Twinkies: The Breakfast of Champion Programmers Still Hard To Get

An anonymous reader writes "When Hostess, baker of Twinkies, filed for bankruptcy and ceased operations in November, Twinkies were no more. Then, a private equity firm bought the business for $410 million and planned to resume production in 'The Sweetest Comeback in the History of Ever.' Now, an article in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette reports that they're still hard to get, since an unprecedented demand has caused orders to exceed production capacity 'by a significant amount.'"

Comments

Re:Pathetic

[bill_mcgonigle]

besides, most countries have taxes on sugar etc..

heh, in the US we tariff the hell out of sugar and subsidize high-fructose corn syrup. To support the War on Triglycerides, apparently.

what I find pathetic is that they ceased production for a product in such high demand. whoever handled the bankruptcy fucked up.

Are you kidding? That strategy has generated billions of dollars worth of free advertising for the Twinkie brand and demand is now at an all-time high; profits from now go to the new owners, losses from then are accounted for in the bankruptcy and get paid for by the creditors. It's brilliant, really, in a sociopathic sort of way.

FWIW, there is a mountain of Twinkie boxes and a 5x8 advertising banner at the entrance to the WalMart in Claremont, NH. I won't need any until October, when the boy wants some of those Minion cupcakes for his birthday party.

Re:Pathetic

[BrokenHalo]

In any case, what exactly is a twinkie? And are they designed for oral ingestion or for insertion via another orifice?

Re:Pathetic

[Dogtanian]

I've never had a twinkie. I want to try.

I live in the UK, and tried one towards the end of last year. (*) In all honesty, I really couldn't see what all the fuss was about.

Even accounting for the fact it may have been marginally stale- since it was an import- it had that almost "uncanny valley" fake quality to it of something that would never have been conventionally "fresh" in the first place. It reminded me of some off-the-shelf (also long-life) waffles I'd tried previously and been similarly unimpressed with.

The snack itself was just bland; mediocre cake and an uninteresting, over-sweet cream filling. Nothing disgusting, just... pointless.

"Long life" baked goods like Twinkies don't seem to be as culturally important over here. I'm only guessing, but possibly the popularity of long-life snacks like the Twinkie may be greater in the US because being more geographically spread out than other countries made keeping goods fresh more of an issue, particuarly when Twinkies (etc.) rose to prominence in the mid-20th-century.

(*) The fact this was around the time of the bankruptcy was pretty coincidental; a new shop importing US snacks had opened, and I was curious to try one. I paid something silly for it- around £1.75 IIRC- but again I doubt that was because of the bankruptcy- the shop markup was already high, and they were charging more for individual ones split from their packs.