HISTORY OF EREWHON - NATURAL FOODS ... - SoyInfo Center

ice, any time of day, and immediately go to sleep for five
or ten minutes, and then get up looking and acting as if
they’d just had 8 hours sleep.
“Bobby Orgo was really a character. He once got in a
big argument with the health inspector (!) of all people, who
had come to check out the warehouse. Everything was ‘dry’
at the warehouse (no refrigeration), so the inspector was
saying this and that about the rules, but was basically going
to let it all go. Bobby comes in smoking a cigarette and the
inspector tells him he can’t smoke in a food facility. Why
not? Against the health code. So what–smoking isn’t bad for
you (macrobiotics tended to look at smoking as ‘yangizing’,
which was ‘good’ for yin people, which everyone was
assumed more or less to be). They get into a big yelling
match, and the inspector ends up citing us for about fifty
violations, and we ended up having to put in tile coving, a
floor drain and stainless steel sinks–all to handle bags of
grain, because of Bobby’s argument.”
In an e-mail dated 10 Jan. 2010 Jimmy Silver adds:
Doug Rauch was both sales and purchasing manager. I more
or less worked for him, or was trained by him, when I came
to Erewhon, mostly because I was interested in what he was
doing. He was the guy that knew all the product
information.
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HISTORY OF EREWHON 48
“Nominally I was in charge of getting the catalogs out,
‘envisioning’ and ‘theming’ them, labels and label concepts
and designs, new products, customer relations (but in a
more technical sense, like product research questions–our
customers were primarily stores and coops), vendor
relations (making nice with our suppliers and producers
beyond issues of payments and shipments and orders), and
handling the import business from Japan and our relations
with our two Japanese suppliers, Muso and Mitoku. Sort of
like a jack of no trades.
“Doug got Trader Joe’s (TJ) to take on natural food
products from Erewhon. Eventually he left and then went to
work for TJ. Their office at the time was only a few blocks
from where he lived. I was sent over to his house for two or
three days during the transition and made notes on a yellow
legal pad of all the things I needed to do and pay attention
to that he told me, and then I became the sales manager and
purchasing manager. By then Erewhon was in Vernon, no
longer in Culver City.
“Doug rapidly rose at TJ, and shortly became their
youngest VP. He convinced them to expand to the East
Coast and became president of the East Coast division. Now
he has ‘graduated’ as he would put it, has some sort of
fellowship at Harvard, and helps out at the local NPR
station (I think he may be the chairman, which I believe
means they rely on him to make sure that they raise enough