Birthday of Sliced Bread

What the day is

Birthday of Sliced Bread celebrates the commercial bread slicer and the pre-sliced loaf it made possible. The machine's first documented commercial use was in July 1928, at a bakery in Chillicothe, Missouri.

Origin and background

The inventor was Otto Frederick Rohwedder, who had worked on the idea for years against consistent skepticism from bakers. Their objection was practical rather than snobbish: a sliced loaf goes stale far faster, because slicing exposes an enormous amount of surface area to air, and it falls apart on the shelf.

Rohwedder's solution was to build a machine that sliced and then wrapped the loaf, which addressed both problems at once. That combination is what made the product viable, and sliced bread was outselling unsliced within a few years. A major national brand adopted it around 1930 and pushed it nationwide.

Its knock-on effects were larger than they look. Sliced bread made the pop-up toaster genuinely useful, since uniform slices fit a standard slot, and the two products drove each other's sales. It also changed how much bread households ate, since a sandwich became a thirty-second job rather than a knife-and-board one.

There is a strange postscript. In January 1943, wartime United States authorities banned the sale of sliced bread, reportedly to conserve wax paper and steel and to hold down prices. Public irritation was immediate and substantial, and the ban was rescinded within about two months.

The phrase about the greatest thing since sliced bread followed within a generation, and has outlasted any memory of why the invention was impressive.

How to take part

• Slice a loaf by hand and see how uneven it gets. That is the problem the machine solved.
• Freeze sliced bread rather than refrigerating it. The refrigerator accelerates staling; the freezer arrests it.
• Toast straight from frozen. It works better than thawing first.
• Buy an unsliced loaf occasionally for the contrast in crust and texture.
• Use the ends. Nobody wants them and they make the best breadcrumbs.