JULY 2008: AROUND THE STATE
Taking it with a grain
RISING PRICES and lackluster consumer spending isn’t bad
for all businesses. Take food for example. After all,
you’ve got to eat, right? Accordingly, the dough (pun
intended) is rising at the newly refurbished 320,000-
square-foot facility at Bob’s Red Mill Natural Foods in
Milwaukie. Known for its whole-grain mixes and cereals, the
company’s new digs doubles its manufacturing capacity,
necessary because the business is growing 25% annually (the
company doesn’t disclose financial figures).
On a recent tour of the mill, owner and president Bob Moore
reached into a freshly milled sack of flax seeds. In his palm
he held yellow flour as if he were a prospector on the banks of
a river, beaming at his discovery of gold.
At 49, you went from running
auto service centers in
California to making
specialty grain products. How’d that happen? In
the service station business I thought I was invincible. I
bought a service station in Mammoth Lakes. It took me a year to
lose everything. It was terrible, a real disaster. We ended up
back in Sacramento living on a farm. There my wife, Charlee,
started baking whole-wheat bread and I thought, “This is
the way people are supposed to eat.” Then after moving to
Redding to run an auto center, I ran across a book called John
Goffe’s Mill by George Woodbury. It was about a man who
inherited an old mill and revived it with his family. I thought
this guy didn’t know beans about milling when he started,
and if he did it, I can do it.
You’re now 79, an age
when most are retired. Why not cash in and take up a
hobby? I don’t fish. I don’t play golf.
Retirement is doing what you want to do, isn’t it? My
first goal was to be in business for myself. I discovered the
freedom of being in business for myself was more important than
the heavy responsibility of being in business for myself. I
have almost 200 employees. That’s different than a hobby
or retirement. I am not going to let it go real quick.
Of your 400 products, which
is your favorite? I eat flax seed every day. And
there’s nothing in this world I enjoy more than
whole-grain bread.
Besides eating whole grains,
any advice for young entrepreneurs? If you put something
on a list and put it in front of you it’s like magic.
Anchor yourself to some ideals and hold onto the rope that is
attached to something. My way of doing that is making fairly
complex lists.
Have you been approached
about selling your business? Everybody loves my
business. Investors, everybody wants to buy this thing. I never
talk to anybody. I am not interested.
JASON SHUFFLER
PHOTO BY ADAM BACHER
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