WHITE BREAD IMPERIALISM - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 80

Green Revolution: in order for Mexico's dreams of modernization and consumer affluence to succeed,
someone would have to turn mountains of wheat into inexpensive sliced white bread.
Like nearly all Mexico City bakers, Lorenzo Servitje came from a tight-knit clan of Spanish immig-
rants. His father was born in Catalonia, and as a young immigrant in turn-of-the-century Mexico City,
he worked his way up through a series of Spanish-owned bakeries. In 1928, Lorenzo's father managed
to open his own bakery, with support of the Spanish community. He called it el Molino, the Windmill, to
evoke images of Don Quixote and the rolling plains of La Mancha. But even amidst all those European
influences, young Lorenzo Servitje set his gaze firmly on the north. After taking over el Molino in 1936,
he began obsessively studying American-style industrial baking, reading every U.S. trade journal he
could find and seeking out U.S.-trained bakery engineers. “I wanted to know every detail of the North
American bread industry,” he recalled later, “[all] the newest technologies and cutting-edge machinery.”
Eating U.S.-style industrial loaves, or pan de caja , “was not a tradition in Mexico,” Lorenzo acknow-
ledged. But he believed he could change that. 54
Along with three other members of the Spanish baking community, including the first Mexican
trained in modern industrial techniques at the American Institute of Baking, Lorenzo began scheming in
1938. Wartime machinery shortages in the United States delayed his plans for Mexico's first American-
style bread factory, but in 1945 Bimbo Bakery opened its doors with four bread lines: sliced white sand-
wich bread, an unsliced white “table” loaf, a soft rye, and packaged toast “for children and the sick.”
The sparkling new bakery sported dough-handling machines from American Machinery and
Foundry, high-speed mixers from Readco, two Flex-o-Matic seventy-tray ovens from Union Steel, and
a temperature-controlled proofing room installed by the Chicago Metallic Corporation. Two of the very
latest bread-wrapping machines from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, would ensure that, unlike Ideal bread,
Bimbo reached stores mold free. With almost three times more Ford delivery vans than Ideal, Bimbo
bread would get there faster, too.
During Bimbo's early years, many Mexican bakers avoided flour made from the new Green Revolu-
tion wheat. Modeled after U.S. wheat varieties and bred with the rigors of industrial processing in mind,
flour made from el Trigo de Rockefeller didn't work well with traditional Mexican baking practices. As
one small-town baker complained to an anthropologist, “You have to be a chemist” to bake with the new
wheat. Bimbo, on the other hand, had scientists on staff, and in keeping with its embrace of all things
modern and North American, was the first major bakery in Mexico to embrace the nontraditional wheat
varieties. By the mid-1950s, Bimbo had established strong ties with the most modern milling companies
in northern Mexico, paving the way for widespread acceptance of the new wheat. 55
Lorenzo's admiration for the U.S. baking industry also extended to its ingenious use of advertising,
and from its first days, Bimbo plastered its name across newspapers, comic strips, and radio. Later, it
would be the first Mexican bakery to appreciate the power of television. As a result, the cuddly bear
mascot that bore the name Bimbo didn't take long to become one of the most-loved characters in Mex-
ican commercial pop culture. Beyond the bear, Bimbo's campaigns touched all the same themes as early
industrial bread advertising in the United States: the hygienic nature of factory bread, the importance of
modern bread in building a strong nation, and the ultra-squeezable quality of industrially baked loaves.
There was one thing, however, that Bimbo did better than any North American counterpart, right
from the start: distribute its product to the far-flung corners of a rapidly expanding city. Bimbo delivery
trucks relentlessly plied the city in search of new sales points, and within a few years soft packaged
bread had saturated the nation's capital. In 1947, Bimbo bought twenty-six new trucks and opened routes
into nearby cities and state capitals. Photos from the period show Bimbo trucks sharing rutted roads with
ox carts and being ferried across rainforest waterways on rafts. Oscar Lewis, in his classic ethnography