Twinkies To Return By Summer
The company that bought Hostess’s snack food business out of bankruptcy expects to have product back on the shelf in a few months:
The new owner of Hostess Brands Inc’s snack cakes hopes to have Twinkies back on U.S. store shelves by this summer, according to a member of the purchasing group.
“Our family is thrilled to have the opportunity to reestablish these iconic brands with new creative marketing ideas and renewed sales efforts and investment,” Daren Metropoulos, a principal at his family’s private equity firm, told Reuters in an email on Tuesday.
“We look forward to having America’s favorite snacks back on the shelf by this summer.”
Daren’s father, Dean Metropoulos, teamed up with Apollo Global Management to offer $410 million for Twinkies and other snack cakes. Their offer was to serve as the minimum offer for the business but no other bidders emerged.
Snack food lovers, your long national nightmare will soon be over.
But all the Twinkies people bought up are still as good as new. I wonder if sales will suffer as the heavy Twinkie users will remain out of the market while they consume their reserve stock? Perhaps there will even be a secondary market for pre-bankruptcy Twinkies where people can trade in antique Twinkies.
There are layers of political irony in this story, and pretty much every unionized corporate BK story for that matter, although the irony almost certainly would be lost on the vast majority of the chattering classes. Obviously unions putting a company into BK and thereby causing job losses for union members is the most patent irony of the lot. But let’s skip that one for now.
Bankruptcy can and does work the same way for all businesses, whether you’re a small mom and pop company, or a mid-sized company worth hundreds of millions, or a mega multinational worth multiple billions. Companies go into it. Either they come out reorganized or they liquidate. But if there are valuable brands those brands live on. Barring extraordinarily rare exceptions, of course.
Ultimately there was no question that Twinkies had enough value that someone would purchase the brand and continue selling them, right? A supermarket without Twinkies and Hostess cakes would be like a liquor store without Jack Daniel’s and Smirnoff.
Conceptually speaking the same thing could have and in fact would have happened with GM. It’s not as if Chevys and Cadillacs would have disappeared from the roads. Someone would have bought them out. At the right price, of course. With the right contracts in place.
Alas, when Democrat power politics matters more than business, or even law for good measure, corruption, cronyism and waste of taxpayer dollars are all but certain to ensue.
I thought that Grupo Bimbo from Mexico would buy Twinkies. What they sell in Latin America is much better than Twinkies.
At least the Minnesota Twins will have their official product back!
I hear Bloomberg has some edict in the works to ban their sale in NYC.
@Tsar Nicholas: Speaking of “layers of irony” I always enjoy watching the market worshippers blame the Unions for Hostess’ demise.
@Mike:
Won’t work, Twinkies will outlast any ban that NYC might try to impose. Politicians have expiration dates, Twinkies do not.
“Snack food lovers, your long national nightmare
will soon be overhas come back from the dead.”FTFY.
Can’t we get rid of those things once and for all?
Twinkies are like cockroaches, they have a shelf life of 10,000 years.
@al-Ameda: Actually, that’s an urban legend. A couple of years ago a foodie guy kept some Twinkies for years after their expiration date. While they didn’t grow mold or get hard, the shortning in the filling and cake became rancid, according to his report.
But it does make a good story when you want to rant from big pharma or some other villian to “manufactured food.” The best way to rid your life of Twinkies is to do what I do–not buy any.
@Just ‘nutha ig’rant cracker: “to rant from big pharma” should read “to change your rant from big pharma.” Should preview more often when I revise on the fly.
@Tsar Nicholas:
Unless, of course, those jobs weren’t worth saving. As one union member said “It will be hard to replace the job I had, but it will be easy to replace the job they were trying to give me.”
@Tsar Nicholas: It also would have been better had the CEO not taking a whoppingly large pay increase before trying to cut down on employees’ salaries.
But of course, I bet you thought that as the CEO, he had the right to charge whatever he could get away with, too bad for those employees.
Modern American Corporate Life: where the top dogs snarf all the goodies and then when the employees ask for a raise, plead poverty.