Bread is one of the world’s oldest artificial foods. There’s evidence that bread has been in existence way before the biblical times but did you know that “sliced bread” has been around for less than a century? At the time of its invention, slice bread was seen as the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped”. This led to the popular idiom “greatest thing since sliced bread“. The first automatically sliced commercial loaves were produced on July 6, 1928, in Chillicothe, Missouri, using a machine invented by Otto Rohwedder, an iowa born, Missouri based jeweler.
Rohwedder’s quest to make sliced bread a reality was not without its challenges. A 1917 fire destroyed his prototype and blueprints, and he also faced skepticism from bakers, who thought factory sliced loaves would quickly go stale or fall apart. Nevertheless, in 1928, Rohwedder’s rebuilt “power driven, multi bladed” bread slicer and was put into service at his friend Frank Bench’s Chillicothe Baking Company.
Due to its convenience, sliced bread is popular in many parts of the world. Sliced bread made it easy for people to eat bread. Since the bread was already sliced, people did not have to go through the stress of slicing it themselves. Also the machine gave them thin and uniform slices that were easier to work with.
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