Baking Evolves Into Big Business
Around 1924, a New York Times Magazine article noted, bread was quickly transforming from primarily a food cooked at home from scratch to a purchased product.
As the journalist Silas Bent wrote at the time:
Prior to the World War, mother – or the cook – baked about two-thirds of the cake and bread we ate in this country. Today, mother or the cook bakes about one-third. The "quality loaf" and a standardized product have brought the change.
Business moves also contributed:
There has been going on since the World War a series of mergers and combinations, culminating not long ago in a $500 [million] bakeries corporation. Suddenly and dramatically came the realization that baking, but recently obscured and despised, ranked seventh in size among our industries.
While Bent didn't specifically name this $500M baking corporation, my research indicates he was referencing Continental Baking Company. In 1924, it purchased four other bakery businesses. With the next year's 1925 purchase of Taggart Baking Company as well, it became the biggest commercial bakery in the country.
(Taggart had invented Wonder Bread in 1921. The Continental conglomerate would also go on to invent Twinkies in 1930.)
Bent also added a few stats about just how much bread production had surged in recent times:
It had ceased to be a handicraft. Mass production has been introduced, with ovens which turn out 6,000 loaves of bread an hour. The chemist had superseded the cook.
Without this hooking up of all the machinery, the modern bakery would be an impossibility. As it is, a single oven turns out thirty-five times as many loaves now as the largest oven could turn out ten years ago. A single factory has an output as great as 4,000 bakeries of a generation ago.
You know the expression "the greatest thing since sliced bread"? Well, sliced bread didn't actually debut until more than three years after this – on July 7, 1928, to be exact.
Baking Evolves Into Big Business: Ten Thousand Years of Breadmaking Ultimates in the Mass Production of the Loaf
Published: Sunday, November 30, 1924