How it began
Thor Bjørklund (1889 to 1975) was a cabinetmaker from Lillehammer. He was using a plane to smooth wood when the idea came to him for a tool that would cut cheese more precisely and easily than a knife. He experimented with a carpenter's plane to make something similar for the kitchen and made slicers in his workshop. He patented the cheese slicer on February 27, 1925.
Before it existed
Cheese was cut with a knife. In the 1920s a block of Norwegian brown cheese weighed around four kilos and was hard to cut neatly, so cheese was easily wasted. In the years after World War I, a thinner slice meant that food could be stretched further.
How it spread
Bjørklund also patented the slicer in Denmark, Sweden and Finland, and in Germany, Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Switzerland. In 1927 he founded the firm Thor Bjørklund & Sønner to produce it. The slicer became a Norwegian export product and is common in households across the Nordic countries and in the Netherlands.
Where it stands today
The original slicer is still made in Norway. Production moved to Ringebu in the Gudbrandsdal valley, where about 200,000 slicers are made a year under the Bjørklund 1925 brand. Different shapes are sold for soft and hard cheese. A giant cheese slicer was put up in Ringebu in 2015 as a roadside landmark.
