2012 was a year that the folks at Hostess would prefer to forget. The company made headlines for its financial woes and subsequent bankruptcy filing. But alas, big businesses, as they so often do, find a creative way to make things work on one level or another.
Hostess has decided to team up with Metropoulos & Co. and Apollo Global Management LLC, the leading bidder for what’s left of the former snack cake giant. The resulting transaction amounted to $410 million for the business and its five bakeries. And that’s just for the company’s snack cakes.
Other bids have been filled for various Hostess bread brands. Winners include Flowers Foods Inc, makers of Tastykakes, and United States Bakery. The nine-figure deal is just a setup for an auction that Hostess CEO Greg Rayburn expects to be "wild and wooly."
He also expects Twinkies and other Hostess cakes to return to store shelves by the back-to-school season. 18,000 jobs may have been lost as a result of the company’s implosion, but Twinkies will likely live to see another day.
Good news. Right?
Well, it is if you enjoy eating barely pronounceable ingredients with an undetermined, but likely decades-long, shelf life (like sodium stearoyl lactylate and soy lecithin).
While supermarkets experienced a surge in sales for Twinkies when news broke about the company’s bankruptcy filing, that was a clear example of brief irrational nostalgia since sales had been declining to that point. Let’s hope that decline continues.
