Bob Moore Oral History Interview, December 28, 2017

JD: Today is December 28, 2017. This interview is with Bob Moore of Bob's Red Mill, and we're at the World Headquarters in Milwaukie, Oregon. My name is Janice Dilg, oral historian for the OSU 150 Oral History Project. Good morning.

BM: Good morning to you, Jan.

JD: So today we're going to talk about Bob's Red Mill--how it got started, lots of evolution to the point that it is now. So, it seems like a good place to begin is, what was your inspiration, why did you want to run a flouring mill?

BM: Well actually, I didn't think a flouring mill was really what I wanted to do in the first place. I just ran across a book called John Goffe's Mill, and you'll notice it's laying here on the table, Jan, because that's where I found it--on the table of a library. Someone had taken it out of the stacks and not 00:01:00checked it out. They just laid it on the table, and I picked it up. And you know, that just changed my whole life. That was 1970, something like that--a long time ago. John Goffe's Mill by George Woodbury. And George was a Goffe through his mother, and this book, which is not very long, written about 1950, was his story of how he restored his family's old flour mill--John Goffe's Mill in Bedford, New Hampshire, way across the whole United States.

It's a charming story; he writes extremely well. He's very well educated. He's educated as an archeologist, and I have an interest in those kinds of things myself. Biblical archeology is something that has fascinated me for most of my life. But above all, when George made the statement, after he got his mill 00:02:00going, that people beat a path to his door over his whole wheat flour and cornmeal, I read that, and I thought, my goodness, if I could find some mill stones and a mill some place, I bet I could do the same thing, only I'm on this side of the United States. And basically that's what happened. I spent quite a bit of time, probably a year's time maybe a little more, searching out where I could find old equipment. I found a mill in Mansfield, North Carolina, and they were going to tear it down. They were going to build a shopping center where it was. And I was able to get the equipment, and I have that equipment.

I have it here in this plant, where we used it for many years until we were able to get some new stone milling equipment, which we have now twenty-four running, twenty-four hours a day. So, it really helped us to get this whole thing started. So it was a great, kind of an experiment in the beginning, just to see what we could do with it. And it has turned out to be, we have about 600 people working here now, and it's just turned out to be an amazing business, making whole wheat whole grain flours and cereals and shipping them, basically, all over the world. We have our products, right from Oregon here, are being distributed throughout the entire world. Oh, it's pretty cool.

JD: The experiment has gone well.

BM: Ah, yeah; it is more than an experiment now [laughing]. I think we really think we're in the business.

JD: And you went from this inspirational book and this story of George Woodbury but then you ended up in Milwaukie, Oregon. You didn't have a mill at that point. Talk about how you started working here in Oregon.

BM: Well, I moved up to Portland, Oregon [pause]. Yeah, I'm trying to, kind of shut down for a minute. I'm not sure just how far we want to go astray here, now. I mean, see, when I first started this whole thing I was with two of my three sons--

JD: Right.

BM: --in Redding, California. And that's where we got this equipment that was available to us and put it into use, and it went well there too.

JD: Mm-hmm.

BM: But Redding was a little dinky town, and it didn't have the potential like Portland [laughs], and I don't think we really recognized and knew that that would be it. I kept my job--I had a very nice and very responsible job running the Penny's Auto Center in Redding, California and had had it for ten years. So, I considered that my life job. But this thing just, we just kept grinding flour and getting creative and making cereals and having a ball creating different kinds of cereals and things like that. Part of my life was definitely to go to seminary, Western Evangelical Seminary, over here on Jennings Lodge and to learn to read the Bible in its original languages, Hebrew and Aramaic Greek. That was my goal in life, one hundred percent. I gave myself over to it--my wife and I 00:03:00gave ourselves over to doing this thing as a piece of our life and sold everything, moved up here to Portland, moved into an apartment, and we began going to seminary.

That was good; it was a new experience for fifty-year-old people. Not very many people try to do some crazy thing like that, but I did. And the problem was, we 00:04:00did a lot of walking when we were studying--vocabulary, we had cards, and we'd read verbs back and forth and whatnot. And we walked for miles, and in the course of all of this, we passed by the old Martin Brothers Mill over on Jennings.

JD: Before your phone rang you were talking about the extensive walking that you and Charlee would do.

BM: Well, we did not expect to stay in the milling business, which we had been in with the boys down in Redding. We expected to go to seminary, and we were doing fine. In fact I, being completely retired and having an income, which I 00:05:00did have, I wasn't particularly worried about anything, and it was kind of fun--getting up in the morning and going to school, studying. And then in the afternoons we had about seven students that were struggling with Greek a lot, and I offered to take them on and tutor them in the evening because it is, it was, a university, and it wasn't very big but they gave me a classroom and said, "Yeah, go ahead." So we all met together there, seven or eight of us, in the evening for an hour or so, and we'd go back over this. So I'd go to class and go home and study, and then I'd come back and teach. So I actually ended up getting all these lessons three times--it's not a bad way to study.

JD: Mm-hmm.

BM: It worked really well for me. I don't know about the rest of them, but it 00:06:00gave me the opportunity to help them get going with some of this that was--because I had spent a lot of time with Greek and whatnot in the concordances and stuff, and I was pretty familiar with a lot of things before I ever came up here. And some of the other students, this was all new to them. So, it was fun. I helped them, and it was all very enjoyable. And during the course of our studies, we walked a lot. I mean, we walked a lot. I mean, we walked a lot [laughing]--miles and miles and miles. I wish I could do that now because it sure was healthy at the time. And in the course of walking, we passed the old Martin Brothers Mill. There's a picture. That is after it was painted red. We didn't have it. There is three times when you should have a picture of it--when we first discovered it; it had a for sale sign on it.

JD: Mm-hmm.

BM: That was significant, especially to me. My poor wife, she said, "What are you doing?" And I said, "Well, I'm just going to look at this thing." And she said, "Well, I thought we were going to learn to read the Bible in the original languages." And I said, "That's what we're going to do but I just want to look at this, and make a phone call here," which I did. And I learned that they were going to tear the building down. So I bought it. And that is the beginning of 00:08:00this business that I'm sitting here talking to you right now.

JD: Mm-hmm.

BM: To be honest with you. Because if I hadn't done that, I probably would not have continued in the milling business, as much as I enjoyed it. But I enjoy a lot of things. I enjoyed studying Hebrew. But I also enjoyed doing this business, and I've been doing this now for 45 years. So, I don't seem to get tired of it. I don't know why. Like, I'm always ready to come back at it again [chuckles].

And so, the people that I've surrounded myself with--the Nancy's and all the wonderful, my staff all through the place--have all for some reason or another stayed with me, and we've just had a delightful time of running a business that we believed in and whatnot. Because whole grains are just really healthy, and people who eat whole grains as a regular diet generally feel pretty good.

And there's a lot of documentation of that, which at the beginning I didn't even know about, but now I do. And I'm very pleased to be a part of what I am in now. So, that little mill, I opened it up, and it was just amazing. My wife and I, I 00:09:00had a partner--I didn't want to do it all alone--so I found a person who I already knew to go in with me, and we did real well with that business. It was just a retail business. We weren't trying to do much. Just, I put a little ad in the paper about, "the mill stones are turning," and we began grinding flour, making cornmeal, packaging things, and it was great fun. I can't, it was just wonderful.

People came from everywhere. Within two weeks I had Channel 2 here in Portland, ABC, Kathy Smith. I had lunch with her not too long ago. This was over 40 years ago, and she came out with a camera crew. And she thought that these old mills were so classy, and so that night I saw myself on TV. And that didn't hurt; people flocked out to the mill to see this new thing [laughs]. It's been a great experience having people appreciate what I've done, and it's been very enjoyable. The next step really was Fred Meyer deciding, Mr. Meyer deciding that 00:10:00he wanted to open health food stores in his grocery stores.

JD: Mm-hmm.

BM: And he had 44 one-stop shopping centers. So 44 stores is a lot of stores. And when his buyer came to me and asked me if I would be willing to make product 00:11:00for Mr. Meyer, I thought [laughing] I didn't. I really didn't want to work that hard. I was doing okay the way that it was. So I just kind of laughingly said, I don't think I want to do that. So. But then I said, why don't you come back in a few months maybe, and I'll think about it. And basically that is what happened. They did come back, and I may have been kind of the only one that could do something like that. There wasn't very many people around the country that had those old mills and things like that.

So I guess, I said yes. And then my challenges really start. I tried to keep up with the orders, and then create new products. And it was very, very challenging the whole thing. And I had people come to work for me who helped me to be more creative and whatnot and gradually I added people to my staff in the old mill until we were supplying all of the Fred Meyer stores with some 50 or 60 whole-grain items. I'm very proud of all that; that was delightful. It turned out to be quite a thing.

JD: And whole grain was not necessarily a steady part of most American diets in the 1970s -- '80s when you were really getting going with this. How do you think you influenced people's dietary tastes?

BM: Well, 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, and I think our diets, nationally and international probably, show the fact that we just have allowed ourselves to be sold a bill of goods by taking the bran and the germ away from the flour and using that as the basis for our food diet. It's not a very good thing. And there was people who, I have some books that--. Del Davis, Gayelord Hauser, Bac Rodale with prevention magazine--

JD: Mm-hmm.

BM: --those people were influencing the media, and they were influencing me, I know that--books, stuff. I had seven or eight different books on whole grains and the value of them. It wasn't a big secret but people just got used to having white flour. And, of course, we've got the big things--salt, sugar, fat--you know, we like all that stuff, so that's what we eat. And we just have a lot of dietary problems, and I think it became time to get ahold of our diets and begin to look at what's happening to the people in the United States certainly, in the world, with obesity and some of the problems that are kind of self-induced by the way we eat and what we don't eat. We've got a lot of problems. And the whole grain just fill right with that.

So, unbeknownst to me, I didn't go into it to be in the health food business or anything. It just became a part of who I was, what I was, and I just have to think that that's probably the right time. And now we're selling our products all over the world, and whole grains are pretty hot. [JD chuckles] I mean, you know, here we are, enjoying quite a bit of notoriety in whole grains and the value of eating a more whole-grain diet. Lots of people have said they felt better and their bodies work better, and it helps for obesity and different things. So, all the way around, I think we've had about 100 years from 1880 somewhere in there on to--we just didn't have enough food that was right, and it was devalued. And I don't know, somehow I've been able to bring an alternative 00:12:00up, and that's what we do.

JD: And so you talked about starting with very old mill stones. But at some point--as your products become more popular, there's more need for them, there's more request for them--at some point you're scaling up. And talk about, kind of, how you kept abreast of changes and when it was time to modernize and expand.

BM: Well, I can tell you, it's an amazing thing how some things happen. The phone rings, and a guy says, "It looks to me like that you have stone mills in your place," and he's calling me from Florida or some place. And I said, "Yeah, 00:13:00that's what I use." "Well, where do you get them?" And I said, "Well, they're not easy to get because usually they are surplus out of an old mill somewhere, and we have several of them." I had three, I think, at the time. "Well," he said, "how would you like to have new ones?" And it turned out that he had just gotten back from Denmark, Saeby, Denmark. And over there, it's crazy, but they still have a factory where they quarry the stones near Paris, France--it's La 00:14:00Ferte. And the interesting part is, is that there's evidence that the Romans, 2000 years ago, were pulling mill stones from that same quarry because the stones are so--they're hard, and they're porous so that they grind flour very well, and they just never seem to wear out. And I just fell into the company, Skilled Mills, that have been there making mill stones and making mills themselves for over 150 years. I didn't know they existed, and they weren't selling anything in the United States. So I gathered up my wife and myself, and we went to Denmark. And I just couldn't believe my eyes--there's a factory that has mill stones. They're all stacked up, ready to be put in mills. And that was the most wonderful experience because I just basically thought that there just wasn't any mills expect for what I could find--beg, borrow and steal--from some old mill somewhere, somewhere or anywhere in the world. But they have new ones, 00:15:00and I bought 10. They taxed me a little bit, but I bought 10. And it took all of three months or so to get them over here. And from that time on, I have never had a problem with milling with stone [mullings ?].

JD: Mm-hmm.

BM: I now have 24 mills operating in this plant that we're sitting in right now, and they run 24 hours a day. They don't wear out. They're the most wonderful piece of machinery. They're slow, and they're cool but they don't take anything 00:16:00out of the grain and that is one of the features that I love about the stones. They take the grain in, grind it into fine flour--or course or whatever you want, cracked wheat anything--and they leave it intact. And I just think that they're just about as great as they can get, and we've put two of them together so that we get twice as much production. And I've been able to get a wonderful life out of these wonderful mill stones. They've been the basis of our whole company, and I just am very pleased.

JD: And so as you are talking it sounds like it's sort of both an art and a science. You're figuring out, kind of, the practicalities of what kind of mills and how many. So, you know you start out with inspiration from a book and a story but then there's also the need to figure out what are the right mills, what are the right machines, what's the right combination. What did you bring to all of these different parts that created this successful business?

BM: Well, that's good a question. I brought simplicity back to it; that's for sure. The simplicity of taking the whole grain, putting it through a mill, grinding it into whatever you want--flour or cereal--and leaving it at that, without taking anything out. The industry, grain industry, has for a century or more now had the sense that they had to take stuff out of it, and they have done 00:18:00just that. In most cases they've devalued it by taking the bran out or the germ, partly because these parts of the grain spoil, cut the shelf life, and I don't do that.

So I think that somebody just needs to be doing what I do, and that's what I do. And we've got a pretty good lion share of the business; it's not bad. So, I just leave it alone, and that's basically pretty much what we do. Now I mix pancake 00:19:00mixes, muffin mixes, we have gone into nuts, beans, legumes--anything that is classified as grain or anything, which it is, we have pretty much taken that over too, so it's been great. So all in all I think that it's been very, very nice.

JD: And your name has always been on the business, but at some point your face became very much, the public place where people interacted with you on every single package.

BM: Well, I had a dear friend who sold me oats, Bob Hackwith. He was back in 00:20:00Minnesota, and he had a large oat company. And I bought oats from him. And Bob, for some reason or another, took a kind of a liking to me and kept insisting that I put my name--he said, big companies do not understand individuals. And you need to put your picture and your name--identify yourself--on your package. And I did that and I have never been sorry.

Everywhere I go people recognize me, and I always have somebody to talk to. [Both chuckle] Somebody is always asking me questions about things. And then, of 00:21:00course, we have our own retail store, which is a little ways from here. And it's usually pretty busy, and that's enjoyable too. I can always find somebody to talk to over there, so. People ask me questions about, just like you are, how did you get in business and different things like that. So it's just been very enjoyable. And so putting your picture and your name on the paper on the front of your products is not a bad idea if you want to stay with it, which I have. I'm still staying with it, so anyway.

JD: Is anyone every surprised that there's a real Bob?

BM: All the time people are always saying, there is a Bob. [JD chuckles] Well, because there's so much fakery in advertising, you know, but I'm not a fake, so. It's enjoyable; it's very enjoyable. I guess, I may be the only generation that can do this, and I'm doing it and enjoying it a lot, so it's great fun.

JD: And you mentioned the store, and I believe that on occasion you entertain the customers there.

BM: Oh, I've been a piano player, frustrated piano player, for most of my life. Many years ago [chuckling] I picked up boogie woogie on the piano. I'm a 00:22:00violinist. I play classic violin, and I sprouted out into the piano. And it just became kind of a thing for me to play boogie on the piano. And then eventually I kept working at it until I could play other things too. And I enjoy a lot of--Nancy, my assistant, she's an excellent pianist, and so I bought two pianos, and we enjoy playing, oh, just a whole variety of songs together--kind of jazz songs and things like that.

It's very enjoyable. I'm surprised at the number of people in life that want to play piano or want to play music and don't because it's just a matter of getting on it and doing it. And that's what I did. Sometimes I wonder about the folks that want to do things. If I want to do something bad enough, I usually dig in 00:23:00and give it a try. And I did that with music, and I'm not sorry. I'm good. I've done a lot of things. The only one thing I never did was fly, and that's something I wanted to do but I didn't. It's a long story.

JD: When you were talking about the person who grew oats and that you bought oats from, and he was the one who was encouraging you to put your name and your face on the packaging on your products.

BM: Bob Hackwith, yeah.

JD: It sounds like you have very personal relationships with the people that you're buying the raw grain from and the raw--

BM: Oh gosh, I know some many of our farmers--the Williams brothers over in 00:24:00Eastern Oregon. And actually, in some cases, my sons and I, two of my sons have airplanes, and over the years we've spent some time flying to visit our suppliers, which has been great fun--up in Montana and back in Colorado and different places. We just get in the plane, and I buy the gas and off we go. [laughs] And we've had some very nice times visiting our farmers, and there's no real reason for it. You just do it because it's a nice opportunity to get away with your sons and also pleasant to visit people who are part of your life, which they are. So in 45 years we've made a lot of friends, and it's made, I 00:25:00don't know, maybe to me it just seems like the grain taste different when you know people [chuckling]. It's not just in a big bin [laughing]. It belonged to somebody you know. Life is like that though, really. I think everyone should be aware that knowing people, it's a good way to live.

JD: And you also have extended relationships with your work crew, your staff here. We did a tour together last week, and most of the people that I met had been here more than a decade and many quite a bit longer than that.

BM: [laughs] Yes. I've got people that have been with me for 35 years and, several of them actually. But then a lot of them have retired too because we can't keep them forever. But yeah, I think that many years ago, lots of years ago, I felt that as the company became profitable, that sharing the profits with my employees, since they're the ones that made it possible, was something that I should do. And I inaugurated a portion of the profits paid out to each one of the employees according to the hours they worked and the length of time they've 00:26:00been with me.

And I have been able to keep that up every single month, 12 months a year, with an extra paycheck each month for the past 27 years, and it has kind of cemented a different kind of relationship with myself and my people because they know that I don't have to do that. I don't have to share the profits with them, but I do. I wouldn't go back and change it for anything but it's just something that I recommend but I don't know how many other companies might be willing to do it but I've done it for 27 years. That's part of what kind of cements your 00:27:00relationship with your people because you go a little extra that you don't have to. Anyway that's part of it.

JD: Mm-hmm. So we've been talking a lot about how you built the business and how you grew to the stage that you are right now. What's in the future for Bob's Red Mill and Bob Moore?

BM: That's a good question. I'd like to see the company perpetuate itself. And I think, I know, that I have structured the company to remain an entity and get as 00:28:00large as it might want to get and be able to create, continue to create, wholesome whole-grain foods and to grow until we become a functional part of the food supply as far as we can possibly reach. Grains are unique in the since that they don't spoil, and I'd like to have a line of whole-grain products--I have a line of whole-grain products--that just doesn't end. And I hope it doesn't end. So we're positioned now, the way with the machinery, the mills and everything, to just continue to grow. And I don't know, I guess we'll have to see if that 00:29:00works so. See what everybody wants to do.

I've structured the company so that the people who stay here and continue to work will all make a portion of the profits of the company. And then, of course, we have two which we hadn't mentioned, our ESOP Employee Stock Ownership Plan--that was the ultimate kind of finishing touches on the business, to actually give the company to the employees. It's a wonderful program, and by my giving the company to the employees it has allowed me to take my share of the company and to help others, in this case OSU, to establish programs for the community, which seems to be working very well. It's been something I'm very 00:30:00proud of, and I hope can perpetuate so that, what goes around comes around.

JD: And we're going to do a second interview and we'll talk about the Moore Family Center more extensively then.

BM: Okay.

JD: But I think this is a great place to wrap up for today, unless you have anything that--

BM: No that's fine. I, that's fine.

JD: Great. Well thanks for participating.

BM: You bet, thank you. Thank you for coming out.

JD: You bet.