Hostess picks lead bidders for Twinkies, other snack cakes

By The Associated Press - Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 11:32 PM - 0 Comments

NEW YORK, N.Y. – Hostess has picked a lead bidder for its famous Twinkies.

The bankrupt company says it has selected a joint offer from two investment firms — C. Dean Metropoulos & Co. and Apollo Global Management LLC — as the lead bid for its Twinkies and other snack cakes.

Hostess, says the two are offering to pay $410 million for the snack-cake business and five bakeries.

The joint “stalking horse” bid would set the floor for an auction process that lets competitors make better offers. A judge would have to approve any final sale.

After years of management turmoil and turnover, Hostess declared it was going out of business and selling its brands in November. The company already announced separate lead bidders for its other brands including Drake’s cakes and Wonder bread.

Hostess unable to reach a deal with 1 of its unions; company continues plans to liquidate

By The Canadian Press - Tuesday, November 20, 2012 at 9:39 PM - 0 Comments

Hostess Brands Inc. lived to die another day.

The maker of Twinkies and Ding Dongs said late Tuesday that it failed to reach an agreement with and its second biggest union. As a result, the company will continue with a hearing on Wednesday in which a bankruptcy court judge will decide if the company can liquidate

The talks had come as a surprise after Hostess declared last week it would move to wind down its business and start selling off its assets in bankruptcy court. After making its case to liquidate on Monday, however, the bankruptcy judge hearing the case noted the two sides hadn’t yet tried resolving their differences through private mediation. The judge noted that 18,000 jobs were on the line and urged the company and union to try to resolve their differences.

Hostess shut down its three dozen plants late last week after it said a strike by the union crippled its ability to maintain normal production. The Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union, which represents about 30 per cent of the company’s workers, says the company’s demise was the result of years of mismanagement, however, and that workers have already given steep concessions over the years.

Hostess: The supervillains have triumphed

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, November 16, 2012 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

The big news of the day—forget wars and stuff, they happen all the time—is that Hostess has chosen to shut down and lay off all its workers as a way of “settling” a strike. That’ll teach those human beings with lives and families.

There’s probably not much likelihood of Twinkies and other popular Hostess products actually disappearing, since the brands are the main asset Hostess still possesses. The company will sell the Twinkie name and the secret formula (the one that led to all the jokes about how Twinkies are the only food that will survive the apocalypse) to someone else. I’m hoping for Disney, since they’ve been buying up everything else.

Actually, in the unlikely event that Disney were to buy the Hostess brands, they could cross-promote it with Marvel and bring back one of Hostess’s most important contributions to our cultural life: the Hostess comic book ads. You probably remember these if you read comic books in the early ’80s, and a lot of the ads later turned up online—Seanbaby has a site where he adopts several different personas to provide colour commentary on the ads. Hostess got the rather terrific idea of paying all the comic book companies to create one-page ads that looked like comic book adventures of famous characters (though not the character who was actually starring in that particular book). The superheroes would foil supervillains by distracting them with the glorious taste of delicious Hostess Fruit Pies.

The in-house artists at the comic companies had all kinds of rules imposed on them by their editors to prevent the ads from destroying the brand of the heroes: for example, the heroes were rarely allowed to eat the Hostess products, since this would somehow cross over into a full-fledged endorsement. And the villains usually had to be one-shot villains with incredibly lame themes: the Chairman, a guy who turns people into chairs, or the Ding-a-Ling Family, a clan of space hillbillies who are impervious to Thor’s mighty hammer but cannot resist Hostess snacks. Usually the bad guy would be lured away from villainy by the yummy filling, but there were some variations and exceptions. For example, this ad, where the Incredible Hulk so dislikes a bunch of roller-skating disco fans that he just kills them all in cold blood. But much like Charles Bronson in Death Wish III, he has the neighborhood cheering for this act of horrific violence, because now they can go buy Hostess products.

Perhaps the most surprising Hostess ad, in view of the events at the company, is this one, where Captain America bursts into a dressmaking operation and interferes with the small businessman’s right to run the business the way he wants. The businessman protests against Captain America’s interference: “Why do you bother me… a poor simple tailor? You have many more important crimes to go after!” But Captain America, that meddling busybody, essentially leads a labour revolt against their boss, just because he was using magic chalk to turn them into dressmakers’ patterns. Cappy’s hatred of efficient business methods and cutting down on the size of the labour force clearly marks him as a secret enemy of the Hostess company, and possibly of capitalism overall.

Well, as I said, Twinkies are not over. (I don’t know about fruit pies; have they even made those for a while? I always assumed that they were featured most prominently in these ads because they weren’t very popular.) But I think it’s fair to assume that if this campaign hadn’t ended, Hostess would still be a thriving business. Once Richie Rich, Superman and Hot Stuff the Little Devil are no longer endorsing you, it’s a short step to bankruptcy.