Twinkies are officially back from the dead
Lesson summary
Hi there everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English, where we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. This is number 625, so that means you can find the full lesson at PlainEnglish.com/625. That includes the full transcript, interactive exercises, and more. PlainEnglish.com/625, and that is thanks to JR, the producer.
Coming up today: They’re yellow, spongy, sweet, and devoid of any nutritional value. There are far tastier snacks available in grocery stores and convenience stores. But the Twinkie has survived on American shelves for over ninety years. And after a brush with death ten years ago, the Twinkie’s future appears secured. Today, we’ll talk about this staple of childhood in the U.S.
In the second half of the lesson, I’ll show you how to use the English expression “try your hand at.” And JR has a song of the week for us. Let’s get going.
The Twinkie refuses to die
The year was 1930. The Continental Baking Company had a factory in Schiller Park, Illinois, a close-in suburb of Chicago. The company was famous, at the time , for making Wonder Bread, one of the first mass-market brands of sliced bread. Continental also made cream-filled strawberry shortcakes; they used special machinery to fill the cakes with cream.
But this was 1930, and food production depended on the seasonality of ingredients. Strawberries were not available all year long , so the machinery to fill strawberry shortcakes with cream—those machines sat idle for a portion of the year, when you couldn’t get strawberries in frigid Illinois.
That’s when James Alexander Dewar, an employee in the Schiller Park factory, had an idea. He invented a snack cake with banana filling. The bananas could be imported when strawberries were out of season . The snack was a yellow cake in the shape of a submarine, filled with banana-flavored cream. He called it a “Twinkie.”
People liked it. These were tough economic times, and Twinkies were cheap: a pack of two cost five cents. But just over a decade later, Continental ran into trouble. Bananas were rationed during World War II, so the company had to change its recipe. Instead of filling the Twinkie with banana cream, the company filled it with vanilla-flavored cream. That turned out to be very popular.
The Twinkie soon became one of America’s favorite junk foods. They even appeared in pop culture. In the 1984 movie “Ghostbusters,” one of the physicists uses a Twinkie to describe the power of ghosts in the city. In “WALL-E,” the robot’s cockroach friend eats Twinkies. One of the characters in “Die Hard” is obsessed with Twinkies: he even memorized the ingredients.
But as the years went by, the Twinkie’s maker, Hostess, which had bought the Continental Baking company, Hostess ran into trouble. It hadn’t evolved with the times. Hostess maintained a fleet of trucks that would deliver its products from the factory directly to the retail stores.
This was antiquated. Most food producers deliver large shipments of their products to distribution centers. Then, the grocery and convenience store chains deliver the right amount of the product to individual stores. Modern inventory management and logistics practices mean that the store chains know exactly what to send to each store, and they have trucks going there anyway. Hostess, a small brand, was duplicating this process and, in doing so, it was spending way too much on delivery.
Not only that, but the product didn’t have a long shelf-life. Despite being all junk and chemicals, a Twinkie had a shelf life of just 26 days—far less than other snack foods like chips, which can last over a month on the shelves.
There was also the movement toward healthier eating—Twinkies didn’t fit into the low-fat movement of the 1990s or the low-carb craze of the early 2000s.
By 2012, it was too much. Hostess was losing money and it filed for its second bankruptcy. On November 21, 2012, Hostess stopped making the Twinkie. Americans scrambled to get the last Twinkies off store shelves; customers fought for the last boxes. Boxes sold for thousands of dollars on eBay. It looked like the end of a snack-food era.
Just six months later, two private equity investors bought Hostess out of bankruptcy and decided they would try their hand at reviving the Twinkie and other Hostess products. Twinkies were back on store shelves—with a few modifications.
The new Twinkie is smaller and has 135 calories compared to 150 before. The shelf-life was extended to 65 days, thanks to new enzymes that can preserve moisture for longer. And Hostess would now deliver only to retailers’ distribution centers, saving a lot of money on labor and gas.
The Twinkie also benefitted from a bit of luck. During the pandemic, American consumers fell back in love with classic brands . The trend toward healthier eating is not going away, but many people are finding room for indulgences, and they’ve returned to the brands they ate as kids.
Hostess Brands just agreed to sell itself to J.M. Smucker Company. You probably know Smucker’s as the maker of jellies and jams. The price was $5.6 billion—not bad for a company that was in bankruptcy just eleven years ago.
As I was researching this, I discovered that Twinkies are not common outside the U.S. They are available in Canada. They are available in Mexico; they’re called “Submarinos” here. I think you can get them in the U.K. And they are huge in Egypt. There’s a bakery in Egypt that supplies Twinkies to the Middle East and North Africa; they love their Twinkies in Egypt, or so I’ve read.
But now it appears the future of the Twinkie is secured. I’m not a huge fan of them. Hostess makes chocolate cupcakes, which I think are better. But during the pandemic, I definitely did follow the trend of going back to brands I remember from my childhood.
Some of them—I tried it once and I said, “okay, that was enough.” But I’ve kept buying a few—so I can understand the people who found their way back to Twinkies.
JR’s song of the week
Today’s song of the week is “Sweet Sounds of Heaven” by the Rolling Stones, featuring Lady Gaga and Stevie Wonder. This one is brand new, released at the end of September. And this is a good song: I’m a Rolling Stones fan and this is one of the best songs in the later stage of their career. Mick Jagger alternates vocals with Lady Gaga; Stevie Wonder is on the keyboard.
Great song this week from JR. “Sweet Sounds of Heaven” by the Rolling Stones.
Next up: the English expression, “try your hand.”
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