Bob’s Red Mill Founder Shares His Philosophy of Putting People First, Focusing on Wholesome Foods
From the editor:
Bob Moore, founder of Bob’s Red Mill and one of the most recognized figures in the natural foods industry, peacefully passed away at home on Saturday, February 10, 2024, at the age of 94. Moore will be remembered for his larger-than-life personality, his leadership and passion for whole grains, his strong work ethic (he remained a Board Member of his beloved Bob’s Red Mill until his death) and his generosity in establishing the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) on his 81st birthday. (https://www.bobsredmill.com/bob-moore)
This article was originally published in the 2013 May Issue of Acres U.S.A.
Bob Moore transferred his company, Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods, to his employees on his 81st birthday. It was a bounteous gift by any measure, as the company was — and is — awash in cash and growing by double digits every year as it markets its famous oatmeal and over 400 other products, many of them certified organic, all of them adorned by a label featuring Moore’s beaming visage. It was only the latest in a string of remarkable events and accomplish-ments in Moore’s life and career, an unlikely journey from gas station owner to department store manager to international prominence in the food business. A passionate traveler, piano player and student of theology, Moore’s vitality amazes his younger associates. Ceding ownership of the company didn’t mean he stopped showing up for work. Based in Milwaukie, Oregon, Bob’s Red Mill began its commercial life in 1972 as another small business entering the tiny natural foods market of the day. Moore didn’t leave his day job for another couple of years. His unusual aptitude for creating and selling whole grain products made it possible for the company to grow right along with the national organic food trade. About two dozen people worked for Bob’s Red Mill by 1988, when a deranged arsonist burned the company’s mill to the ground. As he explains in this interview, Moore turned right around and rebuilt the operation despite only carrying insurance on the building, and despite then being close to standard American retirement age. The company expanded exponentially not long afterward, especially after the federal nutrition guidelines emphasized whole grains. A recent book, People Before Profit by Ken Koopman, tells Moore’s life story in full.
— Chris Walters
ACRES U.S.A. How did you find yourself in the whole grains business?
BOB MOORE. I was born in Portland in 1929, and my dad had a fairly good job at the newspaper, The Oregonian. For various reasons, one being that it rained or drizzled in Portland for 54 days and nights, my mom and dad decided that it wasn’t for
them, so we moved to southern California, and that’s where I was brought up. Until I came back here in 1978 to go to seminary.
ACRES U.S.A. Did you decide you didn’t have a religious calling?
MOORE. Actually I’m meeting with my Greek professor here in town tomorrow —we continued with my schooling quite a while after I decided to go back into the milling business in 1978. I spent a lot of time with the Bible. When I came up here to go to seminary, I had put in a lot of time with dictionaries and concordances, studying the meaning of words in Greek and Hebrew. It was a major part of my life. It was always something I wanted to read from the perspective of the writer rather than the translator. I can’t say that I’ve accomplished a great deal of that, but I gave it a good try. My life was occupied with what I felt was God’s plan for me in other ways. So I got back to whole grains, my first love in life, and milling. This is my 41st year of doing that.
ACRES U.S.A. Did your religious studies influence your ethical approach to doing business?
MOORE. Yes, it has definitely changed my approach not only to my business but to my life. I derive great spiritual and philosophical beliefs out of the scriptures. I believe the Bible is the written word of God, and we should follow it. I just gave a talk last week to about 100 people in Anaheim, California, at our annual trade show down there, all our brokers and all our salespeople. They listened to me pontificate about the love of money being the root of all evil, and also the scriptures from the very first page of the Bible, where God says, “Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth.” And then God says to man, “Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed” — and it’s interesting that “herb” is also the Hebrew word for “seed” — “which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” The thought there in my view is that if you take away the seed’s ability to be a seed, like by taking the germ of the bran away, you have essentially destroyed the value of it. I not only believe but use my findings in the scriptures to further my activities, I guess including selling grains.
ACRES U.S.A. Was it a challenge to grow the business of Bob’s Red Mill in a corporate system that doesn’t always promote people before profits?
MOORE. Actually the laws do promote that particular thing in the form of an ESOP, an employee stock ownership plan. I don’t think it’s for every company, but there are advantages for a reasonably solvent company that’s reasonably successful, with a reasonable number of people. We investigated ESOPs for nine years. Fundamentally, the owners of the business — that’s me — are paid for their ownership, and then it is in turn converted to stock certificates, and those are given to the employees. Eventually — and that’s going to happen here — when the ESOP is paid off, the previous owner no longer owns the company but has received value for it, and the employees are 100 percent owners of the company. Plus they don’t have to pay taxes anymore. This is an IRS-sanctioned program, and I think very beneficial to a company if they want to do it. The normal way — not necessarily the right way — is when you reach a certain point you cast about for investors, or you cast about for some larger company to buy you out. You take your money, go to Florida I guess, and leave your employees faced with whatever the new owners want to do. Owners who have no personal interest in anybody when they first buy it out. I could not allow this to happen, but I had some wonderful advisors, and I will say this for anyone who wants to do an ESOP or anything like it — get yourself some good advisors. I paid a lot of money. This is not a cheap, inexpensive transition of a business. You have three separate attorney groups. One represents the employees, one represents the ESOP, and one represents the owners — soon to be non-owners. All of these have to work together, and you have to have the company evaluated financially once a year. You’re talking thousands of dollars. But the benefit is that as the ESOP progresses — we’re about a third of the way now — we only pay about two-thirds of the taxes we would pay. All in all I feel this program is worthwhile, and we have taken it on with great vigor, and feel wonderful about it. Believe me, when you have 300-plus people and they all receive a stock ownership, quite valuable, every year a share or ownership in the business, it’s impressive. If you have all your eggs in a basket that you have control over, it gives you power and strength in your own investments.
“I opened my frst mill in Redding, California, in 1972, and we ground four, ground corn meal, made some cereal — all whole grain — and people beat a path to our door. Starting very small, and not having any great hopes, I found we were in a business that was ready for its time.”
ACRES U.S.A. Especially considering the alternatives?
MOORE. There was a period of time about 10 years ago when I was inundated with serious pressure to sell the company or become a part of another company or in some way restructure the financial end of this company. Honestly, some of these people were so good at telling their stories, at trying to convince me that I needed them more than anything in the world, that I went to my
partners and said, “I cannot keep doing this as president until I have someone who can take care of these people and cut them back.” Nancy Garner, my executive assistant, came on board eight years ago, and my life became much better after that. Now I do not talk to
people about investing. I go to trade shows all the time, and I have physical experience with some of the big players who’ve come by my booth and insisted they had something better for me than what I had. I have physically picked
up their suitcases, set them out in the aisle, and asked them courteously to not
come back. If you want to keep pure, you’re going to struggle for it.
ACRES U.S.A. When you went into business, a lot of structures and channels we now take for granted were rudimentary or did not yet exist. What kind of challenges did you face?
MOORE. If I was a farmer, and I was stuck with 5,000 acres, I would certainly
have a lot of problems on my hands with equipment and know-how and every-
thing else. But I didn’t start that way. I started with a book called John Goffe’s Mill by George Woodbury. I just found it at the library one day — it was fate or whatever you want to call it. Here’s a fellow who inherited a little water tower flour mill in Bedford, New Hampshire, in the late 1930s. It had been owned
by his great-great-great grandfather. He had 400 acres on a creek, an old mill, millstones, and he started to grind flour. When I finished the book I was just amazed at the overall picture of what
I’d just read. Here’s a guy who was an archaeologist, who had been on digs in Mesopotamia and all over the world, and after he inherited this mill he discovered that when he started grinding flour and making corn meal, people beat
a path to his door. It just appealed to me. I thought, here’s a guy who didn’t know
what he was doing, didn’t know anything about it, but he gave it a try, and the secret
here was that people were ready for some wholesome food. I saw that very clearly.
After I read the book, I wrote letters to various companies here in the United States that made milling equipment. At
that time there were probably five or six. I wrote a nice letter to each one of them and asked if they had any stone grinding
equipment. I didn’t get an answer, except one individual who was kind enough to say that although they hadn’t made any stone grinding equipment for 100
years, he knew a fellow who had some knowledge of it. He gave me a phone number and a name, and I called the guy.
From the phone call I got my first mill, and I opened my doors just as described
in John Goffe’s Mill, not knowing too much. I opened my first mill in Redding,
California, in 1972, and we ground flour, ground corn meal, made some cereal —
all whole grain — and people beat a path to our door. Starting very small, and not
having any great hopes, I found we were in a business that was ready for its time.
“Since the day I opened I’ve never felt I was in the wrong business.”
ACRES U.S.A. It must have been exciting, that sense of knowing you were on to something but not knowing exactly what.
MOORE. I can remember unloading a dumper full of wheat with shovels. You can expect to work hard, that’s for certain. Working hard was never anything I shied away from. I can still remember bringing my granddaughters down, and they took their shoes off and ran through the wheat. We’ve had some pleasant experiences with all this. At the same time I was doing all this, I was a store manager for the J.C. Penney company. I didn’t give up my other job for about two years. But at the end of two years we certainly knew we had a business that had some potential. I think the time had come for whole grains. I was not exactly a leader, since Arrowhead Mills began in 1964, eight years ahead of me, and another one that was ahead of me was El Molino in Los Angeles. Those two brothers started in 1929, the year I was born. So it wasn’t a new idea, and I could look at others and get some inspiration because they were reasonably successful. We were just very small in the overall food supply of our country. But we’re not anymore. We played a dominant role at the trade show in Anaheim, our company and the way it was received. Since the day I opened I’ve never felt I was in the wrong business. We’re now distributing our products in 71 countries around the world, and we have created within the company a department that does labels for other countries. We also have an international sales staff, which is new.
ACRES U.S.A. What are some of your leading markets?
MOORE. Canada is 10 percent of our business, and we have major distributors in the Philippines, Ireland, the U.K. and Denmark.
ACRES U.S.A. Where does most of your supply come from?
MOORE. We buy a lot of oats and also flaxseed from up in Saskatchewan, but most of it comes from the Dakotas.
ACRES U.S.A. How are you coping with ongoing health concerns on the part of food shoppers?
MOORE. We have a full test lab where we can do grain testing, just as complete as any of the big companies. We have a separate lab that does exclusively glutenfree testing or gluten presence testing. We have quite a market in products for people who believe they have or whose medical advisors tell them they have an aversion to wheat, rye or barley. We test all of our gluten-free products on a very tight basis.
ACRES U.S.A. Are there any substitutes for wheat gluten that you try to avoid? A lot of products in the gluten-free section at the supermarket are packed with rice starch and the like.
MOORE. We have about 80 gluten-free products. Of course you can use yeast as a rising agent, but xanthan gum does substitute for the gluten in wheat. The grains we use the most are amaranth, buckwheat, quinoa and sorghum. We also grind white beans into the flour. Xanthan gum or guar gum basically hold things together and give the gluten-free grains some body that makes respectable cake, cookies or bread. We have a wealth of information about all this on our website, including how to cook glutenfree. Five years ago it represented about a third of our sales, and now about 55 percent of our dollar sales are in glutenfree products. It is not something I had anticipated in any way, shape or form. My first gluten-free item was xanthan gum because people wanted to make bread with rice, and they could hold it together with xanthan gum and still use yeast to get it to rise. That was probably 25 years ago.
ACRES U.S.A. The history of Bob’s Red Mill spans almost the entire history of the natural or organic foods sector from a tiny cottage industry to what it is now. What are your thoughts on the direction it’s taken in the past 40 years?
MOORE. At the trade show there were over 60,000 people and 2,700 booths, and people from every country. We had 26 people there. Lots of farmers came up asking what we’re looking for. As you walk around the show, the buzzwords are “organic,” “gluten-free,” “natural” — they beat that one to pieces — and “nonGMO.” What it is, is junk food. Pure junk food. They have taken the same things that appeal to people — have you read Salt Sugar Fat, Michael Moss’ book? The salt-sugar-fat thing just keeps looming its ugly head. Take natural, whole grain and organic, all these things are hot now. So let’s take them and add salt, sugar and fat, mix them in some kind of concoction so we can feed them to the kids. People are not going to be any better off healthwise or weightwise just because it’s whole grain if they stick to the same formulations that appeal to everybody. It’s a dead-end road. It makes my heart ache when I go through that show, and I see that at eight out of 10 booths the product behind the booth is junk food with all the buzzwords. That scripture I read to you — they were suggesting you grind that grain into something to eat. That’s pretty simple. I’m just going to stay right here at the bottom of the pile making whole grains and distributing them around the world. I’m going to leave the rest of them behind or they’re going to leave me behind — I don’t care which as long as I have customers who see things as I do, that the simple wholesomeness of whole grains is what they need to eat to have their bodies feel good.
ACRES U.S.A. About a quarter-century ago, when you were 60 years old, your company was struck by calamity in the form of a fire that destroyed your mill. How did you turn that around at an age when lots of people ease into a slower pace? The whole thing could have ended.
MOORE. You’re right about ending it. I had retirement funds from working at J.C. Penney. I wasn’t broke when I went into the business. Plus the fact of the building, which I owned, being insured. There were some thoughts for a couple of days after the fire that at 60 years old I should give this thing up. But I’ve said this many times — it was my people. At the time I had about 22, and one of my most wonderful people who is still with me today was only 19 when he came to work for me. I more or less followed his life; he was one of my millers. The night of the fire — because it was a small community all of us were down there at two or three in the morning — his wife came up to me and said, “Bob, you’re not going to believe this. We signed the papers today on our new house.” They were newly married. “Now Dave doesn’t have a job.” I’m not sure what I answered her. I don’t think at that moment in time I could give her some big time answer like, “Oh, don’t worry honey, I’ll take care of you.” It was pretty devastating all around, and I don’t think I had an answer for her except to stare off into the sky. But it went inside of me and became a part of my decision to stay in business. There were a lot of factors. We had to find more mills, and we had to find another location. At that time, in 1988, I had a pretty good customer base, and there were some grocery store chains that were carrying our products. If I couldn’t produce, they weren’t going to keep me in their stores. A lot of decisions had to be made, and as it turned out there were a variety of solutions. I sent one of my people down to Redding, California, to work nights at the original mill we had all started together. He did that for three months, so we immediately began getting whole wheat flour, cornmeal and whatnot from there. We found a temporary location within days, and began setting stuff up. Then a major site, 50,000 square feet and seven acres, came up within a couple of months of the fire. I had an astute and respected real estate agent who got that for me. I’d been dealing with him because we needed more space even before the fire. We moved in there and by the end of the year we had better production and more room than before the fire. Almost immediately what was a terrible tragedy — it was a historic building and something we all hated to lose — gave us a fresh start and kept people working who are still with me today. There were some things that made me feel thankful to the Lord that we were able to keep things together. As for finding the energy to keep going at 60, I’m 84 now and if I had the same thing happen again I’d still be at work the next day. Nothing about retirement has any appeal to me. What appeals to me is to build a world that I like to live in, and then live in it. I have no intention of changing that. It’s a delightful world that I live in. We have 325,000 square feet in this building on 17 acres, and we have another warehouse across the street that we recently got for non-food items, and we have this delightful retail outlet that’s built like the old mill. I have a world that affords me a lot of interest and lots of challenges.
“Nothing about retirement has any appeal to me. What appeals to me is to build a world that I like to live in, and then live in it. I have no intention of changing that.”
People Before Profit: The Inspiring Story of the Founder of Bob’s Red Mill, can be found at retail and online booksellers, and so can the book Bob Moore mentions as his chief inspiration, John Goffe’s Mill by George Woodbury.
