The best thing since sliced bread!
I’ve always wanted to be a baker, in another life. That smell of baking bread stops me in my tracks. It’s a bit like Mr. Toad in that famous book, The Wind in the Willows . Toad is happily touring the countryside in his canary yellow caravan when a motor car roars past and tips the caravan into a ditch. Ratty is furious, Mole seizes the horse, and Toad just sits in the middle of the dusty road, gazing after the car in a trance, murmuring, “Poop-poop!” The wreckage doesn’t matter-he’s seen the new thing, and he’s hooked. That’s me, still, when a loaf comes out of the oven. If I’m honest, it’s me with most new things. Unfortunately, transfixed isn’t the same as talented. For years, I’ve struggled with the craft of baking. I’ve produced enough inedible bricks to build a small city. I’ve had the local birds turn up their beaks at the prospect of eating them-and Devon seagulls down here are notoriously voracious and unfussy eaters. But I kept at it. And I’ve finally reached the point where my family will actually eat one of my loaves-and importantly, even cut a second slice. Which brings me to the other, non-baking side of my life: innovation. Back in 2019, in the middle of COVID, I wrote a short piece about sliced bread and why that took off. I want to come back to it now, because there’s an idea in it that I think is really the Cinderella of innovation theory. It explains so much, and yet we keep ignoring it. It’s the idea of adoption: why people take on new things, how new things actually spread. And right now, that matters more than ever. Look at AI. In 2025, a study from MIT found that 95% of company AI pilots were producing no measurable return-not because the technology didn’t work, but because of what researchers called a “learning gap.” This autumn 2026, PwC found over 90% of senior executives use AI at work, but fewer than 4 in 10 of their non-managerial staff do. Now, for all the “wow,” the gee-whiz nature of the technology, adoption is still a slow and a social process. And one of the best places I know to see that in action is a loaf of bread. Otto Rohwedder wasn’t a baker. He was a jeweller with three shops in St. Joseph, Missouri, and a degree in optics. Around 1912, though, he got an idea he couldn’t shake: a machine that would slice a whole loaf of bread all at once. He thought long and hard about what advantages pre-sliced bread might offer. After all, slicing a loaf with a knife took time and effort, and if the loaf was stale and the knife was blunt, it could even be dangerous. So, in principle, people might value a more convenient alternative. But it wasn’t an obvious winner. Bakers told him sliced bread would go stale faster, it would fall apart, the machine was too complex for everyday production, it was bulky, took up too much precious space, and nobody wanted it anyway. But Rohwedder kept going. He couldn’t let go of his idea. He sold his shops to fund the work and found a factory in Monmouth, Illinois, willing to build his machines. Then, late in 1917, that factory caught fire, and his prototype machine and all the blueprints went with it. It took him years to recover and rebuild. By 1928, though, he had a working machine-but still nobody wanted it. Except one man: Frank Bench, who ran the Chillicothe Baking Company in a small Missouri town. Bench had worked with Rohwedder before, so he agreed to give it a go. And on the 7th of July, 1928, the first loaf of commercially sliced bread was produced at his bakery and sold under the brand name “Kleen Maid.” While bakers had been skeptical of the benefits, local families in the Midwest were much more enthusiastic. In fact, as a review in the local newspaper, The Constitution-Tribune , as a review put it: “So neat and precise are the slices, and so definitely better than anyone could possibly slice by hand with a bread knife, one realizes instantly that here is a refinement that will receive a hearty and permanent welcome.” And it did. Within two weeks, bread sales from the bakery had increased by 2,000%. That first machine, it broke down after about six months-which, if you’ve ever worked on an innovation project, might sound depressingly familiar. At first, sliced bread had a practical problem: sliced loaves fell apart before they could be wrapped. So, bakers tried rubber bands, metal pins, all sorts of solutions, but it wasn’t until a St. Louis baker called Gustav Papendick, who had bought Rohwedder’s second machine, came up with a simple fix: a cardboard tray that held the slices together while they were wrapped. Now, notice what’s happening here. The inventor has the original idea, makes the machine, but it’s a user solving a problem that helps make it work at scale. And great ideas don’t always sell themselves, which is where marketing comes in. In 1930, Wonder Bread began selling sliced bread on a national basis. By 1933, thanks to their marketing muscle, most American bakeries had a slicing machine and soon were selling more sliced bread than unsliced. Within five years of that first loaf in Chillicothe, the new thing had become the normal thing. Unfortunately, 10 years later, in January 1943, the US government banned it. It was wartime. The Secretary of Agriculture, Claude Wickard, argued that sliced bread needed heavier wrapping and wasted paper. So, to support the war effort, it was banned, and the ban took effect on the 18th of January. The public was furious. One of the most quoted complaints came from a New York housewife who wrote to The New York Times about the chaos of slicing bread for a family breakfast: “I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household. My husband and four children are all in a rush during and after breakfast. Without ready-sliced bread, I must do the slicing for toast-two pieces for each one, that’s 10. For the lunches, I must cut by hand at least 20 slices for two sandwiches apiece. And afterward, I make my own toast. 22 slices of bread to be cut in a hurry.” The government backed down. On the 8th of March, 1943, seven weeks later, the ban was lifted. Sliced bread and its fascinating history may be very inetresting but what does it have to do with innovation? Well, plenty, as any aspiring entrepreneur will recognize. Think of this situation: You’ve finally made it. After months of struggle, wrestling with a thousand and one technical problems, balancing the resources you need, juggling the plates-finally, you get to launch. You could be forgiven for thinking, “Phew! You’ve earned the right to relax, step back, perhaps hold back on opening the champagne, but at least enjoy the sense of achievement. You’ve created something, moved it from a gleam in the eye to a reality.” Except that the journey isn’t over. You’re only halfway there. The next big challenge is moving to scale, persuading others to adopt your great new thing. And that can be where the trouble starts. Diffusion to scale is one of the thorniest problems in innovation, whether we’re talking about a startup looking to grow or an established business trying to launch a new product or service. And it’s as true of process innovations as it is of products and services. New methods and techniques are often very slow to spread. So, why did sliced bread spread so fast when so many good ideas don’t? Well, for an answer to that question, let’s stay in Iowa, where Otto Rohwedder came from, and meet a farmer’s son. Everett Rogers was born in 1931 on a farm near Carroll, Iowa. His father loved mechanical gadgets-new tractors, new machines-but he was deeply suspicious of anything biological or chemical. And in particular, he refused to plant the new hybrid seed corn, even though it yielded around a quarter more and stood up much better to drought. And then came the drought of 1936. On the neighbour’s farm, the hybrid corn stood tall; on the Rogers farm, the crop wilted. That was what finally changed his father’s mind, and young Everett never forgot it. He went to Iowa State University, studied rural sociology, and spent his life asking why people adopt some innovations and resist others. In 1962, he published Diffusion of Innovations . It became one of the most cited books in all of social science, and it’s still widely read today. His big insight was that adoption follows an S-curve. A few innovators go first-they’re the Mr. Toads of the world, ready to drop anything for the next shiny new thing. Then you have the early adopters, and then the curve accelerates: you have the early majority, then the rest, and finally, right at the end, the laggards. And how fast you climb the curve depends on other things, but in particular, on five characteristics of the innovation as people see it: * Relative advantage: Is it clearly any better? The answer for families: unequivocally, yes. Think about it-no more uneven slices at breakfast, time-saving- it’s a big advantage. * Compatibility: Does it fit how I live, the world I live in? Well, yes, absolutely-right in the center of the kitchen table, and it went beautifully with the other new gadget in that kitchen, the pop-up toaster. * Complexity: Is it simple? Well, there’s not much simpler than a pre-sliced loaf of bread. * Trialability: Can I try it out cheaply? Yes — it’s only one loaf of bread-what’s to lose? * Observability: Can I see the benefits? Can I see others benefitting? In this case, yes-neighbours started talking, sales quickly rose 2,000%. So, five out of five. No wonder sliced bread took off. But notice what happened in the case of Everett Rogers’ father and the hybrid seed corn. It wasn’t an advert or an expert that convinced him to change; it was finally seeing that corn next door standing tall while his had wilted. Adoption of innovation, above all, is a social process. Now let’s look at the opposite case: What happens when something is clearly better, but it still doesn’t spread? Everett Rogers loved a story from a village in Peru called Los Molinas. In the 1950s, a public health worker called Nelida spent two years trying to persuade families to boil their drinking water-a simple way of preventing disease. After two years of effort, just 11 families out of 200 had taken it up. Why? Not because they were foolish, but rather, in the local culture, in local belief, foods and drinks are classified: they’re either hot or cold. Boiled water was associated with illness; it’s something for sick people. Now, Nelida, who was an outsider, worked mostly with the families who were themselves on the edge of village life. So, the innovation made sense-there was nothing wrong with it, it was a better thing to do-it just didn’t fit the culture, and it came through the wrong social channels. Or take scurvy, that terrible disease that devastated the crews on ships as they started to voyage around the world. As far back as 1601, an English sea captain, James Lancaster, ran a rough experiment. The crew of one of his ships got lemon juice, and the crews of the other ships didn’t. The lemon juice crew stayed healthy; the others suffered terribly. The evidence was there, and yet the Royal Navy didn’t make citrus juice standard issue until nearly 200 years later in 1795. So, better-relative advantage-isn’t enough. Evidence isn’t enough. Innovations travel through people, through trust, culture, status, and who is talking to whom. One more story, and it takes us back to baking. In the 1980s, the Matsushita Company (that’s today’s Panasonic) set out to build a machine that would bake bread at home. Their first attempts were a disaster: burnt crusts, raw middles-my own bricks would have felt quite at home in their company. So, a software developer called Ikuko Tanaka did something unusual: she went and apprenticed herself to the head baker at the Osaka International Hotel, famous for its bread. She watched him, she worked with him, she ate a great deal of bread, and she noticed something he couldn’t explain in words: he wasn’t just pushing the dough, he was twisting and stretching it. She took that back to the engineers, who designed a mechanism to mimic that twisting and stretching. The machine worked, and it sold in huge numbers in its first year. The Japanese management thinker Ikujiro Nonaka made this one of the famous cases of “tacit knowledge”-examples of the things we know, but we can’t always put into words. And it’s once again a reminder: innovation spreads not only through information, but through people watching, copying, and learning from each other-which, to be honest, is actually how I finally did learn to bake. So, what innovation lessons could we take from sliced bread? Four spring to mind: * Adoption is a social process. Rogers’ father wasn’t persuaded by data; he was persuaded by his neighbor’s corn. Nelida’s boiled water failed not on evidence, but on the trust and culture factor-it didn’t fit that culture. If you want an innovation to spread, think about who people are going to see using it, and who they trust. Mr. Toad figures shouting “Poop-poop!” at every new thing are actually quite rare; most of us need to see the neighbor’s corn. * Design for those five attributes of innovation. Relative advantage, compatibility, simplicity, trialability, and observability-they’re not just ways of explaining success afterwards; they’re a checklist you can use at the start of any innovation. Sliced bread scored five out of five; most innovation projects don’t, and we rarely ask why. * Users finish the job. Otto Rohwedder might have built the first slicer, but it was actually Papendick with his little tray to hold the bread slices together who made it work. And we know this: users reinvent, adapt, and improve innovations as they spread. It’s what some writers have called “innofusion”-innovation and diffusion-and it’s a constant, developing process. Smart innovators watch what those users do and learn from it. * The technology is the easy part. That’s the lesson for AI today. The tools work, no question. What’s missing is that learning, that trust, that fit with how people actually do their jobs, and leaders who will create the space in which it’s safe to try. Significantly, fewer than 1 in 10 non-managers in that PwC survey said that using AI well was rewarded. That’s not a technology problem; it’s an adoption problem. Perhaps the real adoption test is one my family taught me: not whether people try it once, but whether they’ll cut a second slice. A little postscript: These days, Chillicothe, Missouri, calls itself the “Home of Sliced Bread.” And every year on the 7th of July, there’s a Sliced Bread Day with a parade and a baking competition. It’s even official: the State of Missouri recognized it in 2018. Rather sweetly, though, the town had almost forgotten its own story until a local historian rediscovered it on old newspaper microfilm. And that phrase, “the best thing since sliced bread”-well, that seems to have started in advertising. By the 1930s, bakers were boasting of “the first improvement since sliced bread.” The phrase has stuck ever since, becoming our shorthand for an innovation everyone obviously wants. Except, as we’ve seen, nothing is obvious. Even sliced bread had to be adopted-one family, one breakfast, one second slice at a time. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please follow and subscribe, and let me know in the comments. Maybe think about: What’s the innovation you’ve resisted for years, but now can’t live without, and what affected your decision to adopt it? Get full access to Managing innovation at johnbessant.substack.com/subscribe
