“The best thing since sliced bread.” We’ve all heard the saying. It’s synonymous with greatness, a new invention, a game-changer. But the road to greatness is seldom easy.
Sliced bread was first sold in July 1928, in a bakery in Chillicothe, Missouri. The bakery used an automatic bread-slicing machine invented by jeweller Otto Rohwedder. It had been hard work to get to that point: Rohwedder had tried for some time to introduce the US to sliced bread. He’d carried out extensive market research, surveying tens of thousands of people on the perfect thickness of a slice. And his prototype machine and all his blueprints were lost to a fire in 1917.
Despite grumbling from the baking industry, which voiced concerns about his new-fangled idea, the concept became a hit. The Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune hailed the “thrill of pleasure” that a housewife would get at no longer having to carve up a whole loaf. “So neat and precise are the slices, and so definitely better than anyone could possibly slice by hand with a bread knife that one realises instantly that here is a refinement that will receive a hearty and permanent welcome,” it said. The page was topped with a slogan describing the invention as: “The greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped” – the phrase that became today’s “greatest thing since sliced bread”.
But Rohwedder’s creation wasn’t an instant hit. Pre-sliced loaves went stale faster than whole loaves, and some shoppers also felt they were “sloppy looking”. Rohwedder wasn’t deterred. He produced u-shaped pins to hold loaves together, so they looked more appealing.
Sliced bread soon took off. New York’s Continental Baking Company started using Rohwedder’s machines for its Wonder Bread. People loved the invention that saved them time, effort and potential injury, and the baking industry found itself benefiting too. With slices thinner and more uniform, people ate more of them and more frequently. Bread consumption went up, as did spreads to go on the slices. Even sales of pop-up toasters soared. By 1933, bread-slicing machines were found in bakeries across the US and 80% of bread produced there was sliced.
Yet it still wasn’t plain sailing for the humble sliced loaf. As soon as they got used to their easier-to-use bread, Americans were robbed of it. In early 1943 the government banned it, citing the war effort, with steel for bread-slicing machines required for weaponry, and the thick wax paper also needed for more important uses. “The ready-sliced loaf must have a heavier wrapping than an unsliced one if it is not to dry out,” US food administrator Claude R Wickard told the New York Times. “So, the order prohibiting the slicing of bread is aimed at affecting economies in the manufacture of bread and in the use of paper.”
There was uproar among the US public; the nation pined and demanded its return. One letter to the New York Times said: “I should like to let you see how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household.” Thankfully, the ban was short-lived at just three months. The government said the decision was because it hadn’t yielded as many savings as it’d hoped for, but many attributed it to the backlash. Either way, the US – and the UK – got their sliced bread back. The UK was introduced to the development when the first slicing and wrapping machine was installed in the Wonderloaf Bakery in Tottenham in 1937. By the 1950s the sliced loaf accounted for 80% of the British bread market.
Fast forward to 2020 and sliced bread is now commonplace worldwide. Like any great invention, its history is full of highs and lows, victories and losses, innovation and invention. Bread isn’t the first element in our lives to be wholly transformed by technology and it won’t be the last.
BMW hybrid vehicles use an intelligent combination of petrol and electric power to give you a low-emissions electric drive on short trips, and the option of petrol for longer trips. Discover BMW’s pioneering hybrid cars: they might be the best thing since sliced bread. bmw.co.uk
