U.S. inventor Otto Frederick Rohwedder (1880-1960) started working on the design of an automatic bread slicer in around 1912 and developed several prototypes, including one that held a sliced loaf together with metal pins. These early designs were not successful and Rohwedder faced a major setback in 1917 when his designs were destroyed in a fire at the factory at Monmouth, Illinois, that had agreed to build the first slicing machines.
Rohwedder, having earlier trained as a jeweler, was employed by a security firm while working on the development phase of his invention in his spare time. He continued improving his designs and realized that the main challenge he faced was keeping the bread fresh, because after slicing the loaf went stale more quickly. By 1927 he had devised a machine that both sliced and wrapped the bread. The timing for the launch of the bread slicer was good: the pop-up toaster, invented in Britain in 1919 by Charles Strite, was just becoming popular in the United States.
In 1928, the first of Rohwedder's bread-slicing and wrapping machines was installed at the Chillicothe Baking Co., which started to sell Kleen Maid Sliced Bread. Their customers loved sliced bread and demand for the machine from other bakeries had Rohwedder's production unit struggling to keep pace with orders. He established the Mac-Roh Manufacturing plant at Davenport in 1929 but was forced to sell the plant and his patents during the Great Depression.
Demand for sliced bread continued to grow, however, and by 1933 bakeries in the United States were selling a greater quantity of sliced than unsliced bread. Today, approximately 80 percent of all bread is sold sliced.
