You probably have heard by now the Hostess Brands is back in bankruptcy (the prior incarnation of the parent company made the trip through Chapter 11 back in 2004 (and emerged in 2009). Interstate Bakeries is more than just Hostess and Wonder Bread – a lot of the entire bread aisle is them, you just don’t realize that one company is doing all the different brands – IBC is also Drake snacks, Dolly Madison, Merita Bread, Baker’s Inn, Home Pride, Beefsteak, Eddy’s, J.J. Nissen, Sunbeam…
So I figured I should buy some Hostess products and see what the problem is.
I regularly have bought Home Pride bread – in the last couple years, the bread seems to have been lower quality less “butter”, courser, not as fresh, The “store brand” bread is no worse, and maybe half the price. I didn’t know until right now that it was also an IBC brand.
So I picked up an 8 pack of “Golden Cupcakes” at my local supermarket (not walmart) – price was $4.43. Just a tad under 1 pound ($4.29/lb). Each “cake” has 200 calories, meaning a $/kCal of $3.61, placing it way out of the junk food range [comparison]
So dig in!
They’re awful, even from junk food. Upon closer examination, the box shows “golden” cakes with a dark brown “icing”, but nowhere does the box say that the ice is “chocolate”, because it isn’t. It’s some goo that contains some small amount of alkalized cocoa and food coloring.
What flavor is “Golden”? Got me. The cake is bitter – it tastes vaguely like ginger or maybe baking soda. It is not sugary, and definitely not buttery or vanilla.
Snack foods cratered when they let the government steam roll them over transfats. More recently, Michelle Obama has been leading the campaign to get sugar, fat, and salt out of foods. In the middle of that, we had the mostly bogus peanut butter scare
IBC is also surely a big user of commodity futures to protect itself from wild swings in the prices of the ingredients in their products. More than likely, they were directly or indirectly pushed over the edge by the failure of MF Global.
90% of IBC’s employees are members of the Teamsters.
I ain’t had a Hostess, ‘ Zinger’ in years. They had a bakery outlet nearby but it closed in 04, so I hadn’t bought one since. Snowballs and Twinkies had prominence in the 2009 movie Zombieland.
OL MF Global again, man they are like a bad penny,
parrott