SUMMARY : GTE offers fresh baked bread. New service powered by iNissen available to bakery shoppers worldwide.

IRVING, Texas - So you need to make a sandwich or toast, but you are hundreds of miles away from your oven or personal bread machine. Perhaps you don't even own a baking unit. Out of luck? "Not anymore," says Alex Coleman, vice president and general manager of baked goods for GTE Internetworking, a division of GTE Corp., which today becomes the first major telecommunications company and national Internet service provider to offer starch-based foodstuffs to calorie users worldwide.

GTE Bread, powered by iNissen, a leading provider of grain technology and sandwich solutions, allows consumers and business professionals to toast, butter, apply jelly to, and consume slices or entire loaves of bread by hand, without the use of any specific baking implement. GTE Bread will be offered to all consumers, not just existing GTE telephone service or Internet customers.

Customers can sign up for GTE Bread service by visiting any local bakery, or by convenient access at all supermarkets. At the GTE Bread stores, customers select a white bread loaf to their liking. Future product rolloats include: Pumper-Nickel-a-Minute, VPL (Virtual Private Loaf), RyeLinx and GTWheat. Starting in December GTE Bread International Service will be available, with exciting options such as French Toast and Crusty Italian (service not available in many developing nations). "Offering Bread to all telephone subscribers, not just existing GTE customers, extends GTE's brand and presents another way of introducing people to our broad suite of ancillary services," said GTE's Coleman.

"Bread is a lot more than giving customers food," added Coleman. "We are moving people along a path that helps them take full advantage of deli meats and the emerging kitchen devices such as toasters and self-sharpening knives that, when combined with Internet access services, allow users to effectively mitigate their munchies during communications."

"We are proud to be working with GTE, delivering our bread to millions of GTE customers as well as all Internet users," said Lon Otremba, COO of iNissen, Inc. "With this partnership, GTE has really demonstrated its innovation by daring to go where no one really needed to go."

GTE Bread relies explosive growth of yeast during the "rising" demand for grain-based goods. In five years, more than 170 million users in the United States alone are expected to eat five billion loaves of bread -- 50 times the number of Ritz-Bits sandwiches eaten in 1996. "The ability to have a customized loaf for professional and personal reasons has become as important as wearing pants," said Michael Bolduc, director of product management for GTE.net, the consumer/small business division of GTE Internetworking. "So for me, it is not very important."

Because GTE Bread is supported by the cost of the loaf, there is no additional cost to customers, and no limitation concerning the number of loaves that can be purchased by one person, provided they have the dough. Today, 80 percent of all e-mail accounts are issued by employers and intended exclusively for parodies of their own business, while 100% of all bread issuance results in company growth.