History Off the Beaten Path: Slice of Life
While traveling last summer from the East Coast to Montana and back in our 1969 restored Shasta camper, my husband and I spent hours playing a history trivia game. One of the questions was, “Who invented sliced bread?” Neither of us knew, but we learned that a man named Otto Rohwedder was behind the machine that completely changed how bread was presented, packaged, and consumed by Americans.
Ironically enough, while traveling through Missouri, we saw a billboard for “Chillicothe: The Home of Sliced Bread!” Had we not just played the trivia game, we would have had no idea of the significance of the town that boasted the food culture-changing invention. Seeking as many off-the-beaten-path historical sites as possible on the more than 5,000-mile journey, we took the exit and entered the small, rural town of Chillicothe—population, around 9,000.
Sure enough, the town’s main attraction is the site of the Chillicothe Baking Company, atop which sits a giant model of a sliced loaf of bread. Plus, a historical marker is located in front of the brick building.
How the small Missouri town became the home of sliced bread is a fascinating story. Rohwedder grew up in Iowa, received a degree in optics in 1900, and became a jeweler. He opened three jewelry stores in Missouri and ran them until 1916. However, Rohwedder was an inventor at heart, and he decided that packaging bread of uniform slices was an idea whose time had come—especially for the industry in the Midwestern wheat belt.
Rohwedder took a chance and used the funds from the sale of his jewelry businesses to set up a workshop and began creating prototypes for a bread-slicing machine. A year later, while he was still working on his prototype, a fire destroyed all his design plans and equipment.
Despite the setback, Rohwedder persevered. For years, he worked on the bread-slicing machine, and, by 1927, had created a machine that not only sliced bread but also wrapped it. Rohwedder happened to be acquainted with an entrepreneur named Frank Bench, who ran a bakery in Chillicothe, Missouri. Rohwedder asked Bench if he would be willing to try the invention at his bakery.
On July 7, 1928, the first loaves of machine-sliced bread were sold and within two weeks, the Chillicothe Baking Company’s sales increased 2,000 percent. Area consumers were clearly tired of trying to slice bread evenly themselves, only to have parts of the bread crumble or get smashed in the process.
Rohwedder filed for a patent on the bread slicer and it was issued to him as U.S. Patent No. 1,867,377. Due to the Great Depresson, Rohwedder sold his invention in 1929. Sliced bread rapidly became more popular than unsliced bread, especially when Wonder Bread ran a marketing campaign for sliced bread in 1930. Rohwedder gave talks about his invention across the country until his death in 1960.
While the original Rohwedder invention eventually fell apart from overuse, his second automatic bread-slicer became part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History. Proud of the designation as the original home of sliced bread, the city of Chillicothe annually hosts the Sliced Bread Day Festival in July, featuring such activities as The Greatest Parade Since Sliced Bread, a bread-tasting event, and a Sliced Bread Jam music event.
