The resistance of bread crumb to compression between parallel plates has been measured using cyclic deformation at constant rate with an Instron universal testing machine. The effects of various factors on different measures of the “firmness” taken from the force/deformation records have been studied using a split‐plot factorial analysis with six factors: position in the loaf, rate of deformation, direction of deformation, position in the oven, tray and time. Multi‐factor analysis of variance shows that, although time since baking was the dominant factor, the results show a very highly significant dependence on the direction of measurement with a strong interaction within t