Although still going strong today, Nimble Bread is perhaps most strongly associated with the famous advertising campaign of the late 1960s and 1970s that featured Nimble girl Emily Jones precariously perched on a small chair secured to a red and white Nimble balloon. Accompanied by the memorable ‘I Can’t Let Maggie Go’ by Honeybus, something about the ad caught the public’s imagination in a way rival firm Slimcea’s own balloon based bread commercial singularly failed to do. The product itself harks back to an age when the amateur ethos still prevailed in the sport of dieting. Phrases such as ‘lean cuisine’ and ‘calorie controlled diet’ were about as technically complex as things got. Nimble boasted it was only 40 calories a slice (that’s apparently 27 calories less than normal bread), although it probably helped that each loaf was absolutely tiny.
Richard Davies
August 10, 2010 at 5:08 pm
The writers of the most recent Wallace & Gromet adventure remembered the ads quite well.
yvonne
June 26, 2013 at 4:47 pm
can you still buy nimble bread
Geraldine Guthrie
November 17, 2013 at 7:30 pm
didn’t Nimble do an ad of a pretty blonde girl coming up a hill with a loaf of Nimble bread, similar to that of the boy in the Hovis advert?
Liam
February 23, 2014 at 3:22 pm
It wasn’t just that the loaves were tiny, it’s more that each slice seemed to be 3{30e2395aaf6397fd02d2c79d91a1fe7cbb73158454674890018aee9c53a0cb96} dough and 97{30e2395aaf6397fd02d2c79d91a1fe7cbb73158454674890018aee9c53a0cb96} air.
Glenn Aylett
June 24, 2022 at 7:28 pm
At the other end, there was the cheap white stodge called Mother’s Pride that my paternal grandparents always bought as it was cheap. Haven’t seen that loaf for a long time either.
Richardpd
June 24, 2022 at 10:42 pm
My Dad near liked what he used to call cotton wool bread, in other words cheap white bread with almost no taste.
Sunblest was another brand of bread that seemed omnipresent at one time, with the vans being a common site delivering to schools & hospitals as well as shops.
Glenn Aylett
June 25, 2022 at 12:35 pm
Sunblest had a bakery near me that closed 40 years ago. They were huge in the seventies, like Mother’s Pride.
Richardpd
June 25, 2022 at 12:47 pm
There’s still a Sunblest bakery near to me.
I remember one of my secondary school teachers mentioning they used to take on a lot of school leavers as apprentices back when the delivery vans used to have assistants to help the drivers unload during their rounds.