We've seen some controversial rebrands over the years, but it's not often that a flour company gets people agitated over its logo design. The iconic Milwaukie brand Bob's Red Mill has revealed a bold, modernised look with a custom typeface and new packaging with "wrap-around storytelling", and it's sparked comments recall the most controversial rebrand of 2025 – the cancelled Cracker Barrel rebrand.
Founded in 1978 by Bob and Charlee Moore, employee-owned Bob's Red Mill long cultivated old-time heritage associations for its stone-ground flours, baking mixes and specialty grains. That included the use of a logo design that combined inspiration from hand-painted lettering with an illustration of Bob himself.
The brand brought in Turner Duckworth to freshen things up with a sleek rebrand that introduces a simpler, much clearer and easier-to-read logo, a custom typeface called Red Mill and new packaging that includes an image inspired by the original Red Mill. The new colour palette also draws on the original Red Mill, while new colour families are intended to identify product categories, with consistent dietary callouts.
Bob no longer features in the logo design but retains a presence in the form of a new seal intended to function as a "symbol of the care, quality and commitment that the brand's founder passed on to all Bob's Red Mill employee owners".
In another world, this would be seen as a textbook example of how to upgrade a visual identity while balancing heritage and modernisation. The redesign tidies up the visual presentation of the brand and improves shop shelf legibility to make it easier to find the products, without abandoning the warmth of the vintage feel.
But US brands should know by now the dangers of removing old men from their logo designs. The restaurant chain Cracker Barrel cancelled its logo redesign last year after it was unexpectedly dragged into divisive political discourse. On social media, people accused the brand of "wokeness" over its removal of an anonymous old timer depicted sitting on a chair.
For a Brit, those reactions seemed pretty bizarre (surely, removing an elderly man from a design is more of an anti-DEI move if anything), but the internet backlash won. Cracker Barrel cancelled the rebrand just over a week after it was revealed.
Bob's Red Mill has attracted some similar accusations, but there's an another factor that adds to the controversy: Bob Moore died just over two years ago at the age of 94.
"Founder dies and corporate scrubs him from the logo," one person writes on X. "They took Bob and made him like a ghost... can barely see him," another person complains.
When the owner died. The family couldn’t wait to kill what he built.May 19, 2026
Woke has gone too farMay 19, 2026
Like the aborted Cracker Barrel rebrand, the new Bob's Red Mill logo design highlights the risks of modernising a brand that's been built around the values of tradition and heritage. The old logo design looked dated, but that was the whole point.
The new look is superior in terms of ease of application and making it easy to pick out the products on a crowded shelf, but it also seems aimed at a broader audience at the risk of appearing more generic and losing the nostalgia and the association with old-time quality that gave the brand its original appeal.
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