How Old Is Sliced Bread?

Many of us have labeled something "the best thing since sliced bread." If you ever wondered how long ago sliced bread came into being, the answer is perhaps not as long ago as you thought: commercially sliced bread is just under a century old. It's also an all-American idea created by Iowa inventor Otto Frederick Rohwedder.

Rohwedder devised a bread-slicing machine that was first used commercially in a bakery in Chillicothe, Missouri, in mid-1928. It was some 16 years in the making: Rohwedder started working on it in 1912, and while he had a factory willing to make it by 1917, a fire destroyed the blueprints, so he started over. He was apparently attentive to the complaints of housewives at the time, who found bread slicing to be a cumbersome task often made harder by blunt knives or stale loaves. He even surveyed women about their bread slice preferences to help him determine how thick his machine would slice loaves. Since sliced bread would dry out from exposure to air (which is still a concern today), Rohwedder also had to solve this problem. He initially tried using metal pins to hold the loaves together, but eventually figured out how to make his slicing machine wrap up bread, too.

Considering the whole "best thing since sliced bread" proverb, you'd think bread slicing would have been a smash hit. Yet, bakers were hesitant about the slicing machine, thinking sliced bread would be just a fad, or that it would go stale too quickly. It was reportedly difficult for Rohwedder to find any bakery that would buy into his project (it may not have helped that the machine was 10 feet long), and the Chillicothe bakery that did sign on apparently did it as a last-ditch attempt to avoid bankruptcy.

However, once the slicing machine was given a chance, sliced bread's star rose extraordinarily fast. The bakery that had the machine saw sales rise by 2,000%. By 1929, it was believed that almost any city of 25,000 people or more had a bakery selling sliced bread. Within five years, the vast majority of bread sold in the United States was sliced. Factory-baked bread, such as Wonder Bread, started to become prominent around this time.

During WW2, however, sliced bread ran into one hitch: With the government focused on preserving resources, such as metal, sliced bread was banned for a short period in 1943. However, the ban only lasted a few months before outrage led the government to reverse it. Sliced bread has continued its popularity ever since.