The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread

‘The best thing since sliced bread’ is a phrase that many will be familiar with.

But where does it actually come from?

Well this week marks the 85^th anniversary since the invention by Otto Frederick Rohwedder which put an end to shoddily hacked up pieces of bread and hours of sweat and tears.

However the route to the revolutionary invention was far from straightforward.

Rohwedder was a jeweler by profession and was so sure that sliced bread would be a sensation that he sold his three jewelry stores and invested all his money into the new venture.

The first prototype held the slices together using metal hat pins but due to them continuously falling out this was an unpopular method for bakeries.

In 1917 disaster struck when a fire destroyed the factory containing both the blueprints and original prototype of the slicer.

This didn't deter Rohwedder who spent the next couple of years rebuilding his funds and finding investors and working as an investment and security agent in order to support his family.

In 1927, he designed a further bread-slicing machine, this time it wrapped the the loaves in paper to keep the bread fresh.

By 1933 80 per cent of the bread being produced in America's bakeries were using Rohwedder's slicing machine.

But the iconic phrase actually originates from the marketing of America’s Wonder Bread, one of the first major brands to mass-market pre-sliced bread in the 1930s.

This very day we consume the equivalent of 220 million slices of bread, enough to cover the Wembley pitch 51 times over.

Could you live without sliced bread? They certainly go perfectly with a few slices of Speyside Specialities black pudding jammed in between them!

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