
“I said, ‘What are you going to do? Tear down the mill?’” Mr. Moore recalled. “I thought, ‘This is the most fantastic thing. I can’t believe what’s happening.’ Basically I bought that thing and it changed my whole life.”
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2024-02-14 00:40:16
www.nytimes.com
