You'll Never See These Bread Brands Again

Bread is a staple of the Western diet, with hundreds of varieties traditionally popular throughout almost every region of Europe and North America. Once something that households had to bake individually at home several times a week, bread (and buns, rolls, and the variants) was reinvented in the modern, industrial-minded age into an inexpensively purchased grocery item. Even the smallest market or convenience store virtually anywhere stocks at least a few different styles and brands of bread, from white to wheat to potato to rye to kinds filled with seeds and nuts to ones sweetened with honey.

It's big business to make bread, and national and regional bakeries alike give the people what they want day in and day out, year after year. That is, they do until suddenly, almost out of the blue, the breads that the companies have spent a lot of resources building up brand loyalty for disappear from shelves. Here are some very famous, very popular, and very important breads that millions counted on for their toast and sandwiches until their bakeries sadly stopped producing them.

For decades, Pepperidge Farm's Goldfish crackers were a simple affair: bite-sized crackers shaped like fish. Introduced in 1962, they didn't taste anything like fish but were initially available in one of five mild flavors: Lightly Salted, Cheese, Barbecue, Pizza, and Smoky. The enduringly popular variety, Cheddar Cheese, came along in 1966. In 2011, arguably the strangest Goldfish cracker product hit stores — because it wasn't in any way a cracker.

A new product arrived on grocery store shelves in 2011: Pepperidge Farm Goldfish Sandwich Bread Soft White. It was sandwich bread meant to appeal to the same demographic who enjoyed non-fussy Goldfish crackers — children. The bread came eight to a package, presented like a bun or hoagie roll. Each piece was free of crust and adorned with a smile, like the crackers. Unlike the crackers, the Goldfish bread wasn't cheese-flavored. The product didn't catch on and quietly disappeared. Pepperidge Farm no longer offers the bread for sale.

Bost's Bakery was a family-owned bread-making operation that for years operated out of Shelby, North Carolina. L.C. Best created the company, and his four sons ran it for decades. "If it's fresher than Bost's, it's still in the oven," was the brand's catchphrase on local commercials that aired on local television stations in the area in the mid-20th century.

In the early 1960s, Bost Bakery expanded, building a 66,000-square foot production facility in Thomasville, North Carolina, to meet demand for its bread, distributed by then throughout the upper South. About 2,000 people worked at the facility even into the 1970s when Continental Baking, one of Bost's national competitors and the makers of the bestselling Wonder Bread, bought out the whole operation. Wonder's operators kept the Thomasville plant going, and Bost's Bread on shelves, up until the 1980s, when it closed down the factory and eliminated Bost's from its portfolio of brands.

Sourdough bread is essential to the cuisine and food history of San Francisco. Numerous local bakeries over many decades have produced their own beloved versions of the uniquely bitter and creamy bread, chief among them Larraburu. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen included a loaf of Larraburu bread as part of the hypothetically perfect San Francisco meal, as the bakery operated in the Bay Area for more than seven decades. The Larraburu brothers immigrated to San Francisco from France in 1896 and went into competition with local stalwarts Toscana, Boudin, and Parisian. They carved out a niche with their bread baked with a special sourdough starter made from a live culture. By the mid-1960s, Larraburu sourdough was popular with locals and tourists alike; the San Francisco airport sold 1,500 loaves a week in 1964.

Nevertheless, in the early 1970s, Larraburu filed for bankruptcy. The company had recovered and was beginning to expand again when one of its delivery drivers hit and injured a child. Larrraburu couldn't come back from the financial problems resulting from years of courtroom battles and citing overwhelming debt, the bakery went out of business and ended production of its bread in May 1976.

As early as the 1920s, one of the top-selling breads in and around Washington, D.C. was Dorsch's White Cross Bread. Upon establishment in the 1800s, Dorsch's first production facility was a shed, with bakers churning out only a few loaves each day. Within three decades, it operated out of an urban factory where it could make as many as 100,000 loaves of White Cross and other varieties each day.

Taggart Baking invented Wonder Bread, which helped popularize fortified white bread to the point where it changed the way bread was distributed in the United States. After acquiring other, regional bakeries, Continental Baking Company bought Taggart in 1925 and became the biggest baking concern in the United States. In part to build up Wonder Bread into a national brand, Continental bought other regional and local bakeries around the U.S. whose business it diminished with its ability to bake and distribute inexpensive, pre-sliced bread. In the 1940s, Continental purchased Dorsch's to close it down and use its D.C.-area facilities to bake Wonder Bread and other products.