"Hey, what do you know? This is kind of neat."
These are the words muttered by a skeptical appliance executive shortly before millions of bread machines found their way into American kitchens.
Tom Lacalamita, of Welbilt, a New Jersey home appliance company, was sent home one weekend in 1988 with a bulky machine a colleague had toted back from Japan. Rumor had it that it made bread. Mixed it, kneaded it, shaped it, let it rise and baked it.
"Before I took it home, I didn't find it appealing to do something in a machine that we do so well by hand. It was dumb," Mr. Lacalamita recalled. "But by the end of the weekend, I didn't want to return it. It really was neat."
Spurred on by Mr. Lacalamita's enthusiastic thumbs up, Welbilt began selling the clunky, bigger-than-a-breadbox machines in the United States. At least 15 other companies have since joined in and, together, they sold 2 million machines in 1993, beating estimates of 1.75 million.
Bread machines will be the top-selling appliance in gourmet and specialty stores this year, predicts Nancy Moore, editor of Gourmet Retailer magazine, a trade publication.
More than 100 million loaves of bread will pop out of bread machines this year, predict experts at Fleischmann's Yeast. It's no surprise then that sales of flour and yeast are booming.
And now this new machine age is cranking out a subculture:
At least 20 cookbooks on the subject are selling well. Three newsletters devote themselves to recipes and techniques. Bread-mix-of-the-month clubs and cooking classes are popular. A new product "boosts" machine-made bread to greater heights. New stores sell only bread machines and related paraphernalia. And to take the notion of convenience one step further, about a half-dozen companies package bread mixes that ask the user only to measure and add water.
"People think they're cooking, but they're not," says Peter Giannetti, editor of HomeWorld Business, a trade publication that predicts sales of 2.7 million units this year. "They want fresh food, but they don't want to work at it. There is some psychology at work here -- getting the pleasure of cooking but without the work."
Joan Simpson got her bread machine about two years ago and the luster hasn't worn off yet.
Wake up and smell the bread
"It is so wonderful to wake up to the smell of fresh bread. The taste is amazing, completely fresh with no chemicals. They're just incredible," she says of the machine that reminds her of the "Star Wars" robot R2-D2.
