An Open Letter to the Twinkie (and Other Hostess Snack-Cakes)
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Dear Mr. Twinkie (and Friends),
In a more innocent and ignorant time, I grew up with you. You or your friends were in my lunch box almost every day. It was a pretty clever idea putting two of you in the same cellophane wrapping, assuring that I would always get, and eat, two snack cakes. Sure it doubled the calories, but it allowed you to move more product. Commercials featuring your cartoon alter-egos—Twinkie the Kid, Fruit Pie the Magician, Captain Cupcake—went toe-to-toe with Ronald McDonald during after-school television programming. When my parents were out of the house, I gorged—eating eight of your buddies at a time.
Recently, your company, Hostess, filed for bankruptcy. This came after decades of dominating the snack-cake market. What happened?
The most obvious answer is that an increasing number of Americans won’t eat you anymore. You may have been a staple in my lunch box, but I guarantee you’ll never be in the lunch boxes of my sons. I'm no health-food zealot, but it is incredibly depressing that your cousin, the Ding Dong, has 19.4 grams of fat (about as much as a fatty hamburger patty with almost-none of the nutrients). Americans are trying to eat healthier: a recent study notes that the number of yogurt-eaters in the U.S. has doubled since 2000. American diet trend lines are against you and cannot be reversed.
Meanwhile, you’ve faced market-share erosion even within the shrinking snack-cake market. Little Debbie brand products out-compete you on price and steal your young-slacker and low income customers; resurgent local bakeries beat you on quality and take away your affluent customers.
Fair or not, you’re a symbol of what’s wrong with the American diet. As you well know, Mr. Twinkie, you have 37 ingredients, including glycerides and various mineral derivatives that are closer to rocks than anything in the four food groups. And then you have those fantastically named ingredients like FD&C Yellow 5 and Red 40. The Internet is full of amateur studies that trumpet your supernatural characteristics: one site claims that an unwrapped Twinkie remains unchanged even after sitting in the open air for three years. Another website discusses an experiment in which a Twinkie was put out against ten different foods from all four food groups and mice were allowed to select which food to eat. Every single time, the mice selected the non-Twinkie choice.
When Hostess announced its intent to seek bankruptcy protection, many celebrated. They saw Hostess’s demise as a watershed moment in the changing American diet; they saw it as poetic justice. While I won’t let you in my house, I choose not to celebrate.
If or when the gates permanently close on the Hostess factory (bakery seems like the wrong term), 19,000 good jobs—many of them union jobs—are lost. Hostess has nearly $1B in obligations to its pension and employee benefit funds. The demise of Hostess will inevitably result in the loss of good jobs and un-kept promises to thousands of people who put in an honest day’s work their entire lives. In that way, the bankruptcy in Hostess is less a watershed event for the American diet than another in a string of American business tragedies. Hostess joins Kodak as the second great American brand to seek bankruptcy protection in 2012--and we're only one month into the new year. The similarities are striking: both companies did well by their employees and hometown communities, both failed primarily because they sell products that Americans no longer want.
As for you, Mr. Twinkie, the day will soon come when you are longer on the shelves of American convenience stores. My grandchildren likely will never have the option of eating you. They will see in you museums. They will be amazed when you emerge from dug-up time capsules every bit as yellow, moist, and soft as the day you were buried. They will try to imagine a day when people ate you daily on their way to work, in between sips of Mountain Dew and tokes on a cigarette.
