For some reason, the other night Mrs. Homie and I had a disagreement about, of all things, Sunbeam bread. I say Sunbeam is, if not top-shelf, definitely a name-brand and somewhat-high-quality brand of bread, on par with Wonder Bread. Mrs. Homie maintains that Sunbeam is a crap off-brand meant to be sold at Aldi.
What’s the scoop?
Yes, it is on par with Wonder Bread. That does not make it high-quality or top-shelf. (Not that I don’t enjoy Wonder Bread style bread, just that that type of bread is not synonymous with quality; more with long shelf life and blandness).
I agree with everything Eonwe has said. Name brand and definitely aiming for top shelf and on the par with Wonder Bread, but not necessarily achieving it. (I say not necessarily because I don’t know what would be a top-shelf brand.)
Name brand, aimed at the Wonder Bread audience. It actually is a trademark: different bakers could make their own version of Sunbeam. Their big selling point was that there were no holes in Sunbeam bread.
If you’re into sliced white Wonder-like bread, IMO both Sunbeam and Bunny are “top shelf” like Wonder and better than Wonder. The only thing that Wonder has that Sunbeam and Bunny don’t is national distribution; Sunbeam and Bunny are regional brands. (Sunbeam weirds me out, though; every Christmas, they have glurgy billboards around town featuring an oil painting of a small girl praying, with the whole thing emblazoned with a Bible verse. So when I need white bread for grilled cheese or something, it’s Bunny for me.)
I think the criteria for “top shelf” white bread would be the following: fresh daily baking, delivery, and shelf-service at the client store by the vendor, and day-old bread is not marked down and sold at the client store (but may be marked down and sold at an outlet store). In other words, if the baking company itself sends a delivery truck and service person around daily to pull old loaves and restock with fresh. All three brands above meet this, and this time- and labor-intensive daily routine is one of the reasons the upper tier brands are so much more expensive than lower tiers.
I think it is a regional thing. I grew thinking Sunbeam was IT. I was unaware of any other premium bread until college.
Whatever the quality of the bread, the metaphor strikes me as strained. In my supermarket, one definitely does not find these breads on the top shelf. My guess is that they are shelved within the grabbing range of little kids.
Is it a regional brand? I’ve never heard of it. I thought this was going to be about kitchen appliances.
If it’s any thing like Wonder bread then I would not call it “top shelf” at all.
I think of Pepperidge Farm and Arnold as the “Top Shelf” and Wonder, Sunbeam etc as being the lesser alternatives. Store brands and generic would fall under the Wonder and Sunbeam as bottom shelf -Will hold the bologna in place but otherwise might as well be sawdust- stuffs.
Sunbeam is about the best bread you can get around here, unless you can find a bakery that made some that day, and the prices reflect that. Sunbeam is $3/loaf here, where you can get Krogar brand (just about the best off brand you can get) at 97 cents a loaf.
The regional part is throwing me off here, I feel like “regional” is it’s own category along with national brands and off brands. Quality-wise, I believe you’re correct, it’s definitely in the same quality band for what it is as Wonder. But the regionalness of its packaging and marketing does give it a little mom and pop feel that seems more akin to an off-brand.
I would consider PF and Arnold to be middle shelf, with local bakery bread as top shelf. Sunbeam and Wonder are definitely bottom shelf.
Interesting. We have Wonder Bread here, but it’s definitely not the prestige brand. (That’s what you mean by ‘top-shelf’, right?) I’d say that it’s second from the bottom, after the bargain house brands, actually. Above it are various multigrain breads (here, at least, made by Weston), and above that are the artisan breads.
Sunbeam may be regional, but it has been around a long time and back before I so carefully insulated my self from advertising, was widely advertised. So all it would need to be ‘‘top shelf’’ would be a premium price. In the Dollar General thread recently, somebody pointed out much of what they sell are old brands without advertising support. Perhaps Sunbeam has suffered that fate.
How do you measure the quality of bread and other things? Does wonder Bread really taste any better?
Much of my wife’s and my food is no name stuff from Aldi’s.
Wow, if Wonder Bread is top shelf where you live, what the heck is bottom shelf? I always thought those loaves were for families with lots of young children or underprivileged folks who could not afford real bread.
I believe that in the era before national grocery distribution and marketing, brands such as Sunbeam, Holsum, Butter-Nut, and Ideal were licensed to bakers in different cities. For instance, Quality Bakers of America Cooperative, Inc., was a firm which promoted the trademark Sunbeam on bakery products and which rendered various services to independent bakers. Still seems to work that way. I’m not sure what quality standards the coöps enforced, but it probably wasn’t as tight as that exercised by soft-drink companies on independent bottlers. I think there were a couple of dairy names that worked the same way.
For those times when I simply must have a fluffernutter only bright white white bread will do. On those (increasingly rare) occasions I select Sunbeam, primarily because my mother bought it when I was a kid and nostalgia is involved.
As fluffy non-threatening packaged white breads go it’s a good one, toasts beautifully evenly, and has a hint more actual bread taste than the $.97 store brand.
Is it top-shelf? I wouldn’t call it that, but it’s also not the worst of the worst.
I think people are defining the category in different ways. If you define it narrowly as “long loaves of sliced bread for sandwiches”, then Sunbeam is in the top half. But if you start including the non-standard shaped but still pre-sliced loaves (like PF), then it’s mid-grade, and if you expand the category to “bread”, it’s bottom-barrel, but so is every other loaf that looks like it.
Among the type of bread that Sunbeam is, I like Nature’s Own the best.
Sunbeam is just a cheap name brand bread intended for kids, IMHO.
Maybe not as white trash as Wonder Bread, but only a step above.
Moved to Cafe Society from IMHO.