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

Re:I Know Where The 22,000 Went!

[DarkOx]

Two ways to look at things.

1) Its a shame that we now have more unemployed people. While many of them are somewhat to blame in terms of not taking the initiative and updating their own skills having a post Hostess employment plan etc, I think we can agree there were challenges as well. Society has failed structurally to provide many with the opportunities and tools to keep a viable career path open for their working lifetime.

2) This is really pretty cool. There is a lot more competition in the packaged food space than when the twinkie first graced the scene. Its also true the relative cost of the goods twinkes were originally created as a substitute for have pretty well fallen to levels where twinkie does not make a lot of sense as a replacement good in economic terms. So what we have here is a very niche product, one that could not be offered economically using last centuries technology. Thanks to labor savings and efficiency though the die hard twinkie lovers can get them, and the rest of use vary occasional twinkie consumers can know there will be on on the shelf of our local grocery! The production, supply, and distribution chain is efficient enough to give us a crazy amount of choices!