Bob Moore, founder and face of Bob’s Red Mill food brand, 94

Bob Moore, who became an amiable face of the natural foods industry as the bearded, bolo tie-wearing founder of Bob’s Red Mill, the wholegrain food brand known as a favorite of vegans, home bakers, health-food enthusiasts and gluten-free diners, died Feb. 10 at his home in Milwaukie, Ore., the former mill town where the company is based. He was 94.

A company spokeswoman confirmed his death but did not give a cause.

A folksy, almost Santa-like figure who often donned a red vest or coat, Moore was immediately recognizable to anyone who ever bought a package of Bob’s Red Mill barley, bulgur or buckwheat. An illustration of his face, gently smiling under a flat cap and wire-rimmed glasses, adorns each of the company’s more than 200 products, alongside a salutation that conveyed some of the onetime seminarian’s easygoing charm: “To Your Good Health.”

Under Moore and his wife, co-founder Charlee Moore, the private company grew from an artisanal Oregon business into a global empire of stone-ground grains, cereals and flours, with annual sales of “well over $100 million,” Moore told podcast host Guy Raz in 2018. The company went on a hiring spree in 2020, buoyed by a surge of interest in baking during the coronavirus pandemic, and says it now has more than 700 employees, with sales in more than 70 countries.

Moore, who retired as chief executive in 2018 and continued to serve on the board until his death, was initially hesitant to embrace the health-conscious approach that his brand promoted from its founding in 1978. He once thought that gluten-free dieters “were nuts,” he said, and was skeptical of his wife’s interest in books like “Let’s Get Well,” by nutritionist Adelle Davis.

But his father’s death from a heart attack at age 49, along with his wife’s experiments in whole-grain baking in the 1960s, began to pique his interest in healthy eating. “Our world needed better food, it needed whole grains,” he recalled in an episode of Raz’s podcast “How I Built This.”

While managing a J.C. Penney auto shop in Redding, Calif., Moore came across a library book, “John Goffe’s Mill,” in which Harvard anthropologist George Woodbury chronicled his attempts to restore a derelict mill that belonged to his family in New Hampshire. The book, with its evocative descriptions of traditional milling techniques and the glories of stone-ground flour and corn meal, inspired Moore to think that he might be able to run a mill of his own.

Moore began writing letters to millers across the country, seeking out antique equipment, and eventually acquired a few sets of 19th-century quartz millstones from a defunct mill in North Carolina. He went on to find modest success with his first milling company, Moores’ Flour Mill, which he founded in 1974 with his wife and two of his sons, working out of a vacant Quonset hut in Redding.

But a few years later, on the verge of turning 50, he decided to turn the milling business over to his children. He sold most of his possessions, moved to Portland, Ore., with his wife and enrolled at Western Evangelical Seminary, now part of George Fox University, where he sought to fulfill a long-held ambition of learning Hebrew and Greek so that he could read the Bible in two of its original languages.

“That was my goal in life, one hundred percent,” he said in an oral history for Oregon State University. “I gave myself over to it.”

Within six months, Moore was again seized by visions of stone-ground flour and grains. He and his wife were quizzing each other on Greek nouns and verbs, going over flashcards during a walk in nearby Milwaukie, a few miles south of downtown Portland, when they spotted an old mill and a “for sale” sign out front. Inside were bucket elevators and grain cleaners, along with virtually all of the milling equipment that Moore knew he needed to get started.