Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that Hostess, the company responsible for famous snacks like Twinkies, Ho Hos, Ding Dongs, Sno Balls, Mini Muffins and my personal fave, Fruit Pies, has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Another Hostess legend, the iconic cupcake.
Citing the economy and ballooning expenses for pension and medical benefits, the Indianapolis-born “bakery” hopes to restructure union contracts to get some debt relief. From the WSJ:
Hostess’s filing marks what is known as a Chapter 22 proceeding in restructuring circles, since it had already sought bankruptcy protection once before. Hostess, which in court papers reported $1.4 billion in debt as of Dec. 10, has struggled since emerging from bankruptcy proceedings in February 2009.
How many Twinkies do you need to sell to make up that $1.4 billion? Based on my local ShopRite’s price of $4.29 per box (10 Twinkies), 326,340,326.34 packages would need to be unloaded onto hungry consumers.
Whoa. Hostess is going to have to pick up the pace:
Sales of its signature Twinkies have declined a bit recently while the overall bakery-snacks category has been about flat. Nearly 36 million packages of Twinkies were sold in the year ended Dec. 25, down almost 2% from a year earlier, according to data from SymphonyIRI Group, a Chicago-based market-research firm.
Even though it sounds like dire straits, it’ll be business as usual for Hostess for the foreseeable future, so you won’t need to stockpile on the snack cakes like Armageddon is coming.
TANGENT: I once had a hilarious conversation with Kevin Pollak on the set of a movie about the half-life of Twinkies, and that when nuclear fallout does occur, the surviving cockroaches will feast on them until they all die off of Type II Diabetes.
Here’s some fun facts about Twinkies:
- Twinkies were invented April 6, 1930, in Schiller Park, IL, by Jimmy Dewar, who is quoted as saying, “Twinkies was the best darn-tootin’ idea I ever had.”
- Dewar’s idea for the name came from a billboard he saw advertising “Twinkle Toe Shoes.”
- The golden sponge cakes were originally sold TWO FOR A NICKEL during the Great Depression.
- Twinkies originally had a banana creme filling, but switched to vanilla during banana rationing in World War II. The banana flavor returned after a promotional tie-in for 2005′s King Kong.
- President Bill Clinton put a Twinkie in a time capsule.
- Twinkies make a memorable cameo in Ghostbusters:
- Twinkie the Kid is the official mascot:
- The Chocodile is a chocolate-covered Twinkie.