The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn’t doomed

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The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn’t doomed<br>No, you're not going to code your own Jira

JA Westenberg<br>Jul 12, 2026

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I am the proud owner of a lightly used bread machine.<br>It’s an appliance about the size of a microwave, and it sits on my kitchen counter.<br>It cost about a hundred bucks.<br>The ingredients for a basic loaf are flour, water, yeast, and salt. A bag of flour costs two or three dollars and yields maybe ten loaves. A jar of yeast lasts for months. Salt is cheap enough to be a negligible cost.<br>The machine does almost everything: it kneads, it proofs, it bakes. I dump the ingredients in, press a button, and three hours later I have bread.<br>Well, I have used this machine perhaps twice in three years.<br>Instead, every week I go to the grocery store and buy a loaf of pre-sliced, factory-produced bread in a plastic bag.<br>This is the bread paradox.<br>And it explains why SaaS companies are very, very far from being doomed.

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Five thousand years of bread, and we still buy it pre-made

In one form or another, in almost every culture, humans have been baking bread for at least five thousand years.<br>The ancient Egyptians were running commercial bakeries along the Nile by around 3000 BCE, using emmer wheat and sourdough fermentation techniques that wouldn’t be out of place in a modern artisanal bakery in Brooklyn. The Romans “industrialized “ the process, and by the time Pliny the Elder wrote his Natural History in the first century CE, Rome had a professional bakers’ guild, animal-powered dough-kneading machines, and a distribution network that supplied bread to hundreds of thousands of urban residents who never baked a loaf themselves.<br>They bought.

Roman Bakery<br>And they bought for the same reasons as I did, thousands of years later: because it was easier, because it was consistent, and because the alternative cost time and attention they’d rather have spent elsewhere.<br>The medieval European guild system kept baking professional for centuries. In London, the Worshipful Company of Bakers received its first royal charter in the 12th century, and sheriffs dragged bakers who sold underweight bread through the streets on a sled as punishment. The guilds enforced standards, maintained training through apprenticeships, and ensured that townspeople bought their bread from specialists rather than making it themselves. The vision of a medieval peasant household where everyone bakes their own daily loaf is a romantic invention. People baked at home when they had no other option. When bakers were available and affordable, they bought.

Otto Rohwedder<br>In 1928, Otto Rohwedder perfected the commercial bread-slicing machine in Chillicothe, Missouri, and within a few years, American bakeries were shipping pre-sliced loaves in mass-produced packaging across the country. In 1961, researchers at the British Baking Industries Research Association in Chorleywood developed a process that reduced bread production time from hours to minutes by using mechanical dough development and chemical additives. By the late 20th century, American bakeries had achieved a level of efficiency and scale that would have been unimaginable to a Roman baker or a medieval guildsman. Today, the United States consumes about 21 million tons of bread and bakery products annually. Divided across the population and the days of the year, Americans buy about 10 million loaves of pre-baked bread each day.<br>That’s ten million loaves a day, in a country where flour costs pennies per loaf, where bread machines cost under a hundred dollars, where bakers and homemakers have known the recipe for five millennia, and where a machine can do the whole job for you.<br>The make-or-buy gap

In George Orwell’s essay “In Defence of English Cooking,” he lamented that English bread had become “a pale, fluffy, tasteless thing” thanks to industrial production - but people kept right on buying it. People ate bad industrial bread because it was there, because it was cheap, because it was uniform, and because they couldn’t be fucked baking.<br>Economists call this the “make-or-buy” decision: a rational actor produces something themselves only when the total cost, including time and opportunity costs, is lower than the cost of buying it from someone else. The total cost, though, is almost always higher than people guess - because they forget to account for the mental overhead. Baking bread takes flour and yeast, but it also takes planning. You have to remember to buy ingredients and start the machine. You have to accept that homemade bread goes stale faster, because it doesn’t have the preservatives that give Wonder Bread its uncanny shelf life. The machine needs cleaning afterward. Each of these steps is minor in isolation, but they build on each other,...