How many times have you said “___ is the best thing since sliced bread.”? Have you ever wondered how this phrase came to be? Well I did, and the following is what I have come up with after researching the net.

In 1928 a man and his family traveled from their home in Iowa to a town called Chillicothe in Missouri. Why this town? I am not exactly sure, but Otto Rohwedder and his family chose that oddly named town to peddle their wares. We have all heard the phrase “Desperate times call for desperate measures”. For Frank Bench, a baker in Chillicothe, 1928 was just that- desperate times. He was on the verge of bankruptcy when the Rohwedder family pitched their idea of pre-sliced bread. Frank, I am sure feeling like there was nothing left to lose, took their invention and started filling the Chillicothe, Missouri grocery store shelves with bread that was presliced on July 7, 1928. Mr. Bench saw a 2000% increase in sales in just two weeks time. And so started the world’s love affair with the time saving pre-sliced bread.

We, as a species, are a fairly progressive bunch, right? I mean we invented the wheel, harnessed the power of electricity, and even invented an apparatus through which people could communicate over wire; and yet the idea of pre-slicing bread had to wait for a decade after the first World War???? Let’s immagine for just a minute John Montague the 4th Earl of Sandwich’s version of a sandwich- the first sandwich. How haphazard and pleb-like it must have seemed without the perfectly uniform pair of wheat and yeast brewis adorning the outside of the lamb and bitter herds he had selected for himself! I just can’t come to grips with the reality that we could build ships such as the Titanic and no one had contemplated selling bread pre-sliced.

After discussing this with some coworkers the comment was made that necessity is the mother of invention. Maybe there wasn’t a need for pre-sliced bread. While this may hold true to a point, with regard to sliced bread the exponential growth of Frank Bench’s bread sales speaks volumes about a need being fulfilled. Let us not, dear friends, ever speak the phrase “greatest thing sinced sliced bread” in vain again! Let us remember the chance one baker and one Iowan family took to better the lives of people across the globe by using the Rohwedder bread slicer as the standard to which all inventions post 1928 should be held!