The Rise and Fall of Hostess: Why Nobody Buys Twinkies Anymore

Hostess made a snack cake famous for lasting forever, and then spent nearly a century proving that the company behind it could not. For most of the twentieth century, Continental Baking and its Hostess cakes sat in nearly every lunchbox in America: the Twinkie born in a Schiller Park bakery in 1930, the CupCake with the white squiggle, Wonder Bread on The Howdy Doody Show, Twinkie the Kid and a starring role in Ghostbusters. Then a tangle of owners, union contracts and debt, two bankruptcies and a bitter 2012 strike shut the whole company down and set off a national Twinkie panic. The cakes came back in 2013, were sold to J.M. Smucker in 2023, and have been sliding ever since. In this episode: How an idle strawberry-shortcake pan and a shoe billboard gave James Dewar the Twinkie in 1930 Wonder Bread, a balloon race in Indianapolis, and the birth of the Continental Baking Company Doc Rice, the CupCake squiggle, Howdy Doody and the route drivers who kept every rack fresh ITT, Ralston Purina, Interstate Bakeries and the 1995 merger that stacked up 372 union contracts The Twinkie myths: the eternal shelf life and the so-called Twinkie defense The 2004 and 2012 bankruptcies, the bakers' strike and the shutdown that put 18,500 people out of work The Sweetest Comeback in the History of Ever, and Smucker's $5.6 billion bet that went stale Subscribe to Mainstreet Memories for more stories of the brands, stores and Main Street favorites that built American life and then slipped away. #Hostess #MainstreetMemories #RiseAndFall #Twinkies #WonderBread #ContinentalBaking #RetailHistory #BrandsThatDied #FoodHistory #Smucker #Nostalgia