“People who eat white bread,” fashionista Diana Vreeland once said, “have no dreams.” Selling it is something else entirely. By introducing his sliced white bread to Mexican consumers in 1945, Lorenzo Servitje fulfilled a vision that transformed the company he helped found into the biggest bakery in the world.
Servitje, who established Grupo Bimbo with four fellow dreamers, has died. His death was announced by the company, a Mexican conglomerate whose trademarks include Wonder Bread, Sara Lee, Entenmann’s, Thomas’ English muffins, Brownberry, Boboli and, in Britain, New York-brand bagels.
“Today, if you buy Arnold bread in the East or Orowheat in the West, Freihofer in Pennsylvania or Mrs. Baird in Texas, Stroehmann’s in the mid-Atlantic or Old Country in Arizona, not to mention Roman-Meal, Sun-Made and Francisco sourdough, it’s Bimbo,” Aaron Bobrow-Strain wrote in White Bread: A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf (2012).
The company began as a small bakery and retail store opened by Servitje’s father, a Spanish immigrant from Catalonia, in 1928.
When his father died suddenly in 1936, Servitje inherited the business, gave up his work as an accountant and began figuring out how to import modern U.S. industrial baking technology.
The company began with 34 employees and 10 trucks. Today, Grupo Bimbo has 130,000 employees and 170 factories in 22 countries that make 10,000 products.
Servitje succeeded with a multipronged strategy. He marketed his cellophane-wrapped, mass-produced bread as healthful and dependable, in contrast to the traditional French rolls, or bolillos that were unavailable intermittently during frequent labour disputes and that sometimes originated in unhygienic bakeries.
The company became the biggest baking company in the U.S. in 2009 after acquiring Weston Foods; two years later, it became the world’s biggest after scooping up competitors in Spain, Portugal and Argentina.
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