Hostess Down

Memo to the outgoing Hostess management team: if you can't make it in the snack cakes business at a time when America is supposedly more obese than ever and states are legalizing pot, maybe you're the problem.

Stores selling Hostess products have been inundated by consumers bemoaning the company's going-out-of-business announcement. It'll probably turn out to be the best sales day in recent Hostess history. Of course, if all those people now claiming their love of Twinkies had actually bought them in the last few years, Hostess wouldn't be bankrupt.

I'm one of those who hasn't bought Hostess products for a long time, but whenever I'm in New York, I always make it a point to get a product made by one of their subsidiaries, the Drake's Coffee Cake.  Along with the individually-wrapped-in-foil Yodels and Ring Dings (which Hostess ripped off to make Ho Hos and Ding Dongs), they're a regional favorite in the northeast that we can't get in St. Louis. I hope Drake's survives post-Hostess. I also mourn the loss of those chocolate cupcakes with the swirl on top, which I knew had never been touched by human hands until they stuck to mine.

In 1988, when Hostess introduced Strawberry Twinkies, they let me do a promotion where I gave a thousand of them to one listener. If there are any left a quarter-century later, I bet they taste just as horrible as they did originally.