In 1928, a full-page newspaper ad announced the first presliced loaf of bread. It included instructions: 1) “Open wrapper at one end”; 2) “Pull out pin”; 3) “Remove as many slices as desired.” At the time, as everyone knew, cut bread quickly went stale. Anticipating consumers’ fears, Otto Rohwedder, a Missouri-based inventor, inserted a U-shaped pin at both ends of his presliced loaf to hold the bread together inside the resealable bag, creating an illusion of wholeness that signified freshness.

Rohwedder was careful to take his customers into account in other ways as well, interviewing women to find out exactly what they wanted, down to their preferred slice thickness (half an inch). Then he teamed up with a baker named Frank Bench who supplied — literally and figuratively — the dough. The product they created became a runaway hit. By 1930, sliced bread had spread to almost every town in America.

Factory-made loaves, sliced or unsliced, were typically softer than bakery loaves, to make them seem as if they’d just come out of the oven. “It hit a tipping point where bread became so soft that it was almost impossible to slice it at home,” says Aaron Bobrow-Strain, author of a social history, “White Bread.” Consumers loved to make sandwiches with precision-cut squares of Wonder Bread, and this kind of loaf came to stand for the epitome of convenience. By the 1950s, people were praising their favorite inventions as “the best thing since sliced bread.”