Anyone know how and why Hostess is back in business?

http://www.newbernsj.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-twinkies-make-an-unlikely-return-1.178073

Twinkie Power!

Bury a Twinkie and a homemade cookie in the backyard. Dig them both up in a month and prepare to be terrified.

@johnpowell this is the internet no ones got a month here. Can you spoil it for us. Or maybe a YouTube video?

It’s an American Icon. Kinda wish someone would argue that point…

Blame Zombieland.

The Hostess brand is a commodity which was sold to get investors out of bankruptcy.

The brand has been bought by Apollo Global Management and Metropoulos & Co. Some of the breads and other products have been purchased by other companies as well. The 18,000 employees of Hostess have pretty much all lost thier jobs. The products are no longer distributed directly to stores but rather through distributors which means the delivery problems with the unions are gone. The snacks are substantially the same but twinkies and fruit pies and such are imperceptably smaller. I don’t know if the new companies are unionized but the labor force is about 10% of what it was. I suspect that means it’s not.

@DWW25921 I see it that way too. I mean how could Americans live on without this chemical cake?
I feel like I’m in chemistry class again every time I look at the ingredients on one of those vile things.

Hostess is gone. Somebody bought the name and the recipes.

@uberbatman Pretty sure it’s the same ingredients you’d find in homemade cupcakes.

Let’s see:

Flour: polysaccharides, Potassium bromate, Benzoyl peroxide, Ascorbic acid, Chlorine gas, chlorine dioxide, Calcium peroxide, Azodicarbonamide or azobisformamide, Calcium propanoate, Sodium benzoate, Tricalcium phosphate, Butylated hydroxyanisole. From Wiki

….That’s just the flour you’ll find in your kitchen cabinets. Shall I go on and list the “chemical” ingredients in sugar, baking soda, butter, milk, etc.?

I guess I’m the only one who’s happy to be able to buy Twinkies again.
I think they actually taste better this time around. :0)

I can not eat Twinkies. Not since I was 8 and my girl friend, Bonnie, and I went on a thieving rampage one summer at a Shop Eze. We stole some Twinkies, among other things that summer, then went beside the building and CRAMMED the evidence down our throats instead of savoring them like they deserved. Ruined Twinkies for ever for me. Too much guilt tied up with them. I need counseling. Or…I just need to avoid Twinkies. Yes, avoiding Twinkies would be cheaper than counseling.

@Katniss If you like Twinkies (and I do!) you should try the Little Debbie version, Cloud Cakes!

@Dutchess_III: I know you’re not implying that Twinkies have the same ingredients as homemade cupcakes. If you are, you are clueless.

@Yetanotheruser Really? They’re good?
Thanks for the tip! I’ll check them out. :0)

@Katniss Yes, shortly after the “sweetest comeback” started, Mrs. Yetanotheruser asked me to go get her a box of Twankies. Of course, when the first shipment made it to the store, the shelves did not stay stocked for long. So, rather than disappoint the wife, I got a box of Cloud Cakes. She likes them better than the original.

The name is the only thing that is the same. Everything else is different. It is not the same they as it was before, and the ingredients are different.

The company that bought the name is using their own employees and their own bakeries, which are run more efficiently than the original company. That explains how they can do it.

I saw that some other companies were making Hostess knock-offs which I haven’t tried and then saw that Hostess was a brand again.

Not necessarily @jca. Most of the ingredients are the same, flour, salt, sugar, whatever, but I’m sure they have preservatives that home made cakes don’t. But I don’t know that the preservatives are necessarily bad for us. We tend to ASSUME they are.

My point is people tend to freak out when they read the “ingredients” in certain foods, because they’re big, long, scientific words that are impossible to pronounce, hence they “must” be dangerous.
My point is, the majority of those ingredients / chemicals, if you will, are a natural part of what makes up that particular food.

For example, “In wheat, phenolic compounds are mainly found in the form of insoluble bound ferulic acid.” and ”Alkylresorcinols are phenolic lipids present in high amounts in the bran layer (e.g. pericarp, testa and aleurone layers)”

OMG! We’re eating Alkylresorcinols and ferulic acid and phenolic lipids??? That HAS to be bad! It HAS to be linked to “name that disease.”

This was done to stop Hostess from having to pay pensions.
Fuck Hostess.

The “original” Hostess did not want to give decent salaries to the union workers, yet the CEO and President and other higher ups were getting huge salaries, bonuses and severance. Google it. Everyone loves to point fingers at unions as being greedy (but in reality, just doing what they are supposed to do – demand living wages) yet people don’t usually look at the big picture.

@jca

Yes the big picture. The unions felt justified in demanding more. Unfornately in the big picture 18,000 employees lost thier job as a result. I can’t help but wonder if any of them regretted that decision.

@Jaxk: Good question. I am not sure what they feel, but they say “if you don’t stand for something, then you stand for nothing.” The union has to stand for something, that’s their job. As I learned working for a union, what gets reported in the paper is only about 5% of what actually goes on.

When you stand on principle, sometimes you lose. It’s imporatnt to make sure the principle is worth the cost.

Very true. I’m sure there’s way more to the Hostess story than we know.