Bob Moore, the founder of Bob's Red Mill, has died at the age of 94

Bob Moore, the grandfatherly entrepreneur who, with his wife Charlee, used an image of organic heartiness and wholesome Americana to turn the artisanal grain company Bob's Red Mill into a $100 million-a-year business, died Saturday at his home in Milwaukie, Oregon. He was 94.

His death was announced by the company, which did not specify a cause.

Founded in Milwaukie in 1978, Bob's Red Mill grew from serving the Portland area to a global natural food giant, marketing more than 200 products in more than 70 countries. The company's product line includes a whole grain range, including stone-ground sorghum flour, paleo-style 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 nutrition-focused shift away from processed foods and grains.

“I think people who eat white flour, white rice, sprouted corn – in other words, grains that have had some of their nutrients taken away – come up short,” Mr. Moore said in a 2017 interview for an Oregon State University oral history. “I think our diets, nationally and internationally probably, show that we've just allowed ourselves to be sold a bill of goods.”

Despite the company's explosive growth, Mr. Moore fended off numerous offers from food giants to buy Bob's Red Mill. Instead, he opted for an employee stock ownership plan, instituted in 2010, on his 81st birthday; by April 2020, the plan had put 100 percent of the company into the hands of its more than 700 employees.

“The Bible says that do to others as you would want them to treat you,” Mr. Moore, an observant Christian, said when discussing the plan in a recent interview with Portland Monthly magazine.

While Bob's Red Mill is a collaborative effort in that sense, its marketing appeal is rooted in the cult of personality surrounding its hirsute founder.

Mr. Moore, known for his signature red vest and white beard, frequently drew comparisons to Santa Claus. (He was also known for his bolo ties and newsie caps.) His softly smiling face adorns the packaging of all 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 evoke an anti-corporate, back-to-the-land ethos reminiscent of the Catalog of the entire Earth era of the 1970s, with a clear appeal to ex-hippies and coastal wellness enthusiasts.

At the same time we see the amiable, white-haired Bob and Charlee Moore, sometimes depicted smiling in one of their two 1931 Fords Model A roadstersprojected a small-town wholesomeness that evoked a lost world of barbershop quartets and sarsaparilla floats that seemed perfectly tailored for the heartland.

It seems that the wholesomeness was anything but an act. And it turned out 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 of Ken and Doris Moore. He grew up in San Bernardino, California, outside Los Angeles, where his father also had a kind of grain-adjacent job: driving a Wonder Bread truck.

Bob was too young to enlist when World War II broke out, so he took a job in a warehouse for the May Company department store in Los Angeles. He was introduced to management at the age of 16 when his boss promoted him to run his own department in the store.

“I walked out of his office — I didn't walk out, I flew out,” he said on the NPR podcast “How I Built This With Guy Raz.” “I was just on cloud nine.”

After a three-year stint in the Army, 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 started a family with three boys.

Mr. Moore was still trying to decide on a career path when one day he was driving down Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles and saw a “Coming Soon” sign for a new Mobil gas station. He sensed a lucrative business existed and reached out to see if he could buy it. The young couple quickly sold their home to help them 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 grew tired of the smog and crowds in Los Angeles. They sold the station and moved to the Mammoth Lakes ski resort in the southern Sierra Nevada, where they bought another gas station. Things went wrong within a year.

Nearly penniless, the Moores moved to Sacramento, where Mr. Moore took a job in the hardware department of a Sears department store.

In his mid-forties, he was managing a J.C. Penney auto shop in Redding, California, when he walked into a library and came across a book titled “John Goffe's Mill” by George Woodbury, which detailed the author's restoration of a run. -down family grist mill in New Hampshire.

“It is a charming story,” Mr. Moore said in the interview with Oregon State. The author, he said, is “trained as an archaeologist and I am interested in that kind of thing myself. Biblical archeology is something that has fascinated me for most of my life.”

“But most of all,” he added, “when George, after getting his mill up and running, made the statement that people were beating a path to his door about his whole wheat flour and cornmeal, I read that and I thought, ' Good Lord. If I could find millstones and a mill somewhere, I bet I could do the same thing.'”

He did exactly that. He began tracking down old 19th century millstones and other necessary equipment, and he converted a Quonset hut on the edge of town into a mill for grinding various types of wheat and other grains. In 1974, he and his wife turned his new obsession into a family business, which 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 went well, but Mr. Moore eventually began to feel the tug of a lifelong dream: learning to read the Bible in its original languages, including Hebrew and Koine Greek. He retired when he was about fifty, and he and his wife moved to Portland to pursue these studies at a seminary.

Mr. Moore, however, soon grew tired of the laborious work involved in learning ancient languages. “One day we were walking around and 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 surprise there was a mill. It had been there for a long time. And in front of it was a 'For Sale' sign. I could not believe it.”

“I looked out the window and saw bucket elevators, grain cleaners and all the milling equipment,” he continued. “I couldn't believe what I was looking at.”

When he dialed the number listed, the owner said he planned to demolish the mill to expose the value of the underlying land.

“I said, 'What are you going to do? Tear down that mill?'” Mr. Moore recalled. “I thought: this is the most fantastic thing there is. I can't believe what's happening.' So basically I bought the thing and it changed my whole life.