Board of directors · Bend
Catherine Moreau-Blake
Director
“The question is always the same: what happens to the customer at nine on Monday morning if this goes wrong?”
Founded Cascade Cold Chain, a refrigerated-trucking company, with one truck in 1998. Sold it in 2020 with 340. Chairs the board's technology committee.
- [email protected]
- Phone
- +1 (541) 555-0167
- Office
- Bend branch
- With Meridian since
- 2021
The story
Catherine grew up in Québec City, the daughter of a long-haul trucker and a schoolteacher. She spent her childhood summers riding in her father's cab across Canada, and came to understand logistics as a kind of applied kindness: getting things to people who need them, on time, intact.
She came to Oregon in 1994 for a master's in supply-chain management and never left. In 1998, with a single used refrigerated truck and a loan from Meridian Trust that no larger bank would make, she founded Cascade Cold Chain in Bend, delivering produce and pharmaceuticals across the Northwest. By 2020 the company had 340 trucks and 900 employees, and she sold it to a national carrier on the condition that the Bend headquarters stay open.
She joined Meridian Trust's board in 2021 and chairs the technology committee. She was the board member who pushed hardest for the 2022 core-system migration, having lived through a failed software rollout at her own company in 2011 that she describes as 'the worst eight weeks of my working life'. She is known for asking, in every technology discussion, 'what happens to the customer at 9 a.m. Monday if this goes wrong?'
She lives outside Bend with her husband Tom, a retired forester, two horses, and a border collie named Dispatch. Her daughter runs operations for a food bank in Seattle.
Off duty
When not at the bank
Endurance riding
She competes in 50-mile endurance rides on an Arabian gelding named Rouleur, including the Oregon 100 in 2023. 'Trucking taught me pace. The horse taught me patience.'
French cooking
Cassoulet from her grandmother's recipe, made once a winter over three days, for twenty people. Board members have learned to accept the invitation.
Nordic skating
Long-blade skating on frozen lakes in the high Cascades when conditions allow, which is rarely. She keeps an ice auger in her truck from December to February.
Ask me about
Education
- B.Comm., Université Laval, 1992
- M.S. Supply Chain Management, Portland State University, 1996
