In 1928, Otto Rohwedder's bread-slicing machine debuted at a Missouri bakery; within a year, orders outpaced his company's ability to fulfill them

Otto Rohwedder's bread-slicing machine was nearly a lost cause. According to the National Museum of American History, a fire destroyed his prototype; he faced funding issues more than once, and it took him about sixteen years to find someone to install a working model in a bakery. The museum notes that the machine began working in 1928, and a year later, bakeries struggled to keep up with demand. Pre-sliced bread is now so ordinary that it is easy to forget how new the convenience once was. People once had to slice bread by hand, and it took years of development to make pre-sliced loaves practical.

Sixteen years, one fire, and a machine that finally worked

Museum records indicate that Rohwedder began sketching the first bread slicer in 1912, when he owned three jewelry stores in St. Joseph, Missouri, and decided to devote his time and effort to the invention. Seeing promise in the idea, he sold his jewelry stores to focus on developing the invention. The inventor faced significant setbacks while developing the machine. First, a fire destroyed the prototype and its working drawings in 1917. However, the determined inventor did not give up and, by 1927, invented a machine that solved the main problem of previous prototypes. In fact, the mechanical slicing process was relatively simple.


However, the bread needed to stay fresh for a long time after it was cut. Bread becomes stale as moisture redistributes after baking, and the crust helps slow that process. Rohwedder's machine sliced the loaf and used pins to hold the slices together so the loaf could then be wrapped separately. This may have helped the bread stay fresh longer. The invention was patented and protected by a patent document, and the technical drawing of the device, titled "machine for slicing an entire loaf of bread at a single operation," is held in the US patent record under patent number 1,867,377.

One small Missouri bakery started a nationwide rush

Rohwedder sold his first machine to his friend and fellow Missourian, baker Frank Bench, who installed it at the Chillicothe Baking Company. On July 7, 1928, that company produced some of the first slices of bread. They were called Kleen Maid Sliced Bread, and the Smithsonian notes that the local paper ran the news on its front page. Other bakers thought there would be no demand for pre-sliced bread, but they quickly realized that ordinary customers felt differently. The fame of the Chillicothe bakery's product spread to other towns, and orders for the machine soon outpaced the new company's capacity. Keeping up with demand became a bigger issue than anyone expected, and it happened within the first year of selling the first machine.

The toaster's secret partner in the kitchen

Sliced bread was not a success on its own. The pop-up toaster, patented in 1921 and sold commercially as the Toastmaster from 1926, required even slices to work properly, and Rohwedder's machine provided them. The two appliances likely reinforced each other's popularity. By the early 1930s, national bread brands had mechanized slicing, and pre-sliced loaves had become much more widely available. According to the Smithsonian, the phrase "the best thing since sliced bread" was probably coined in advertising for new products sold in grocery stores at the time, which is why it persists as a convenient expression of genuine convenience.

The bread ban that drew public protests

How attached Americans had become to sliced bread became clear in an unexpected way. According to Smithsonian Magazine, the Office of Price Administration banned the sale of pre-sliced bread in January 1943 amid wartime rationing of flour and other materials. Households quickly protested; people had grown accustomed to sliced bread over the past fifteen years, so giving it up, even briefly, felt inconvenient rather than sacrificial. The ban was lifted within two months, according to Smithsonian Magazine.

The real problem Rohwedder solved, and it wasn't slicing

Rohwedder, the inventor of the bread-slicing machine, is often remembered for more than just the slicing itself. Yes, he invented slicing, but that has been around for ages. He solved a major problem people had dealt with for ages: keeping bread fresh. How did he figure out how to cut and wrap a loaf so it stayed fresh until it was bought? This helped a small Missouri bakery popularize sliced bread nationwide and inspired a jingle that is still remembered today.