For years, Oregon-based Bob's Red Mill products have a been a staple of food co-ops and natural-food supermarkets. The company puts out a variety of top-quality, stone-ground organic grain products: from flours to grits to "bear mush" hot cereals. Now that CEO/founder Bob Moore is ready to start thinking about a succession plan, he probably could have cashed in nicely by selling out to some conglomerate looking for organic cachet-and a slice of one of the food industry's few true growth areas. Instead, he did something infinitely more interesting-and better for the Milwaukie, Oregon, community where the company employs 209 people. He took the company employee-owned, ABC News reports. In doing so, he's creating a durable, national-level institution whose profits remain and percolate broadly within a local economy. Moore is creating a model wherein national-level food businesses can generate broadly distributed wealth within communities, whereas now they mainly extract wealth from communities and concentrate it in the hands of a few shareholders. I'll be commenting on this more soon; for now, watch the video. (Hat tip to Civil Eats.)
Organic Grain Miller Bob's Red Mill Goes Employee-Owned
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Organic grain miller goes employee-owned
By Tom Philpott
Grist, February 22, 2010
Straight to the Source
