“I don’t think there are any grains we don’t have that we should have,” says Bob Moore. Given that Bob’s Red Mill, the Portland, Oregon, company that bears Moore’s name, produces and sells more than 400 types of flours, meals, mixes, seeds, oats, cereals, and, of course, whole grains, this seems an eminently reasonable claim.
But while Bob’s Red Mill products—many stone-ground, often organic, and invariably sporting Moore’s bespectacled, white-bearded image—are a staple of many a natural food enthusiast’s pantry, the 34-year-old company is arguably most beloved by the gluten-free community. Bob’s markets more than 50 gluten-free products, from active dry yeast and black bean flour to xanthan gum and teff flour. Gluten-free items currently represent about 30 percent of revenue, and according to Moore account for the company’s biggest growth area.
The current explosion of interest in gluten-free cooking and baking may have helped Moore’s business, but Bob’s Red Mill has actually been around for decades. The seeds of Moore’s success were planted back in the 1960s, when his wife Charlee’s “concern for our health and what we ate” first sparked an interest in whole grains, Moore, now a vigorous 83, recounts. At the time, whole grains were being championed by prominent nutritionists like Gayelord Hauser and Adelle Davis, as well as the recently launched Prevention magazine. It was also an era when scientists were beginning to understand the genetic nature of celiac disease, or gluten intolerance.
Moore was in an entirely different line of work at the time—managing a Firestone auto center—and living with his wife and their three young sons on a rented dairy farm outside Sacramento. For Moore, the true turning point came when he picked up a copy of John Goffe’s Mill, George Woodbury’s real-life account of the restoration of an old gristmill in New Hampshire. Inspired both by Woodbury’s success and the appealing notion of an old stone mill slowly grinding flour, Moore began researching milling gear at the local library.
A few form letters and phone calls led him to Fayetteville, North Carolina, where he salvaged equipment from a defunct mill. In 1972, he and Charlee opened their first mill in a rented factory in Redding, California. They started by milling cornmeal, corn flour, whole wheat flour, and whole wheat pastry flour. For six years, “the mill was kind of done on the side on weekends and evenings,” Moore recalls, while he maintained his job at the auto center. Although the new venture was successful, the Moores realized early on that the small-scale, local nature of the business could not sustain them and their children’s growing families. And so in 1978, Moore and his wife sold their share of the mill. They left it in the hands of two of their grown sons, who still own and operate it to this day, supplying Bob’s Red Mill with its corn grits and granolas.
Meanwhile, Moore and Charlee moved to Moore’s hometown of Portland, where he attended seminary classes to fulfill his longtime dream of studying the Bible in the original Hebrew and Greek. Not long after the move, Moore and Charlee took a stroll one day and happened upon their destiny in the form of an abandoned mill. Over the next decade, they turned that mill—whose red paint inspired the company’s name—into a thriving small business, supplying natural food stores throughout the Northwest. In 1991, after attending a major natural products trade show in Anaheim, California, the company began distributing its products on a national level.
Moore’s first opportunity in the gluten-free niche came in 1985, when members of the Seattle-based Gluten Intolerance Group approached Moore and encouraged him to sell xanthan gum, an agent that gives gluten-free baked goods viscosity and bulk. Moore tracked down the San Diego manufacturer of this key ingredient and began using xanthan gum in his mixes, as well as repackaging it for sale under the Bob’s Red Mill name. The Seattle advocacy and support group also pressed him to separate naturally gluten-free grains, such as rice, from his other products. “I didn’t think rice could be mixed with whole wheat flour and you’d have a contaminated product,” he recalls. “To me, they were all whole grains and good for you.” Moore says he realized that if his company was going to make gluten-free products, it was important to use separate mills. Today, Bob’s has an entirely separate facility for manufacturing and packaging gluten-free goods, as well as a laboratory for developing new gluten-free products. “Because we’ve gone into it so thoroughly,” Moore states, “I just feel we’ve done the right thing with gluten-free.”
When you look at national trends over the last few years, Moore’s dedication to the gluten-free niche seems prescient and well placed. Across the industry, “sales of gluten-free products exceeded $6 billion in 2011, and grew 27 percent since 2009,” says food trend forecaster Suzy Badaracco, citing statistics from the market research firm Mintel. Although Badaracco, founder of the forecasting firm Culinary Tides, predicts that the gluten-free phenomenon is a bubble that will burst sooner rather than later, companies whose products already have a loyal following and have been forward-thinking rather than opportunistic are far less likely to, as Badaracco puts it, “get caught with their pants down.”
Moore doesn’t seem to be in danger of losing his shirt, much less his pants. Among his loyal following is Shauna James Ahern, creator of the widely read Gluten-Free Girl and the Chef food blog. “It’s pretty simple,” says Ahern, when asked what her diet would be like without Bob’s panoply of gluten-free staples. “I can’t imagine living my life without them.”
Moore is not in thrall to trends, and he understands the nature of unpredictability all too well. In 1988, an arsonist set fire to the company’s mill and burned it to the ground, forcing Moore to rebuild his business from scratch. “I have to admit that at almost 60 years old, it was pretty devastating,” Moore says. “I didn’t really have any other way of life.” He briefly considered going back into the auto industry, but his 18 employees and the 50 stores they supplied persuaded him to give whole grains another try. Moore was able to find another location a few miles from the original mill, and was back in business within three months of the fire. It would prove to be only a quick pit stop on Moore’s road to success, as the company outgrew that location in 2007 and moved to its current 325,000-square-foot facility in Milwaukie, a suburb of Portland.
In 2010, Bob’s Red Mill underwent another seismic shift when Moore decided to sell the company to his employees. Although his advancing age played a part in the decision, incessant offers to buy the company were also a significant factor. “The number of people who wanted to buy it got to a real crescendo several years ago,” he reports. “I was being driven crazy by different venture capitalists and a wide variety of professional people who wanted to acquire the company for one reason or another.” Moore’s decision underscored another distinguishing feature of his business philosophy: his commitment and loyalty to the people who have helped him build his company. “Most of my employees have been with me for a long time,” he says. “I really love my people.”
On his 81st birthday in 2010, Moore and his partners signed one-third of the company over to his 200-plus employees through an Employment Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP. The arrangement was intended to allow the ESOP to buy out Moore and his partners within a decade while simultaneously awarding the employees with free stock and thus ownership in the company. But due to the company’s current success, ESOP funding is ahead of schedule, meaning the transfer will be fully funded in half the time originally planned.
“If there’s anything that I’ve done with my life that I feel was the ultimate correct thing to do, it is making Bob’s Red Mill an ESOP,” he maintains. “We are the right company and have the right staff to make this happen.” The transition hasn’t put an end to the buy-out offers, however. “We still get investors that want to help us out,” says Nancy Garner, Moore’s executive assistant. “But we don’t really need their help.” The new corporate structure hasn’t greatly altered Moore’s involvement in day-to-day operations. Until the ESOP is paid for, he remains the company’s president, CEO, and founder. For the past few years, business has grown between 20 and 30 percent annually, though Moore declines to disclose financial specifics. He does allow that the company continues to expand internationally; it aims to do business in 71 countries and is increasing its existing presence in England, Iceland, Jordan, and Mongolia. “Business is good,” he says.
Currently, Moore works five days a week, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and spends his spare time playing his Steinway grand and 200-year-old violin and driving around with Charlee in their pair of 1931 Model A Fords. He reports that he hasn’t lost one workday to sickness in the last year, and enjoys talking to the groups that tour the company’s headquarters. Inevitably, someone asks, “‘Are you really Bob?’” he laughs. “We get that all the time.”
Rebecca Flint Marx lives in New York City and has written about food and other topics for publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and New York magazine. Her most recent contribution to Gourmet Live was Kosher Meat Finds Greener Pastures.