Bob Moore: A man with a mill and a mission

Bob Moore’s office in the Portland, Ore., suburbs is filled with vintage model airplanes strung from the ceiling, a bucket of hard red wheat and a pile of books by Pliny, a 1st-century philosopher who wrote about the natural world. Moore has a thing for the past, but he can’t decide which days of yore he likes best. “I’m interested in everything,” he says. From his office window, he admires his 1931 Model A Ford, one of two he drives to work as founder and chief executive of Bob’s Red Mill. The man who is interested in everything built his business on one thing that has proved timeless: whole grains.

Sometimes the 82-year-old Moore starts the day at the upright piano on the mill floor. He’s a little more relaxed these days, no doubt because on his 81st birthday last year he began transferring ownership of the company, in the form of stock, to his employees. “I like partnerships,” he says.

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Although Moore’s face graces every one of the company’s 284 products, which he says will bring in more than $110 million in revenue this year, you probably haven’t heard of him. He keeps a surprisingly low profile, preferring that customers stay on a first-name basis. On each Red Mill bag, Moore serves as folksy ambassador, wearing a derby cap, glasses and a bolo. In real life, he adds a red jacket. If Whole Foods sells a latte-fueled dream of healthy ’90s decadence, Bob’s Red Mill peddles a more populist fantasy of prairie days, a manufactured nostalgia.

In reality, Moore is harking back to early-1900s wisdom by pushing whole grains, high fiber and complex carbohydrates. Doing so positioned him ahead of the curve 37 years ago, when he opened his first mill with his wife, Charlee, and two of his three sons, in Redding, Calif. Moore’s Flour Mill, as it was called then, had nine employees.

Today, the “Mill” is an impressive 320,000-square-foot building the company moved to in 2007; it is flanked by silos on the side of a highway in Milwaukie, Ore., about 15 minutes from downtown Portland. Inside are putty-colored Danish-made mills, each fitted with a millstone that grinds whole grains into cornmeal, flax meal, brown rice flour and more.

Though mechanized, the mills are consistent with “slow food” thinking. Moore rejects a faster metal-roller process, which he says heats the products and shortens their shelf lives. “We built these machines,” he says. “The others that existed, they screamed, got hot and went 94 miles per hour. I don’t live my life that way, and I don’t want my food that way.”

His father’s death of a heart attack at age 49 planted the seeds of Moore’s health-consciousness, as did early exposure to his wife’s grandmother’s books, such as “Let’s Get Well” by Adele Davis. “I thought she was a real nut,” he says. “Now I make my living being a nut.”

Moore honed his work ethic as the owner of a gas station in Los Angeles in the 1950s but eventually moved his wife and three sons to the resort town of Mammoth Lakes to escape the L.A. smog, There, his second gas station business failed miserably, and the Moores ended up so broke they had to move the family into an empty rental property owned by their minister.