History
In the 1950s, Moore briefly owned a gas station in Los Angeles.[12] The smog in the city influenced Bob and his wife Charlee to sell the station, and move to Mammoth Lakes, a small resort town in the mountains about 300 miles (480 km) north of Los Angeles where he opened a second gas station. After its failure, Moore was forced to move his family into an empty rental property owned by their minister.
Moore worked in the hardware department of a Sears store located in Sacramento and was a manager at a J.C. Penney auto shop in Redding. He subsequently bought a five-acre goat farm where he and Charlee raised their sons. He and his sons sold milk and eggs locally. Charlee began experimenting with baking whole grain bread.[13] Moore's drive for healthier foods started with his father's death of a heart attack at age 49, and his wife's grandmother's healthy eating obsession.[14]
In the 1950s, he discovered a book called John Goffe's Mill by George Woodbury at a local library.[15] It details how an archeologist rebuilt a New Hampshire flour mill and went into business with no prior experience. He began experimenting with stone-ground flours in the mid-1960s after reading.[13][6] Stone grinding, largely abandoned when the flour industry moved to steel grinding burrs, used quartz millstones operating at lower temperatures, blending the germ, its oil, the bran, and the endosperm.[11] By this point, the Moore family had adopted a back-to-basics diet that included whole grains.[16]
He purchased millstones dating back to the 1880s from a company in Fayetteville, North Carolina,[17] which sat for a few years until 1974, when Moore, his wife, and two of his three sons started Moore's Flour Mill, in Redding, California.[13][18] The mill was converted from a Quonset hut.[17]
After four years, Bob and his wife retired from the Redding Mill and left his sons to run it.[19] That mill still produces some products under contract with Moore's current company.[18]
Bob's Red Mill
The Moores moved to Portland, where Bob attended a seminary to study the Bible for several months.[19] Bob found a commercial flour mill in Oregon City that was for sale, painted it red, and went back into the flours business.[19] Moore bought millstones from the closed Boyd mill near Dufur, Oregon.[20] He acquired other stones from old mills in Indiana and Tennessee.[11] Bob's Red Mill Natural Foods went into business in 1978 and began producing stone ground flours and cereals for the local area. The product was sold direct through his store until he made a deal with the Fred Meyer grocery stores to carry his products.[13]
