How to Update the Classics with Historic Bob’s Red Mill

(Gerry Furth-Sides) Bob’s Red Mill whole grains food company, established in 1978 in Milwaukie, Oregon by Bob and Charlee Moore, is uniquely American and a leader in its field. We love the products on their own with the classic oatmeal we tried. We love, admire and respect the company history that includes employee ownership.

And we loved the cookies and rolls we made from the oats, too! It adds a wonderful texture and heft to the dough.

The happy day of a complete change in company ownership came in April 30th of 2020, on the 10th anniversary of the project. Bob’s Red Mill is now 100% employee owned, one of only about 8,000 businesses in the country to achieve this incredible feat.

Bob’s Red Mill was one of the first ordering systems to adapt eating styles

Bob’s Red Mill earned the title of the “nation’s leading miller of diverse whole-grain foods years ago. The products are sold through seventy natural food and specialty grocery distributors in the United States and Canada, their online store, and the company’s factory store and restaurant.

Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods produces natural, certified organic, and glue-free milled grain products, ” Its products are distributed throughout the United States, Canada and other locations, including the Caribbean.

Whole grain products, the bulk of company’s line of over 400 products are in themselves made in way that is historic. They are ground with quartz millstones which come from several 120-year-old mills, as well as baking mixes,  beans, seeds, nuts, dried fruits, spices, and herbs.

Moore’s drive for healthier foods started with his father’s death of a heart attack at age 49, and his grandmother’s healthy eating obsession

He began experimenting with stone ground flours in the mid 1960s after reading “John Goffe’s Mill,” a book about an archeologist who rebuilt a flour mill and went into business with no prior experience.  Stone grinding, largely abandoned when the flour industry moved to steel rollers, used quartz millstones that operate at lower temperatures and blend the germ, its oil, the bran, and the endosperm, preserving the nutrition in the grains. 

Moore found his first traditional stone-grinding flour millstones from a company in North Carolina while he was working, at the time, for J.C. Penney. The equipment sat for a few years until Moore, his wife, and two of his three sons started their first mill business, Moore’s Flour Mill in Redding, California. The rest is history.

In 2011, the Moores donated $5 million to Oregon State University to develop a center to study whole grains and over $1 million to a local naturopathic college, both for the study of childhood obesity.