Bob's Red Mill: Bob Moore

In the 1960s, Bob Moore read a book about an old grain mill and was inspired to start his own. Using giant quartz stones from the 19th century, he made dozens of different cereals and flours, positioning his company at the forefront of the health food boom. Today, Bob's Red Mill has grown into a $100 million business – and at nearly 90, Bob goes to work at the mill every day. PLUS, for our postscript, "How You Built That," how Mike Bolos and Jason Grohowski created the portable desk, Deskview. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Guy Raz?

  Hey, one quick thing before we start the show. Just want to let you know that we've just announced some brand new details about the How I Built This Summit in October, sponsored by American Express. We're going to have breakout sessions where you can learn all kinds of skills, from acquiring new users to pitching investors. You'll also be able to get the support you need to build a great culture for your company or overcome imposter syndrome. You can see the full schedule of breakout sessions and the main stage show at npr.org/summit. And just to let you know, our early bird special is ending soon, so buy your tickets before June 1st to save $100. That's $100 you can put back toward whatever it is you're building. OK, here's the show.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  I got a call in the middle of the night. Got up, put my clothes on, jumped in the car. I live just one mile from the mill, and I was lifted up on a hill, and the mill was down in the valley. And when I came around the corner and I could see this fire reaching into the heavens and realizing that that was my business.

• 1:17Guy Raz?

  From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 1:28Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how Bob Moore's passion project to grind his own flour turned into a whole grains empire called Bob's Red Mill, one of the biggest names in natural foods.

• 1:46Guy Raz?

  On this show, we've heard the stories of a lot of tech entrepreneurs. But today's story, it's about as low tech as it gets. It actually goes back to the Paleolithic era, and a technology invented essentially by cavemen, grinding seeds and grains into flour. And as an actual industry, people have been making a living off of this for at least 10,000 years. So we're not talking about a disruptive idea here. Bob's Red Mill mainly sells whole grains and flours. And not just wheat or corn, but things like millet and sorghum and kamut. And who actually knows what kamut is? And even though it wasn't his intention, Bob has turned all of that grain into gold.

• 2:31Guy Raz?

  Bob's Red Mill is a $100 million a year business. Go to most supermarkets today, and there is a good chance you will find Bob's Red Mill products. Just look for Bob's friendly, white-bearded face on the package. And what's really amazing about this story? Bob started the company after he basically retired, when he was almost 50 years old. Right around the time, he decided to study theology at a Christian seminary in Portland, Oregon. And at the time, Bob was not a rich man, but we'll get there. For now, here's what you need to know. Bob grew up in the LA area during the Great Depression. His dad drove a truck selling Wonder Bread.

• 3:15Guy Raz?

  And around the time of the Second World War, all the young men went off to fight. Bob wasn't quite old enough to enlist, but he was old enough to work.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I rounded up a job from the May Company in Los Angeles, which was their headquarters, I believe. I got a job in the warehouse. They had a master warehouse that fed the other May Company stores. And because there wasn't men around, the people that were running the warehouse were all old guys, at least in my mind, they were really old. And they weren't draftable. And I can remember, after working at the May Company warehouse for quite some time, I was called down to the office. And his name was Mr. House, and he smoked cigars. And he was ominous, in my mind, anyway.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  And I knocked on his door, and of course, I thought they were going to fire me. And I was just shaking. I was so nervous to go in there. And Mr. House said, well, sit down, Bob. And he asked me if I would like to have a department of my own at 16 years old.

• 4:29Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Guy, that was probably the greatest thing that society did for Bob Moore, was to give me that kind of responsibility when I was that young. And I almost cried. And he said, we will pay you a dollar an hour. Gosh, that was a lot of money at that time.

• 4:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  But I walked out of his office. I didn't walk out, I flew out. I was just in seventh heaven. And it was probably one of the most magnificent moments in my life was having that happen to me.

• 5:05Guy Raz?

  After Bob finished high school, he joined the Army for three years. And when he got back to Southern California, he met his wife, Charlie, and eventually, they had three boys. For a couple of years, Bob worked for an electric motors company, and he thought that's what he would do for the rest of his life. But then, his dad died unexpectedly.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  I have a picture of him in my office that was taken the same year he died. He looks as fresh and normal as anybody at 49 years old. Certainly didn't look like he was ready to die. And he just keeled over one day, and the doctor said he was dead by the time he hit the ground. He had a massive heart attack. And to this day, I miss my dad immensely.

• 5:52Guy Raz?

  You were, I guess, in your early 20s when he died. How did that change your direction at that point?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Well, Dad and I were always going to go into business together. Well, that didn't happen, of course. And one day, I was driving down Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles, and they had just put up a big sign on a corner that said, "Coming Soon, Mobile Gas Station." And I wrote the phone number down and called it, because I wanted to find out how much it would cost to get a gas station. I didn't even think there was enough money in the world for me to do that. But they came through with a figure that seemed fairly

• 6:37Speaker 01

  reasonable to me. And so, we put the house up for sale and sold it immediately, and got the money we needed to buy the gas station. And that's what I did.

• 6:49Guy Raz?

  How much did you need to buy that gas station at that time?

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Oh, it was about $6,000. And I can tell you that the excitement of having my own business, it's still with me. Guy is still with me. It fulfilled every single thing my dad and I had talked about. And only I didn't have my dad.

• 7:11Guy Raz?

  So if you were enjoying things at the gas station, you, I should mention, you like sold it a couple of years later and got out of LA. Why? Why did you do that?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  Well, LA had a lot of problems. It was very smoggy. It was so intensely uncomfortable that we talked about, well, now that I have a gas station, we could really move anyplace. We could get a gas station in any town. And we decided that Mammoth Lakes was the right place to go. The Mammoth Lakes Lodge had just built a big ski resort up at the top of the mountain, which I believe is still a very

• 7:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah, sure.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  active ski area. And so I sold my station and we sold that house. So we had enough money. I think at the time, we had about $17,000, which in 1959, oh, Guy, it was a lot of money.

• 8:13Guy Raz?

  And so you moved your family out to Mammoth Lakes?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  I did.

• 8:17Guy Raz?

  And how'd it go?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Nothing. No business.

• 8:21Guy Raz?

  What?

• 8:21Speaker 01

  It was crazy. There was already a Shell station up there that had been there for years and years and years. And everybody loved them and went there for their gas and for everything else. And frankly, Guy, by the, almost one year to the day, we just ran out of money. And there's only one way I could go in this to get ourselves out of there.

• 8:42Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Which I did. And Charlie and I and the three boys took off for Sacramento, where I changed my direction in life.

• 8:52Guy Raz?

  So what did you end up doing? So a year after this thing fails?

• 8:56Speaker 01

  One year, almost to the day, we got down to Sacramento. And I got a job at Sears and Roebuck in the hardware department, selling everything. I mean, lawnmowers and all the stuff that was there to sell.

• 9:10Guy Raz?

  When you moved to Sacramento, what was your family's financial situation?

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Well, I think we were at the lowest point. We moved in, we had a minister of the church that we decided to go to at the time. He was caretaking an apartment, three-unit apartment, and one of the units didn't have a shower that worked. And he said, "Well, Bob can let you and Charlie and the boys live in that for a while." And we took him up on it because we didn't have any money. I remember the kitchen was very small, and Charlie and I put a mattress in the kitchen and slept on the floor. And the boys, the two youngest

• 9:54Speaker 01

  boys, slept together on a fold-up bed. And Ken, the oldest at that time, slept in a sleeping bag, and that's how we slept. We didn't have any furniture. So that was about the lowest point in our life when we were living on somebody else with the three boys. You know, when you get down, you feel helpless, like a baby.

• 10:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  You don't, there's no strength left in you. You don't even know how to retaliate or fight. We really, we needed a helping hand.

• 10:29Guy Raz?

  But at some point, maybe it was in the early or mid 1960s, I read that you came across a book.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 10:37Guy Raz?

  That I think it's safe to say probably changed your life. What was that book?

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Yes. A book called John Goffey's Mill, written by George Woodbury. I have it in front of me right now. And George was a very well-educated archaeologist. He got a letter in the mail. It said that he had inherited his family's mill, which was about 600 acres, in Bedford, New Hampshire. Well, I mean, if you got a letter like that, you're going to go down and see what you had. And that's exactly what George did. He went down to the mill and spent the next 10 years of his life restoring John Goffey's mill, which is still down there.

• 11:21Guy Raz?

  And so this is like a memoir of his life restoring?

• 11:24Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 11:25Guy Raz?

  And that that book somehow struck a chord with you? What, why?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  All of a sudden, he makes a statement in the book that the most delightful thing was whole grains, when he ground all these wonderful whole wheat flour and whole rye flour and cornmeal and all this, that the public beat a path to his door. I remember those words. I underlined them and tagged them and showed it to my wife. If we could do this, if we could get a mill and do the same thing, the public would beat a path to our door.

• 12:00Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 12:01Speaker 01

  And we would be in business.

• 12:03Guy Raz?

  So you get really interested in this idea of maybe starting a mill and lots of people get interesting ideas and get obsessed with things for a time being. And so what did you do? Did you start to think, well, how are we going to buy a mill? Did you start to talk to your wife, to Charlie and say, let's look for a mill to buy?

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did a lot of talking. I did a lot of talking to Charlie and the boys were all in their teenagers by that time. And I got them interested too. And one thing I did was I went to the library and they had a 12-volume group of American manufacturers of equipment. And in there, they had pages of companies who made flour mills and equipment for mills. And I wrote some letters, rather naive, because I really, I was talking about stuff in the 1800s and asking them about stone mills. And I wrote about 10 letters.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  And I think I only received a response back from about two of them. One of them gave me the name of a fella who they knew had a stone mill. His name was Dewey Sheets and he lived in Muncie, Indiana. And he had been in the milling business for a lot of his life. And Dewey was such a help. He found me a mill that was to be torn down in Fayetteville, North Carolina. So I ended up...

• 13:36Speaker 01

  For not a whole lot of money with my garage stacked full of old, very ancient stone mills dated 1870, 1860, 1880.

• 13:50Guy Raz?

  Let me just understand what you had, what you were bringing in. You were bringing like large stone.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:55Guy Raz?

  Wheels and just all the equipment you would need to grind up grains into flour?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 14:00Guy Raz?

  And, and with, I guess with all, with, with the intention of eventually actually getting it up and running and starting a mill, but was anybody, I don't know, anybody that you knew saying, thinking, this guy Bob is like, kind of losing his mind. I mean, this hobby thing of starting a mill, you know, it seems like he's taking it a bit far.

• 14:20Speaker 01

  You know, Guy, I don't know why I didn't have much resistance. I didn't feel that I had to back up to anybody or apologize. I think that I felt it was time for healthier food to come along. Our world needed better food, needed more whole grains, it needed most of the nutrition put back in the food that we were feeding people through the grocery chains. And the whole thing began to take on a real form and make sense to me. And when I talked to people, certainly my wife and others, it made sense to them too. So, well, maybe you should try it.

• 15:04Guy Raz?

  I guess after a couple of years, you started to save some money and then you were able to buy.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  My wife started to save money.

• 15:11Guy Raz?

  She started to save money, okay. And you were able to.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  I never was good at it.

• 15:14Guy Raz?

  But after a couple of years, you were able to move to a, a small farm, like a five acre farm. You have, you amassed all this equipment. This is, I guess, the late 60s, early 70s at this point. First of all, how did you, how were you going to get the cash to, to find the land to build a flour mill on?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Well, we didn't build a flour mill. We rented a piece of property that had a building on it. There were so many things that happened in our favor. I got a job at Penny's, JCPenney Company in Redding, California, opening a brand new auto center. And so, we ended up in Redding, California. There was a delightful old Quonset hut on the south end of town. And it was vacant. And we built walls inside, built a store, a real quaint store with cedar planking on the walls. We covered the whole front of the building, made it, tried to make it look like a flour mill and called it Moore's Flour Mill.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  And we converted this building into what was a reasonable facsimile of a mill. And we had three stone mills that we set here and there and began the process of grinding flour, whole wheat flour, cornmeal.

• 16:37Guy Raz?

  So, so this is 1974. You opened the doors to Moore's Flour Mill with your boys. And, and, and you're making wheat flour, corn flour, what else?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Oh, actually, we, I created the 10 grain cereal that we're using now. We ground whole wheat. There's a lot of kinds of wheat. There's a durum wheat, which is a hard white wheat. There's a red wheat, which is high in protein and makes wonderful bread. Oh, and then soft wheat. There's a soft white wheat for pastries and, and biscuits. And so you, you, you get a little knowledge of what grains are and how to use them. Then you create some recipes and put them in a bag and then you pedal them. And that's just what we did.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  We put large windows across the wall from the store into the mill room and they could see it, one or two or three mills running all the time.

• 17:41Guy Raz?

  So this was like, almost like an artisanal mom and pop kind of storefront. It was, it was never designed to be anything bigger than that, I guess, right?

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Oh, no, no, no. I kept my job at Penny's for two years and Charlie, of course. She worked the store and talked with people and she was a great believer in whole grains. And it was all very nice. We were having a great time.

• 18:07Guy Raz?

  OK, but you must have still been like kind of restless because you, I guess it was around this time, you kind of made a radical shift. Like, you decided to retire. One of your sons takes over the mill, and then you take off to go study at a seminary.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  That's right. I had an intense desire to learn to read the Bible in the original languages, Hebrew and Koine Greek. And we did a little scouting about and found here that Portland, where I am right now, was one of the greatest spots for seminaries. And we enrolled in one of the seminaries here and began to learn to speak Bible in its original languages.

• 18:58Guy Raz?

  This is, I mean, this is interesting, Bob, because at this point, when you decide to completely change directions and just go and study at a seminary, you are about 50 years old. So just a little bit older than the age when your father died.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:13Guy Raz?

  And this was going to be, this was going to be your retirement, the beginning of the, you're sort of winding down from work, I guess, right?

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Well, I counted all my buckets that I had, and I said to Charlie, I think we could last, we could live this way for four or five years. And I think I could get my education. And once I got that, I would get some kind of direction, I felt, whether it was spiritual direction or what, and would be able to reroute my life into something that was worthwhile. And we both agreed that that's what appealed to us both. So that's what we did.

• 19:49Guy Raz?

  So you start at seminary school?

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do.

• 19:53Guy Raz?

  And did you love it? Did it fulfill all of your dreams and hopes and wishes?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  No.

• 20:00Guy Raz?

  Oh, no. What happened?

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Well, it's hard work when you haven't been into languages, Guy. It's a tough one, actually. I had to do a lot of studying, and Charlie was right with me.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  What really changed the whole thing was one day we were walking along. We were reading vocabulary cards back and forth. We had Greek verbs on one side and nouns on the other. And so, anyway, one day, we were walking down a particular street. And much to my surprise, I looked over and there was a mill. And it'd been there for a long time. And in front of it was a for sale sign. I couldn't believe it. I said to Charlie, I said, "Hon, that is an old mill." We walked over. It was probably six blocks from the cemetery. And I got up, went up on the steps.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  And I looked in the window, and I could see bucket elevators, grain cleaners. I could see all the milling equipment. I could not believe what I was looking at. And there was a phone number. And I called the number, and I got ahold of the guy that owned the property. And when I told him I was interested, he says, "What are we talking about here?" He owned a lot of property. I said, "The old mill, mill, mill, mill." "Oh," he said, "yeah, that property." He said, "Yeah, we're going to tear the building down. And we're going to have the property as two acres. And we're going to have it for sale. So it's going to be a really good buy without that old mill on it." I said, "What are you going to do? Tear that mill down?" And I thought, "This is just the most fantastic thing in the world.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  I can't believe what's happening." So, well, basically, I bought the thing and changed my entire life.

• 21:55Guy Raz?

  When we come back, how Bob opened his new mill, started to grow the business, and then stood on a hill and watched the whole thing go up in smoke. I'm Guy Raz. Stay with us. You're listening to How I Built This from NPR.

• 22:21Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. So it's 1978. Bob and his wife Charlie stumble across an old mill about to be torn down, and they decide to save it, to create a new company. And they call it Bob's Red Mill.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  It took three months. I gave myself three months to the day to get the doors open. And I began a concerted effort to make my life what I thought I was capable of doing with this building now. The building was everything. It was just a godsend, to be honest with you. I think that's a good term.

• 23:01Guy Raz?

  But how did people-- like, when you opened the doors after three or four months from the moment you bought it--

• 23:06Speaker 01

  Three months to the day.

• 23:08Guy Raz?

  Three months from the day. And you're processing grains, and you know how to do this stuff. How did you get the word out? I mean, were you just waiting for customers to show up and buy flour and grains?

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Well, I had a lot of help. I put-- every Tuesday was the food ads in the local paper. And I put a two-column, "The mill is now running. Come and enjoy fresh stone-ground whole wheat flour." And I'm a pretty good shouter. I can yell it out pretty loud and make it work pretty well.

• 23:45Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  And Channel 2 here came out with Kathy Smith. And within two weeks of opening the mill, I was on the evening news--

• 23:57Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  --with Kathy saying the nicest things about Bob's Red Mill. And then I could fill a parking lot in no time.

• 24:06Guy Raz?

  And people were buying your grains, your oats, your, like, your flours? Just coming in and buying all that stuff?

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, but what else came in was we had a group of markets here called Fred Meyer One Stop Shopping Center. And their buyer came in. He was a vice president. And he said, "Mr. Meyer-- Would like to open health food stores in all 44 of his stores. And he'd like to put your products in there.

• 24:37Guy Raz?

  Huh.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  And they gave me a list of the grains they wanted, the flowers they wanted. And of course, with the Fred Meyer chain, others came to us, Safeway, I know, and Albertsons and some of those, and asked us if we had enough production

• 24:52Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  to keep them going. And without too much effort, we got a pretty good business going.

• 25:01Guy Raz?

  And this is, I guess we should say, this is the mid 70s. So this is like, really when the health food craze kind of starts to take off in America. It's, it's really

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Well, we had a, yeah, we, we had a lot of help. Like Reader's Digest came out with an article on bran and why that was so healthy for you to keep your bowels in good order. And just one thing right after another kept coming out. And of course, everybody had a TV and there were shows on health. And we really began to realize that we had a kind of a tiger by the tail over this whole thing, you know? I'm, I, there's a lot of revelation in this stuff. We didn't start out with any huge intent or anything. It just, it just seemed like the right thing. First off, we were eating that stuff ourselves and we all felt the benefits of all this.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  So that's one thing, that you're in a business that you believe in. And I think that's one of the biggest things that made this thing work.

• 26:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So, all right, so, so Bob, I'm going to just jump ahead because the first 10 years of the company were growing slowly and steadily. You were still pretty small.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:12Guy Raz?

  But about 10 years in, after you launched Bob's Red Mill in, in 1988.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  Ominous year.

• 26:20Guy Raz?

  Ominous year. You had a fire completely destroy.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:24Guy Raz?

  The mill.

• 26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did.

• 26:26Guy Raz?

  And it was intentionally set. It was set by an arsonist.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, we, it was kind of crazy people running around. I didn't know this person at all, and it wasn't any, like, an ex-employee, or anybody mad, or with any grievance, or anything. I don't think any of us knew what was coming, and, boy, I'll tell you, with that old wooden building that was really old, you know, why, it really caught fire, and it was full of grain. It was a very active company, lots of paper, and just everything.

• 27:03Guy Raz?

  Where were you when it happened? I mean, how did you find out about it?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Well, I got a call in the middle of the night. "Bob, Bob, your mill's on fire." So, I got up and put my clothes on, jumped in the car, and got on down, and as I went around the corner, I didn't, I lived just one mile from the mill, and I was lived up on a hill, and the mill was down in the valley, and when I came around the corner, and I could see this fire reaching into the heavens, and realizing that that was my business. And you don't know what to think, you don't know how to think, you don't know whether

• 27:48Speaker 01

  to cry, or what. I just got down there pretty quickly. The fire chief came up to me, who I knew, they used to make inspections of the mill, and he said, "We got all the water we need, but if you could tell me what part of the mill is the most precious that would keep you going in business, I can direct a whole fire department at that point." And of course, the millstones were the most important part of the whole thing. We walked over to the mill. It was pretty hot there, but, you know, and the fire departments were throwing a lot of water on the building, but we walked over, and I pointed out on

• 28:30Speaker 01

  the building, side of the building, where the mills were inside.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  They immediately had a saw. They just whacked a big square hole in it and he planted one of the firemen there on the ground with the fire hose aimed through the hole. And for the entire time of the fire, he kept a direction inside the mill room, which actually saved all three mills.

• 28:57Guy Raz?

  So when the fire was, when the fire was put out and you're, you're, you're looking at what was left of Bob's Red Mill, which I'm assuming was not a whole lot, did you, did you, were you immediately thinking, we're gonna just rebuild and, and start up again really soon? Or did you, did you think, maybe it's time, maybe this is a sign to, to pack it in?

• 29:19Speaker 01

  Well, that's pretty much what I thought. But there were some things that changed my mind. And even that very night, David, my, at that time, my oldest employee, his wife came down. Eileen was such a lovely lady. She was our, she worked at the bank where we banked, and that's how David met her. And we took them, the two kids on their first date together for dinner. And they got married. We went to their wedding and everything else. And David had been with me almost 10 years by that time. And that night, within a few

• 29:59Speaker 01

  minutes of my arrival there, Charlie came. And she and Eileen were talking, and I overheard them. And Eileen told Charlie, "Oh, Charlie, I don't know what we're gonna do. We just signed the papers on our home. David doesn't have a job now." And, you know, that sunk in pretty deep. Charlie looked at me, and I guess what she was saying, and what I was thinking in my mind, is that there's probably not gonna be any thoughts of, of not continuing this thing. Somehow we'll make it work. There's an awful lot of things that have motivated

• 30:36Speaker 01

  me over the years. And a lot of those things came out because of David and Eileen and the fire. So I felt that I had a weighty responsibility staring me in the face. And there's a lot of things that go through your mind in, in those kind of situations. And certainly, I had every thought you could think of.

• 31:02Guy Raz?

  But you kept it going. You decided to keep it going.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  We tried first, of course, to rebuild the mill and that was impossible.

• 31:12Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  But I had a warehouse across the street, about a 10,000 square foot warehouse directly across the street. So even though the mill burned down, I had some resources. I was able to save the millstones. So we almost immediately moved across the street to the 10,000 square feet that we had. It wasn't enough, but we tried it. And I kept, but I had the business. Guy, I had awesome business. People wanted our products. They kept bugging me when I was going to open my retail part, which of course burned up. And we just kept trying and trying to keep machinery going.

• 31:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Remember now, I started many years ago with my sons in Redding, California. And my wonderful son, Bob, had a milling operation that we had all built as a family. And he allowed one of my people to go down there and grind my whole wheat flour and my corn meal and things like that at night, you know, and then they put it in a truck and brought it back up. So all these things began to work almost immediately. It gave me a pretty good degree of comfort with getting things going.

• 32:24Guy Raz?

  One of the, one of the really interesting things, Bob, it seems that after the fire is really when the business started to take off. I mean,

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Why it did.

• 32:32Guy Raz?

  And this sort of the 10 years after the company almost, you know, just like goes out of business because of the fire. What happened? What's the reason why? I mean, was there a strategic decision that you made? Was there someone you met? Was there a lucky break that you guys got that just allowed Bob's Red Mill products to go national and then beyond?

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Well, actually, there was. I was told that I'd never go anywhere or be anything unless I became a part of the national natural food industry. So I joined that. It wasn't very expensive. And we went down to Anaheim, California, where I just got back.

• 33:12Guy Raz?

  This is a famous, this is a famous natural food expo, right?

• 33:15Speaker 01

  That's correct, yeah. And we got a little 10 by 10 booth at the back of this thing. And we brought all the products that we were making. There was quite a few, actually, several hundred. And I tried to have all natural whole grains and every form of them. We could take one item, corn, for instance, and we can make corn grits. We can make fine corn meal, regular corn meal, coarse corn meal. I ended up with, you know, six or seven products over one basic grain. I did the same with wheat, and I did the same with oats and everything else. So, I mean, it was a unique way of doing it. I wanted everything. I didn't sell as well, some better than others. But when the industry down there in Anaheim

• 33:57Speaker 01

  saw this, I had some people come to me and they said they wanted it. Who's your distributor? And I said, "Well, I don't have a distributor." So those people, the distributors were there at the show, too. They went and got their distributor. And they brought them down. They said, "We want these products." So they took my products on. So almost overnight, we kind of hit the jackpot. And we had to go back and work pretty hard to catch up with their orders.

• 34:28Guy Raz?

  So, once you found distributors and you started to, your product started to really take off, it wasn't that long before you really started to, I mean, the revenue for your company was growing. I mean, I think by 2007, your sales topped 45, maybe 50 million dollars. Did you, I mean, I know you didn't go into this for money.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  No, I didn't.

• 34:50Guy Raz?

  But did you ever look at that number? Did anybody, your CFO or just say, "Hey, look, this is our revenue"? And did you ever just think... That's crazy. This little mill is doing this kind of revenue.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Well, we do it pretty good. Pretty good, Guy. People were always wanting to buy us. I mean, it was just a constant.

• 35:08Guy Raz?

  You were getting offers from companies?

• 35:10Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Different investors who wanted to invest in me and actually different companies that just simply wanted to buy me. There was a lot of that.

• 35:20Guy Raz?

  And you just said no every time?

• 35:22Speaker 01

  No, I said no because, all right, I didn't, it wasn't any money anyway. Besides, I knew as soon as they bought me out, even though they always tell you that everything's going to stay the same, that everything changes. And I didn't want my life to change. I thought it was really swell. It was a good, good life, Guy.

• 35:42Guy Raz?

  All right, so you have this company. It is now doing at least 100 million in revenue a year.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is. It's well, well over 100 million dollars.

• 35:51Guy Raz?

  And I think it was in 2010, you, you announced that you want to hand the company over to your employees and they, they now own like two thirds of it, right?

• 36:00Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 36:02Guy Raz?

  And you are also giving away a lot of, or most of your money. So it sounds like, and you have a long time to go, a long life ahead of you, but it sounds like you are slowly, it sounds like you are slowly aiming to, to end, you know, to end your time here on earth as a, as a poor or a, you know, relatively poor guy, a guy with no money.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Guy, if there's anything I can tell you, I'm giving it away because I want to. I mean, the Bible to me was so clear, to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Now, that's the basis of how I think and how I feel. If you do these things, the feeling, the return, your life is appreciably improved. And I have that feeling. I know what that is. It's a different feeling than I had when I was 50 years old or younger.

• 36:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 36:59Guy Raz?

  How much of what you experienced throughout the course of your life and incredible success with this company do you attribute to luck and how much to just hard work and your intelligence and your skill?

• 37:12Speaker 01

  Oh, Guy, I've always worked hard. I'm crazy. I get up at 6. Here I am at almost 90. I get up at 6 every morning. I go down to my own store, my own restaurant, and have cereal. I don't like anything besides hot cereal, cooked cereal. And then I get in the bed a little bit early, but I work till 5 or 6 every day. So I've always worked hard. So if working hard is a secret to success, I've done that. I know what it feels like, and I probably never will do anything different.

• 37:48Guy Raz?

  Bob, you talked a little bit about your faith and your Christianity, and I'm just wondering, like, how much has it guided you, you know, over the years, like, your decisions and your thinking?

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Well, I think it permeates me, as far as that's concerned. The whole concept of whole grains, I got from the very first page of the Bible. You know, when you go to seminary, they start you off with the first page. So I have it with me. I can read it to you. There's only a couple of lines. "God said, 'Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit. You shall have them for food.'" And I read these words in 14 different translations, and I learned to figure it out. In the original Hebrew, it still says the same thing: simple,

• 38:42Speaker 01

  unequivocal, comforting. Just made perfect sense to me, Guy. And the fact that I could establish a business around it was just unbelievable. And I'm not doing too bad at it. It's working pretty well.

• 39:01Guy Raz?

  Bob Moore, founder of Bob's Red Mill. In 2007, the company moved to a bigger facility just outside of Portland, where they make about 400 different products, still using the old quartz millstones from the 1800s. By the way, Bob actually keeps a mason jar full of the very first product to come off of those stones, red wheat flour, ground in his original mill more than 40 years ago. And please do stick around, because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you're building.

• 39:39Guy Raz?

  Hey, thanks so much for sticking around, because it's time now for how you built that. And today's story starts back in 2015, when Mike Bolos was working as a lawyer in Chicago, and then moved to a new firm and a new office.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  My new desk was just one of those typical desks that's kind of mounted to a wall. But yet, in downtown Chicago, I had these beautiful floor-to-ceiling windows out to my right, overlooking the city.

• 40:04Guy Raz?

  Now, we might not all have floor-to-ceiling windows in our office, but we can relate to the main problem, right? An office desk that is not in the right place.

• 40:12Speaker 02

  The perfect place to be would be the window. Get this beautiful view, get the natural sunlight. I'm like, there's got to be something out there for that.

• 40:19Guy Raz?

  What Mike was looking for was a desk, a ledge, really, that could be mounted directly to a window.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  So, started looking online, couldn't find anything. And that's when, kind of like I always like to do, I headed to Home Depot and Amazon and started to buy the parts I need to build it.

• 40:36Guy Raz?

  Okay, so first thing on Mike's list? Suction cups that could attach a desk to a window and could support what's on the desk, like laptops, books, you know, that type of stuff.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  So, I shopped and I found some good suction cups that, you know, held about 40 pounds, they said. Mounted them with some string that I bought from Amazon and created this really rudimentary, almost kind of cat bed looking thing.

• 41:01Guy Raz?

  And it wasn't too bad for his first try, but it was bouncy and it was too narrow to really work as a desk.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  And it was at that point that I stepped up and I found the types of suction discs that they use to install commercial grade glass windows and high rises. And I was like, this is perfect. These are ultra durable, ultra strong, and intended for this purpose, essentially.

• 41:23Guy Raz?

  Okay, so Mike now had the critical suction he needed to affix the desk to a window. And from there, he built 18 prototypes. And finally, he had the desk he'd been dreaming of.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  People started walking by my office and saying, what is that? I want that in my office. That's cool. Where did you buy it? And that's when kind of the light bulb clicked and it was like, well, I should really think about mass production and really bring in this to market.

• 41:46Guy Raz?

  And around that time, Mike went to a party where he met a guy named Jason and told Jason about the desk he'd built.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  Immediately, the light bulb went off in my head.

• 41:55Guy Raz?

  Yes, more light bulbs. It turns out Jason Grohowski was a real estate advisor, and it was his job to help businesses improve the design of their workplaces. So Jason saw real potential in the desk that Mike had invented. Here's Jason.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  I've seen how the culture within spaces is changing, how all the new buildings are glass, how everything is about bringing in the natural light for employees and just productivity and health and wellness within spaces. And so I just got super excited. I was like, we need to, we need to do this. We need to take this to the next level.

• 42:28Guy Raz?

  Mike and Jason soon started working with a design firm in Chicago and made even more tweaks to the desk. And by January 2017, they had a prototype ready. So they launched a Kickstarter that April and made $25,000 in just the first day.

• 42:44Speaker 03

  After we closed out the Kickstarter, we had to fulfill these orders. So then it was, let's go get this made.

• 42:51Guy Raz?

  They had all of these orders and no manufacturer yet. So a month later, this is May of 2017, they found one in Singapore. And by November, Jason and Mike went there to check on the desks before they got shipped.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  And I look at the unit and I'm like, something doesn't seem right. And I play with it, and the lever snaps. At that point, we had 2,000 units already made, all the components made. And we were like, this is something that we can't let out the door.

• 43:21Guy Raz?

  So after a month of sleepless nights and many design revisions, Jason and Mike finally got the lever right. In December, they started shipping their desks from their Singapore manufacturer to their customers in more than 40 countries. They're now both working full time on their company. It's called DeskView. And their desk comes fully assembled, so you can install it on your window in just a few minutes and then enjoy the view.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  We focus so closely on our computers. All of our workday is just straining our eyes to look at close objects. With DeskView, you're actually allowing yourself to relax your eye and look out further.

• 44:04Guy Raz?

  If you want to find out more about DeskView, head to our Facebook page. And of course, if you have a story about something you're building, please tell us all about it at build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more or hear previous episodes, go to howibuiltthis.npr.org. You can also write us at [email protected]. And if you want to send us a tweet, it's at howIBuiltThis. Our show was produced this week by Rachel Faulkner, with original music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. Thanks also to Noor Kudsi, Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkhanpour, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.