12. The Birth of the Bread-Slicing Machine
The phrase “the greatest thing since sliced bread” dates to 1928. That year, loaves of bread that had been sliced with a machine, then packaged for convenience, made their first appearance in the United States. It began when Otto Frederick Rohwedder (1880 – 1960), an inventor and engineer, created the first automatic bread slicing machine for commercial use. He sold his first machine to the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri, which became the first bakery to sell pre-sliced bread loaves.
The new-fangled sliced bread was advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped“. It was a bold assertion that contrasted greatly with the experience of actual consumers. Among other things, in the days before preservatives, sliced bread went stale faster than its intact counterpart. It had an aesthetic problem as well: customers simply thought the sliced loaves looked sloppy. A stopgap solution was to use pins to hold the sliced loaves together, and make them appear intact inside the packaging.