A Toast to Freedom: Sliced Bread, 97 Years Later | The American Spectator

Consumer freedom is often intangible, but sometimes it looks like a loaf of bread in your fridge.

Almost a century ago, in Chillicothe, Missouri, a jeweler from Iowa, Otto Frederick Rohwedder, had a radical idea: what if a whole loaf of bread could be pre-cut and sold? The premise was meant to rectify a minor inconvenience, as slicing bread by hand wasn’t uniform and often damaged its quality. After betting his life savings on a bread-slicing machine and partnering with friend and baker Frank Bench, Rohwedder put his products on the market on July 7, 1928.

Rohwedder understood the hesitancy in his initial marketing, dubbing the invention “startling to some people.” Indeed, early buyers thought the bread slices were messy and would stale quicker than regular loaves. The infant market needed reassurance, and fast, so Rohwedder improved machine packaging.

Yet, Rohwedder and Bench capitalized on a core tenet of today’s economic landscape: convenience. Accessibility to new technologies and consumer goods was foreign to the average American during the late 1920s. Consumer debt doubled from 1920 to 1930, and 60 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line. Customers today overwhelmingly deem convenience their most significant factor in shopping; most are willing to pay extra for it and abandon items they find difficult to obtain.

The two entrepreneurs recognized that providing an alternative solution was not enough. Rohwedder and Bench needed to convey that their food was intrinsically valuable and superior to establishment offerings. Thus, they took to the local newspapers and launched a brilliant advertisement campaign.

Rohwedder spun apprehension into intrigue, calling sliced bread a “sound, sensible and in every way a progressive refinement in Baker’s bread service.” He claimed his work was “the greatest step forward in the baking industry” in decades, a feat that resonated with mothers short on time and grocers concerned with food freshness.

Catherine Stortz Ripley, a former editor for The Chillicothe Constitution Tribune, noted that the curiosity jolted sales and satisfaction, as Bench’s bakery saw a 2000 percent increase in sales in just a few weeks. Other bread companies were slow to embrace the ingenuity, but the Midwest sales of a baking revolution couldn’t be ignored. In just two years, mechanical slicing spanned coast-to-coast, with 90 percent of store-bought bread sold pre-sliced.

The meteoric rise of sliced bread illustrates how advertising can shape consumer preferences during a product’s early stages. Some have argued that slicing didn’t fundamentally change the bread itself, but the “value-added” campaign carried the weight of its success. Good marketing is psychological — it fabricates something seemingly missing from ordinary life and reconfigures it in the image of a product or service.

The 1930s sliced bread ads from A&P Food Stores and Stone Baking Company in Atlanta evoked themes of nutrition, cleanliness, and modernity, attributes that enticed potential buyers to indulge in something greater than food. Some may call the practice manipulation; others see it as problem-solving.

Research shows that advertising in the pre-launch and beginning phases tends to temporarily uptick consumer interest. Sliced bread defied that trend after Wonder Bread, a market juggernaut, embraced it in 1930, launching a suite of ads that popularized the novelty into an American kitchen necessity, reshaping consumption habits, dietary norms, and how quickly people ate.

It even became the subject of a modern metaphor. Entertainer Red Skelton would later dismiss concerns about television, calling the medium “the greatest thing since sliced bread.” The adoration of sliced bread blurred the line between its practical use and symbolic value, and whether customers could distinguish the two. An inability to do so misguides the market by restricting genuine choice.

However, a tone-deaf federal order proved consumers truly valued their loaves.

In 1943, under the auspices of saving wax paper for wartime production, President Franklin Roosevelt’s Office of Price Administration banned the sale of sliced bread. Local officials threatened to shut down bakeries still using bread-slicing machines, an invasion of private property and commerce. While the measure was meant to counteract another progressive price-raising measure, Roosevelt had a clear message: collective security comes first; individual choice comes later.

The backlash against the decision was immediate and “caused a societal meltdown of epic proportions.” Homemakers stormed hardware stores for better knives, with thousands penning their frustration to national news outlets — one even vouched in the New York Times that Rohwedder’s contribution was integral to “the morale and saneness of a household.” Short-term bread sales dropped by 5-10 percent, while the anticipated savings in wax paper were negligible. The government’s intervention failed to recognize the true value Americans placed on sliced bread.

Unfavorability and ineffectiveness forced the government to withdraw the ban in less than two months, and nobody wanted to admit fault. The episode demonstrated that consumer appreciation transcended the physical product and any ad messaging: sliced bread was a simple and ingrained means to a smoother routine. When the government removed this instrumental staple, consumers rallied to restore that comfort. Consumer freedom requires a robust and constant defense; only policies that recognize the instrumental and intrinsic worth of markets can flourish in tandem with their customers.

Consumer freedom isn’t merely the ability to choose among many options, but having that choice with minimal friction and maximum efficiency. The principle is fundamentally about preserving the space to act on preferences, whether those are for convenience, taste, or tradition. If advertisements and innovation can heighten our awareness of what we value, buyers are uniquely situated to recognize and reassert their worth. The story of sliced bread, its triumphs, and its drama must not be forgotten. For that, it deserves a toast.

READ MORE:

Gen Z is Clueless When It Comes to Voting

America, France, and the Free Market

Alex Rosado is a political, cultural, and consumer freedom writer for Young Voices, writing in his personal capacity. Follow him on X @Alexprosado.