Hostess Saves Twinkies By Automating, Fires 94% Of Their Workforce (washingtonpost.com)

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Where Twinkie once employed 22,000 workers in more than 40 bakeries, their workforce is now down to just 1,170, reports the Washington Post, relying mostly on robotic arms and other forms of automation. "This 500-person plant produces more than 1 million Twinkies a day, 400 million a year. That's 80% of Hostess' total output -- output that under the old regime required 14 plants and 9,000 employees."

"We like to think of ourselves as a billion-dollar startup," Hostess chief executive Bill Toler said Tuesday, announcing that Hostess Brands, which had twice filed for bankruptcy, now plans to become a publicly-listed company valued at $2.3 billion.

Comments

Headline is misleading and a little clickbaity

[jpostel]

They didn't fire everyone because of automation. They fired everyone because the business was grossly inefficient and bankrupt, and it happened over several years. They automated because it was the only way to compete in their market and survive as a company.

Re:Headline is misleading and a little clickbaity

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I came here to complain about the loaded headline. This isn't even the same company at all. The old one went into chapter 7 and got liquidated. There were no employees left. Those 1,170 jobs are essentially new jobs. Yeah, they likely pay less with fewer benefits than the old company, but they otherwise wouldn't exist without the current owners buying the assets, since nobody else was interested.

It could be that the submitter is trying to tank the IPO by spinning things this way so he can buy the stock cheaper.

Re:Headline is misleading and a little clickbaity

[MightyYar]

Management should have been thrown into the fire instead. They're the ones who ran the company into the ground, not the people who did the actual work every day. But guess who got fucked over?

Pretty much everyone got fucked over. The unions negotiated themselves out of a job, the owners lost most of their equity in the bankruptcy, and the debt holders had to take discounts. The people running the show now essentially just bought the brand and are justifiably proud that they aren't doing as shitty a job as the last group of people.

Re:Union played hardball and lost

[JBMcB]

To be fair, the teamsters were making concessions, while the baker's union was playing hardball. IIRC it got to the point where the teamsters were actually complaining about the other union, which is pretty unusual.

No, they "saved" corp profits by Union busting

[_KiTA_]

While the Automation kick is an interesting angle, lets not forget what actually killed Hostess -- vulture capitalists. These are Mitt Romney style assholes who swooped in, loaded the company up with debt, then pawned it off after leeching all the money out. Somehow though, it's not embezzlement when an investment company does it.

But it gets worse. The unions that took the blame? They were having their workers give upwards of a THIRD of their paychecks just to try and save the company they helped build. And that just caused the vultures to trade the company around more and more.

That leaves the unions in one corner and the hedge funds and Hostess management in the other. Management ordered the company to stop contributing to the union pension funds, ignoring their obligations under collective bargaining agreements. They have demanded a new round of concessions, which would have doubled insurance premiums, negated all pension obligations, and slashed pay by 27 to 32 percent. Again, the 14-year Hostess bakery veteran: “Remember how I said I made $48,000 in 2005 and $34,000 last year? I would make $25,000 in five years if I took their offer. It will be hard to replace the job I had, but it will be easy to replace the job they were trying to give me.”

So yeah, the automation is interesting, but lets not forget what brought us to this point. Vultures bought the company, embezzeled a shitload by loading on bad debt and pawning the company of as well as flat out stealing from the pension fund, and passing the buck to the next leech until they couldn't pass it any further. And now instead of having good quality Wonder Bread and tasty, if not exactly healthy, sweets like the Twinkie, we get mass produced automated crap.

The local Hostess bakery re-branded as a Franz, and the quality is really good. They also have a direct-from-the-baker storefront that you can go in and get bread at a huge discount. Oh, and they're union and pay their workers a good wage -- around $17 an hour starting.

As I said the last time this came up, no American should EVER support Union Busting. Hostess is dead to me, and besides You can clone a twinkie pretty easily, which lets you do stuff like a fresh baked chocolate twinkie with cherry filling.

Re:No, they "saved" corp profits by Union busting

[_KiTA_]

Do the math first. 400MM twinkies, 22,000 people. That is an output of about 9 twinkies per hour per employee. Even if back in the day they produced twice as many, the efficiency is abysmal and there is no way that a Twinkie has sufficient value to sustain all those people on a liveable wage.

Well, yeah? That's why the workers didn't just make Twinkies -- they also made a shitload of different types of pastries (chocodiles, ho hos, etc) and breads. Stuff like Wonder Bread, the Nature's Pride line, etc etc. And the 22,000 people probably weren't all making Twinkies to begin with.

Hostess -- under their name Interstate Bakeries Corporation -- was pretty damned huge before the Vultures got to them. Hell, before the health food kick of the past decade or so Wonder Bread was probably one of the most popular breads in the US.

Re: The Taste must have been fired also

[ArmoredDragon]

They used real cream back in the 1960's.

Welcome to the modern era of cost-cutting, shortcuts and quick profits. Long-term strategies need not apply.

No they didn't, that was back in the 30's when the twinkie underwent a big change, and the reason they changed it was because the key ingredient of a twinkie no longer existed. They made twinkies out of actual bananas. The reason they stopped doing both bananas and cream was because both were rationed in WWII (partly due to the gross michel extinction, with the cavendish not making it to mass market quite yet, among other general supply problems that existed at the time caused them to switch to vanilla creme.) After that period, everybody's palate changed and they adapted to the new taste. Depressions tend to do that.

Even if they wanted to go back to the old taste, they couldn't. The gross michel banana is gone and it's not coming back; instead we have the cavendish now which is very bland in comparison, and even it is going to die soon because like their predecessor, all cavendish bananas are clones of one another. This MUST be the case though, because real bananas that can reproduce on their own don't have much actual fruit in them, and have seeds that are as hard as a rock and will break your teeth if you try to chew them. We might be able to resurrect the gross michel with GMO to make them more resilient to the fungus that killed them, but who knows because we can't even have golden rice because Greenpeace declared war on it.

At any rate, back in 2011 Hostess reintroduced the original twinkie (as best they could; remember, no more gross michel, so it's literally impossible for them to reproduce the original taste without adding sugar and other stuff) only nobody really bought it. People got used to the post-depression twinkie as its taste had already become so iconic over the years, and so that's what people want.

Re: The Taste must have been fired also

[avgjoe62]

Oh I think there was plenty of greed involved, just not on the part of the factory workers: Hostess Executives got Raises While Filing for Bankruptcy