Bob Moore, the grandfatherly businessman who, with his wife, Charlee, used an image of organic hearty and wholesome Americana to turn Bob’s Red Mill cereal company into a $100 million-a-year business, died Saturday at his home in Milwaukie. , Ore. He was 94 years old.
His death was announced by the company, which did not give a cause.
Founded in Milwaukie in 1978, Bob’s Red Mill has grown from serving the Portland area to a global natural foods behemoth, marketing more than 200 products in more than 70 countries. The company’s product line includes a range of whole grains, including sorghum flour, old fashioned muesli and whole grain pearl couscous, along with energy bars and cake and soup mixes.
Over the years, the company has benefited greatly from the dietary shift away from processed foods and grains.
“I think the people who eat white flour, white rice, sprouted corn — in other words, grains that have had some of their nutrients stripped from them — are few and far between,” Mr. Moore said in a 2017 interview for State University Oral History University of Oregon. “I think our diets, nationally and internationally, probably point to the fact that we just allowed ourselves to be sold a bill of goods.”
Despite the company’s explosive growth, Mr. Moore turned down several offers from food giants to buy Bob’s Red Mill. He opted instead for an employee stock ownership plan, which was instituted in 2010, on his 81st birthday. By April 2020, the plan had put 100% of the company in the hands of its 700-plus employees.
“The Bible says do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” said Mr. Moore, an observant Christian, discussing the plan in a recent interview with Portland Monthly magazine.
While Bob’s Red Mill is an ensemble effort in that sense, its marketing allure is rooted in the cult of personality surrounding its founding founder.
Mr Moore, known for his trademark red vest and white beard, has often drawn comparisons to Santa Claus. (He was also known for his bolo ties and newsboy caps.) His gently smiling face graces the packaging of each of his company’s products, along with the tagline “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 heavy emphasis on natural ingredients, Bob’s Red Mill managed to create an anti-corporate ethos reminiscent of the Whole Earth Catalog era of the 1970s, clearly resonating with its ex-hippies and devotees. coastal wellness.
At the same time, likable, white-haired Bob and Charlie Moore, sometimes seen smiling in one of two 1931 Ford Model A roadsters, projected a small-town wholesomeness that suggested a lost world of barbershop quartets and sarsaparillas that seemed perfectly suited for the heart.
Hygiene, it seems, was anything but an act. And it proved to be a building block for a nine-figure powerhouse.
Robert Gene Moore was born on February 15, 1929 in Portland, the eldest of two children to Ken and Doris Moore. He grew up in San Bernardino, California, outside of Los Angeles, where his father also had a job near the grain: He drove a Wonder Bread truck.
Bob was too young to enlist when World War II began, so he got a job in a warehouse for the May Company department store in Los Angeles. He was given an early taste of management at 16 when his boss promoted him to run his own department in the store.
“I left his office — I didn’t go out, I flew out,” he said on NPR’s “How I Built This With Guy Raz” podcast. “I was just over the moon.”
After a three-year stint in the military, during which he helped build bridges and roads in the Marshall Islands, he returned to Southern California and met Charlee Lu Coote. The Moores married in 1953 and raised a family that would include three boys.
Mr. Moore was still trying to settle on a career path when, driving down Crenshaw Avenue in Los Angeles one day, he saw a “Coming Soon” sign for a new Mobil gas station. Sensing a profitable business, he reached out to see if he could buy it. The young couple quickly sold their house to help them scrape together 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 tired of the smog and hustle and bustle of Los Angeles. They sold the gas station and moved to the ski town of Mammoth Lakes, in the southern Sierra Nevada, where they bought another gas station. It failed within a year.
Almost destitute, the Moores moved to Sacramento, where Mr. Moore took a job in the hardware department of a Sears department store.
In the mid-40s, he was managing a JC Penney auto store in Redding, California, when he wandered into a library and came across a book called “John Goffe’s Mill,” by George Woodbury, which chronicled the author’s restoration of a run . -Family owned flour mill in New Hampshire.
“It’s a fascinating story,” Mr. Moore said in the Oregon State interview. The author, he said, “trained as an archaeologist and I am interested in such things myself. Biblical archeology is something that has fascinated me for most of my life.”
“But above all,” he added, “when George made the statement, after he opened his mill for business, that the people beat a path to his door over his wholemeal flour and cornmeal, I read it and thought : “Oh my god. , if I could find some millstones and a mill somewhere, I bet I could do the same thing.”
That’s exactly what he did. He began locating old millstones from the 19th century and other necessary equipment and converted a Quonset hut on the outskirts of town into a mill for grinding various strains of wheat and other grains. In 1974, he and his wife turned his new obsession into a family mill, employing their teenage sons.
Mr. Moore is survived by a sister, Jeannie, and sons, Ken, Bob, Jr. and David, as well as nine grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. His wife died in 2018.
Business was good, but Mr. Moore finally began to feel the pull of a lifelong dream: to learn to read the Bible in its original languages, including Hebrew and Koine Greek. He retired when he was about 50, and he and his wife moved to Portland to pursue this course of study at a seminary.
Mr. Moore, however, soon tired of the hard work involved in learning ancient languages. “One day we were walking around, reading vocabulary cards back and forth, we had Greek verbs on one side and nouns on the other,” he said on the podcast. “To my great surprise, there was a mill. He was there for a long time. And in front of it was a “For Sale” sign. I could not believe it.”
“I looked in the window and I could see bucket elevators, grain cleaners, I could see all the milling equipment,” he continued. “I couldn’t believe what I was looking at.”
When he called the number listed, the owner said he planned to tear down the mill to reveal the value of the underlying land.
“I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ Tear down this mill?’ Mr. Moore recalls. “I thought, ‘This is the most fantastic thing. I can’t believe what’s happening.’ So basically, I bought the thing and it changed my whole life.”
