Sliced Bread: Cutting Things Fine

Wonder Bread

Friday, July 7 — When something is proclaimed the best thing since sliced bread, that praise doesn’t encompass as much time as one might think. Sliced bread, wrapped for sale in wax paper, first appeared on store shelves on this date in 1928 in Chillicothe, Missouri. The Chillicothe Baking Company’s innovation of uniform, pre-sliced bread loaves remained local for a short while.

By the 1930s, the obvious convenience of satisfactory sliced bread spread the practice nationally. In large part, this was due to the Wonder Bread brand, founded in 1921, adopting the automatic slicer. There are some 3,000 commercial bakeries across the United States, employing over 125,000 workers. These establishments make a lot of dough: about $31 billion per year.

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