Cookaholics Bulletin Board

I'm sure those at the top have their golden parachutes - seems this always happens in these situations, despite the fact that poor management is probably what got them there. Then, when another company buys them out, the workers in the plants will be offered their jobs back, at minimum wage, or close to it, and no benefits. Or they will simply move the operations, and your Twinkies wil have printed on them "MADE IN CHINA".

This is doubly sad out here, because Hostess was a San Francisco company. When I moved here, Hostess Cupcakes were still manufactured in the Mission, down by 16th & Bryant. It's funny to think of San Francisco, home of all-natural organic slow food in the USA, as the home of the Twinkie, but it is.

That's one of the things that has a lot of the senior emloyees pissed off and unwilling to compromise, BTW. They were told that if they followed the company moved to Oakland, Nevada, or elsewhere, and took a cost-of-living cut, the company would stay afloat and they'd keep their jobs. Now they're being asked to take another pay cut and maybe move again.

In a lot of these meltdown cases, it's not even that there isn't a compromise which both management and union would accept. There's just no trust left, on either side, so no compromise is possible.

Hmmm, brings to mind the "twinkie defense" many times mocked and established many years ago in CA. I'll have to continue to hone my own recipes. Ho Hos or yodels (Drakes brand) are next to try.

The good news is the Canadian licensee is alive and well.

Becky, we need a "Like" button for posts.

To weigh in on the demise of the Hostess brand, could it be that they didn't change with the times, and the appeal of overly processed, tasteless, squishy white "bread" and equally abhorrent sweet treats is no longer sufficient? Maybe it was neither the "greedy unions" or the "greedy owners" but an ill-conceived strategy combined with ineffective marketing.

In the grocery store today, there were a few bags of Wonder bread (you "wonder" why they call it bread), but I neglected to see if there were any Ho-Hos, Twinkies or Ding-Dongs left. I've heard people are buying them to sell on eBay.

Darcie,

Oh, there's no question that Hostess' revenue has been declining steadily for years. In addition to unhealthfulness cutting into their sales to suburbanites, on the low end they've got a lot more competition thanks to newer brands and store brands. The company has been steadily shrinking since 1980, really.

That being said (and I looked into the history a little) the current news shows a split between workers and management about what to do about the shrinkage. Workers would like Hostess to keep producing, gradually shrinking until they disappear (but keeping some people working for another 10 years). Management would like to break up the company, loot it for personal gain, and auction off the pieces for what they can get. Management looks likely to win.

None of this could have anything to do with the food sucking, could it? I admit I used to pick up the occasional cherry pie on long car trips, but the last one I had was just awful. The crust was weird(er) and there were no actual cherries, just "cherry" flavored goo. That was about 4 years ago. I haven't had one since. I never did like their chocolate snack cakes. If you closed your eyes, you couldn't even tell they were chocolate. It all tasted oily and stale, really. The only Hostess cake that I ever really liked was the Dolly Madison Raspberry Zingers. Really, Little Debby is tastier and cheaper, too.

Jes,

If food that sucks were a reason for businesses in the food sector to go bankrupt, probably more than half of those businesses would be going or have already gone under! Look at all of the food in restaurants and in supermarkets! Granted, while they have come along with a lot of more nutritious foods, as well as better tasting items, such as from the bakeries in some markets, junk foods, such as those from Hostess and the like, still predominate. All you have to do is look at the white bread section in any market, the snack food aisle, and all that junk in the frozen food aisles, to realize flavor is not what keeps these things selling - it is marketing. While even good advertising would not get me to eat that stuff (probably the last time I ate a twinkie was in the 70's!), I'm not a normal food consumer, which I'm sure everyone on this site can say. And if we were, all of those businesses would have been gone long ago.

I know people will eat any kind of awful edible things trying to pass as food. I just have to wonder how much of Hostess's woes have to do with the fact that, even for low-end baked goods, they're just not that good. They may have done well in the days when there wasn't tons of competition, but now there are many more brands to choose from - most of which are tastier and/or cheaper, not to mention the healthier options like meal replacement bars. Add to that the eroding of brand loyalty among younger consumers and I think people just began to realize that there were things they'd rather eat.

As for Wonder Bread - It's in all the supermarkets here, but it has a much smaller presence than store-brand bread. Maybe it's still a thing in other parts of the country, but around here, if you're going to buy crap anyway, you might as well save a buck.

Most of what I'm hearing from friends is a big collective, "meh." Even the ones brushing a nostalgic tear from their eyes admit they haven't eaten any of this stuff in years - and most of my friends are definitely not foodies.

I think Darcie's right. They didn't change with the times. They allowed their brands to become the butt of jokes - shorthand for foodstuffs of no redeeming nutritional value that will be the only things left for the cockroaches to snack on after the apocalypse. Look at Doritos, another product that has become synonymous with "obesity epidemic." They responded with better marketing and new flavors. It's fun to pretend you're a 14-year-old and commit the dietary sin of chowing some Blazin' Buffalo and Ranch Doritos. Hostess just kept turning out the same Twinkies and Ding-Dongs that baby boomers were eating before Elvis's jumpsuit became ironic. With the sparkle gone from the brand name, I think a lot of folks just realized that the cupcakes with the white swirly just didn't taste good.