Today's baguettes are tomorrow's cookies

A crumby idea to fight food waste 🥖

Is there ever a truly original idea? A thought that has never crossed the mind of one of the other 117 billion people estimated to ever have lived on Earth?

Mark Twain didn’t think so. Here’s what he wrote in his autobiography:

"There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations.

A few years ago, I went to Bordeaux to meet the inventor of a new idea. Franck Wallet was working as a city planner when he realized just how much bread gets thrown away in French bakeries every year. He became so passionate about the issue, he quit his job to look for solutions. He soon discovered that crumbs made from old bread could replace flour in a variety of recipes like cakes, cookies, or even more bread.

But bakers told him they didn’t have an effective way to grind large quantities of bread in their bakeries, so Wallet set out to create a machine that could do it for them. He named it le Crumbler. You can see exactly how the concept works in this video I produced for Insider.

The beauty of le Crumbler lies in its simplicity. It’s basically an industrial food processor designed specifically for bread. And because it’s small scale and low tech, it can be easily implemented for immediate impact.

It’s the type of idea that makes you think why wasn’t anyone doing this before?

Then, a research-savvy editor at Insider sent me this Ebay page advertising a “Rare Antique Counter Top Lee's Bread Crumber from 1895 by Goodell Company.”

At first glance, I didn’t quite understand what this weathered contraption might have to do with a mechanical bread grinder. Intrigued, I searched “Lee’s Bread Crumber.”

Well, it turns out le Crumbler is not a new idea.

The machine advertised for sale on Ebay may not have an electric motor, but its purpose is the same: grind stale bread into crumbs so that they can be used in the next day’s dough. And like Franck Wallet, the original Crumber inventor was so passionate about fighting food waste that he decided to dedicate his time to building a machine that could reduce it.

Joseph Lee’s Crumber, 1895

I didn’t find out about the Crumber inventor until the Insider video was nearly finished, but his story deserves a spotlight. His name was Joseph Lee.

Lee was born to enslaved parents in South Carolina in 1849. During his early life, he worked as a kitchen servant where he learned cooking and baking. In 1865, at the age of 16, he was freed as a result of the Civil War.

Putting his culinary training to use, he set sail with the U.S. Coast Guard earning a living as the ship’s cook. He eventually settled in Newton, Massachusetts. It was there that Lee began to make a name for himself.

Joseph Lee, 1848-1908

Lee married Christiana Howard in 1875 and the couple became known as some of the Boston area’s most prominent socialites. In the 1870s and 80s, Lee opened several businesses including an upscale seafood restaurant and a posh hotel. His most notable guests included Supreme Court justices and three presidents: Benjamin Harrison, Chester Arthur and Grover Cleveland.

Even after so many successful endeavors, Lee continued to chase new ambitions. As a baker and bakery owner, he noticed that a more uniform kneading of the dough always led to better bread. So, in August 1894, Lee secured a patent for a dough-kneading machine designed to produce higher-quality loaves in less time.

After having created a solution for the beginning of the production process, Lee then turned his attention towards finding a way to reduce waste on the backend. He patented Lee’s Bread Crumber in 1895.

Lee’s Crumber was powered by a hand crank which forced the dried bread through cogs to tear and shred it. The crumbs would fall through a grate and land in a try where they could be removed or emptied into the top for another run through the machine.

Lee sold the rights to this machine to New Hampshire based manufacturing firm, The Goodell Co., who produced the model seen on Ebay.

The idea caught on. By the turn of the century, hundreds of catering companies and large hotels were employing Lee’s Crumber to save money by reusing their old bread.

Lee died of tuberculosis in 1908 and is buried in Newton cemetery. In 2019, Lee was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

I’m intrigued by the fact that the Crumber didn’t stick around. Lee’s death wasn’t the end of bread baking, even if there are fewer independent bakeries than before, yet somewhere along the way, the idea of bakeries recycling their old bread fell by the wayside. Maybe there was no one passionate enough to update the technology with the times or maybe people became less concerned with food waste — whatever the reason, the idea lay largely dormant for more than a hundred years only to be “reinvented” in 2015.

I don’t know if Franck Wallet ever heard of Joseph Lee, but I do know that the Crumber/Crumbler is the perfect example of what Mark Twain describes in the rest of his musings on new ideas:

“We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages."