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Business|Bob Moore, Who Founded Bob's Red Mill, Is Dead at 94
  
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/13/business/bob-moore-dead.html

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Bob Moore, Who Founded Bob's Red Mill, Is Dead at 94

A former gas station owner, he was learning to read the Bible in its
original languages when he changed course and started what became an
artisanal-grains powerhouse.

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Bob Moore, a man with white hair and a full white beard wearing a red
jacket, a gray cap and glasses, stands on the upper level of a large
retail store.
Bob Moore, the founder of Bob's Red Mill, at his retail store in
Milwaukie, Ore., in 2010. His company grew from serving the Portland
area to become a global natural-foods behemoth.Credit...Doug Beghtel/
The Oregonian, via Associated Press
Alex Williams

By Alex Williams

Feb. 13, 2024

Bob Moore, the grandfatherly entrepreneur who, with his wife,
Charlee, leveraged 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 on Saturday at his home in
Milwaukie, Ore. He was 94.

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

Founded in Milwaukie in 1978, Bob's Red Mill grew from serving the
Portland area to become a global natural-foods behemoth, marketing
more than 200 products in more than 70 countries. The company's
product line runs a whole-grain gamut, including stone-ground sorghum
flour, paleo-style muesli and whole wheat-pearl couscous, along with
energy bars and cake and soup mixes.

Over the years, the company profited handsomely from the
nutrition-minded shift away from processed foods and grains.

"I think that people who eat white flour, white rice, de-germinated
corn -- in other words, grains that have had part of their nutrients
taken away -- are coming up short," Mr. Moore said in 2017 in an
interview for an Oregon State University oral history. "I think our
diets, nationally, and international probably, show the fact that we
just have allowed ourselves to be sold a bill of goods."

Despite the company's explosive growth, Mr. Moore fended off numerous
offers by food giants to buy Bob's Red Mill. He opted instead 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
in the hands of its more than 700 employees.

"The Bible says to do unto others as you would have them do unto
you," Mr. Moore, an observant Christian, said in discussing the plan
in a recent interview with Portland Monthly magazine.

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