July 7, 2025

— Otto Frederick Rohwedder (or his advertisers)

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Thanks to the Chillicothe Baking Company

Let's talk about sliced bread. We take it for granted, right? In fact, we probably don't even refer to it as "sliced bread," any more than we'd refer to it as "baked bread."

The default is that it's sliced; we likely only use the phrase "sliced bread" if we're talking about how something is the best new thing since that strange invention.

It turns out however that today -- July 7 -- is the 97th anniversary of the first recorded sale of sliced bread, using the invention of a child of German immigrants who had become obsessed with the idea.

Otto Frederick Rohwedder came from Davenport, Iowa, and he grew up the kind of boy who was obsessed with taking things apart to learn how they work. He became a jeweler first, and then became an optometrist, but his real interest lay in mechanics: gears, precision parts, problem solving.

Eventually, he settled in St. Joseph, Missouri, where he owned his a jewelry store and quietly began experimenting with something no one had asked for: a bread-slicing machine.

The idea came from conversations with local bakers. Rohwedder believed that if a machine could slice bread quickly and evenly—and if the bread could be wrapped right away to preserve freshness—it would change how people baked, sold, and ate their daily loaves.

Bakers were skeptical. Housewives worried the sliced bread would go stale. Most people simply didn't see the need.

Still, Rohwedder believed -- even became obsessed. He spent years designing a prototype, and by 1916, he had sold his jewelry business to fund the project. He was all in.

Then disaster struck. In 1917, a fire destroyed the factory where his prototype was being developed. The machine was gone, along with the blueprints. Ten years of work disappeared overnight.

Rohwedder was 37 years old, with no business, no model, no investor interest, and a public that still didn't want what he was building. But he didn't quit.

He started over, redesigning the machine from scratch, this time adding a component that would wrap each sliced loaf in wax paper, extending its shelf life and reassuring consumers who feared staleness.

It took him another 11 years to find a bakery willing to give it a shot.

On July 7, 1928, the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri -- which was nearly bankrupt and had nothing to lose -- began selling the first commercially available pre-sliced bread using Rohwedder's invention.

Its first advertising slogan makes me chuckle now: "the greatest forward step in baking since bread was wrapped."

And it worked! Sales soared 2,000%, saving the bakery. Customers loved the convenience and consistency.

Within two years, Continental Baking Company adopted the technology for its national Wonder Bread brand. By 1933, 80% of bread sold in the United States was pre-sliced.

The U.S. government even banned sliced bread briefly in 1943 during World War II (Food Distribtion Order 1, citing wasteful packaging). But the public backlash was swift.

According to one account:

The policy was reversed within weeks.

Alas, Otto Rohwedder is the latest in a long line of innovators who didn't exactly get rich from his invention. He was in dire straits during the Depression, and he survived by selling his patents to Micro-Westco Company, and then going to work for that company.

Few of us know his name (until now, maybe!). But, his legacy lives on in every brown-bag lunch, every toaster slot, every kitchen breadbox.

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Did you see ...

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