“It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread” is a cliché we use to describe an invention that is likely to significantly change our lives in a positive way. But why sliced bread? Why not something bigger like electricity, the automobile or indoor plumbing? Pre-sliced bread is such a normal part of our lives that it is difficult to believe less than 100 years ago this convenience did not exist.
Over the thousands of years of its consumption, bread has undergone significant changes to how it is made and by whom. With the Industrial Age, came industrial food when the once slow and time-consuming process of baking bread left the home kitchen and entered the factory.
In 1916, a jeweler from Missouri, Otto Rohwedder, sold his jewelry business to pursue the invention of a commercial scale bread slicer. His first prototype and blueprints were destroyed in a fire in 1917. Rohwedder spent the next several years building up capital and investors before introducing an improved prototype in 1928.
At first, bakeries were skeptical of bread slicers. Anyone familiar with bread knows that sliced bread grows stale much quicker than unsliced bread. Rohwedder initially tried to solve this problem by holding the loaf together with hat pins, but the pins kept falling out. With his 1928 prototype, Rohwedder wrapped the loaves tightly in wax paper, holding the loaf together and keeping it fresh.
Struggling baker Frank Bench, from Chillicothe, Missouri, was the first to install the bread slicer in his bakery. On July 7, 1928, Sliced Kleen Maid Bread was available for purchase in stores. His sales increased over 1000% in the first two weeks. Orders for bread slicers started pouring in from bakeries.
In 1930, Wonder Bread started selling pre-sliced loaves. Commercially made loaves were softer and chewier making them more difficult to slice neatly compared to crustier homemade loaves. Pre-slicing just made sense with Wonder Bread’s signature softness.
By 1933, just five years after the first commercial bread slicer was installed in a bakery, 80% of bread in America was being sold pre-sliced. During World War II, sliced bread was being consumed in such large quantities that it was briefly banned in an effort to save on the wax paper used to keep it fresh. Over the span of 15 years, sliced bread went from novelty to luxury to necessity, turning a fringe idea into a cliché to which all other inventions aspire.
Crystal Kelly is a feature writer for Bizarre Bytes with those unusual facts that you only need to know for Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy or to stump your in-laws.
