When was the first machine sold that could slice and wrap a loaf of bread?

Sliced bread is a loaf of bread that has been sliced with a machine and packaged for convenience. A prototype was built in 1912 but was destroyed by a fire. It was not until 1928 that a fully working machine was ready. It was first sold in 1928, advertised as "the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped". This led to the popular phrase "greatest thing since sliced bread".

Otto Fredrick Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, United States, invented the first loaf-at-a-time bread slicing machine. The first commercial use of the machine was by Chillicothe, Missouri, which sold their first slices on June 7, 1928. As commercially sliced bread resulted in uniform and somewhat thinner slices, people ate more slices of bread at a time, and ate bread more frequently, because of the ease of eating another piece of bread. This increased consumption of bread and, in turn, increased consumption of spreads, such as jam, to put on the bread.