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Sainsbury's toasts 80th anniversary of sliced bread production

SAINSBURY’S MARKS THE 80TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE INVENTION OF SLICED BREAD WITH TIPS TO HELP FAMILIES USE THEIR LOAVES AND CUT WASTE

Sainsbury’s is celebrating today’s 80th anniversary of sliced bread, which first went into production on July 7th, 1928, with the publication of a series of handy hints for making the most of one of the World’s iconic foods.

Each year, 225 million loaves of sliced bread are sold by Sainsbury’s alone, enough to cover 30 square miles.

Britons throw away an amazing 7 million slices of bread each day, according to recent research by WRAP – enough bread to carpet ten football pitches. Yet bread is one of the most versatile and usable ingredients in the modern larder.

“Sliced bread is a staple part of the British diet and there can be few people who don’t have at least a few slices of it every day,” said Ian Cambridge, bread buyer for Sainsbury’s. “With the current pressures on household budgets, we thought we’d offer a few hints and tips for all of us to use our loaves and reduce waste.”

Sainsbury’s started selling sliced bread in the early 1950s at its first self-services stores in Croydon and Eastbourne. In 1964 Sainsbury’s began selling its first own-label sliced bread which was wrapped in a cloth bread-bag to ensure the bread arrived home tasty and fresh.

A loaf of Sainsbury’s own brand sliced bread retails for 65p.

SAINSBURY’S TOP TIPS FOR LEFT-OVER BREAD
1. Small pieces of leftover bread can be slowly dried in the oven until crisp and brittle, then ground and kept in a glass jar and used as breadcrumbs for coating scallops or croquettes and used in dry stuffings, etc.
2. Larger dried pieces of bread are a good substitute for crackers or croutons with soup, and are often preferred to fresh bread.
3. Small pieces and broken slices of stale bread can be used to make moist stuffings for meat and poultry.
4. Bread pudding and bread and butter pudding, two great British classics, are a perfect way to use leftover bread. Apple Charlottes and Summer Puddings are also ideal.
5. Dry bread and rolls can be refreshed by dipping them quickly in cold water, draining them and heating them in the oven.
6. Bread sauce, made with onion, milk, cloves, pepper and slices of stale bread, is a perfect accompaniment to roast chicken or turkey.

A SHORT HISTORY OF SLICED BREAD

Otto Frederick Rohwedder is considered the inventor of sliced bread. He started working on a bread slicer in 1912. When Rohwedder originally proposed his idea to bakers, they told him that pre-cut loaves would go stale too quickly.

Rohwedder tried to find ways to keep the bread from going stale. Among his inventions was a device that would hold the slices of bread together with hat pins. Unfortunately, the pins kept falling out.

In 1928 Rohwedder designed a machine that would slice and wrap bread, thereby preserving the bread’s moisture and preventing it from going stale. The first commercial use of the machine was by the Chillicothe Baking Company of Chillicothe, Missouri, which produced their first slices on July 7, 1928.

By 1933, only five years after its introduction, American bakeries were turning out more sliced than unsliced bread. In the period since, sliced bread has become a worldwide phenomenon.

During 1943, U. S. officials imposed a short-lived ban on sliced bread as a wartime conservation measure, believing that slicing bread would cause it to dry out more quickly. After a popular outcry, the ban was rescinded on March 8th, 1943.

Sainsbury’s started selling sliced bread in the early 1950s at its first self-services stores in Croydon and Eastbourne. In 1964 Sainsbury’s began selling its first own-label sliced bread which was wrapped in a cloth bread-bag to ensure the bread arrived home tasty and fresh.

A loaf of Sainsbury’s own brand sliced bread retails for 65p.

The phrase “the greatest thing since sliced bread” is commonly used to praise an invention or development. The popular use of the phrase is thought to originate from the hype surround 1930s advertisements for Wonder Bread, the first mass-marketer of sliced bread.

- Ends –

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