Wherein The Author Celebrates The Twinkie

I bought a box of Twinkies. I did. Yes, I am still a 9-year-old boy when I get sent to the grocery store. Especially when I am hungry. Which we are always urged to not do. But all of these technicalities are not important. What is important is that I have a box of Twinkies. Is there a snack that is as American (or as maligned) as the Hostess Twinkie?

I once worked with a guy who had the theory that there was not a living soul who does not like donuts. He added an asterisk – there are lots of people who won’t eat them for lots of reasons, but none of those reasons is a simple “I just don’t like them.” I think we could apply that same sweeping generalization to the humble Twinkee.

Although the lineage of Hostess snack cakes is a bit convoluted, it appears that they were born in Indianapolis, Indiana by the Taggart Baking Company, which had also introduced the world to Wonder Bread. Taggart introduced a chocolate cupcake in 1919, which stakes a claim to being the first commercially offered snack cake in the U.S. The makers of Tasty Kake dispute this claim and, because I have ties to both Philadelphia and Indianapolis, I will not back a horse in that race. And it really doesn’t matter because Taggart was bought lock, stock and cupcake by a New York baking concern which changed its name around that time to Continental Baking Company.

The ad above makes it clear that by the late 1920’s, the focus had shifted to selling ready-made cakes to busy housewives. In addition to the cupcakes, offerings included iced layer cakes and what Hostess called “our famous Silver Bar” – a vanilla loaf cake with vanilla icing. The name of “Hostess” makes a lot more sense to me now, given that it came from a time before kids became the company’s primary sales target.

Um, let’s get back to the Twinkie. It seems that in 1930, a fellow named Jimmy Dewar was the manager of Continental’s operations in the Chicago area. The company made a line of strawberry shortcakes that used a cream filling, and Dewar decided that the machine that put the cream filling in the shortcakes sat idle for too much of the time. His elegant solution was a little sponge cake with filling that could be sold two for a nickel. When asked for a name, Dewar remembered seeing an ad for “Twinkle Toe Shoes” and decided that Twinkie would be a great name. He turned out to be right.

But up to this time, neither the Hostess Cupcake nor the Twinkie was what snack lovers would recognize today. The cupcakes lacked the cream filling and the little looping swirl on the icing, and the Twinkie was filled with – wait for it – a banana-flavored cream. It was only when bananas were rationed during WWII that Hostess substituted vanilla cream for the banana variety, and the modern Twinkie was born. It’s Cupcake sibling would have to wait until 1950 before it got the cream and the swirl that has marked the Hostess Cupcake ever since. Oh wait – according to the ads and the packaging materials, it is not “cream filling” but “creamed filling”. [Begin sarcastic font] Could it be that there is no actual cream used in the filling of a Twinkie? [End sarcastic font]

Was there ever a product more perfectly timed to take advantage of the postwar baby boom? The Twinkie and the 1950’s were simply made for each other. Let’s take a poll – is there a single boomer kid anywhere in America who did not get a 2-pack of Twinkies packed in a lunch for school at least once? (The author pauses to survey the readership). Of course there isn’t!

I will confess that the Twinkie was always in 4th place in my ranking of Hostess snack cakes. I was a Cupcake kid through and through, because – chocolate. Which was what brought the Ding Dong and the Ho Ho up past the Twinkie in my personal ranking. Also a 2-pack of Cupcakes weighed more than a 2-pack of Twinkies, and I was all about the value. So I happily (if only occasionally) consumed my preferred Hostess treats, though I would easily cross over to Team Twinkie when one was offered to me (even if I found the advertising mascot “Twinkie The Kid” to be irritating). And so I took the Twinkie for granted as something that would always be there. Until one day it wasn’t.

Continental Baking was purchased by the conglomerate ITT in the 1960’s and ITT was, in turn, gobbled up by Interstate Bakeries Corporation (IBC) in 1995. That company struggled with external headwinds (like that whole healthy eating thing that turned out to be more than a fad) and internal factors like a stormy relationship with its union workers that led to a 2012 strike. That strike turned out to be the straw that broke the Twinkie’s back, and the company closed and began liquidating assets.

Fortunately, you can’t keep a good Twinkie down. “New Hostess Brands” was formed by a private equity company, which bought the Twinkie and other assets of “old” Hostess, and the iconic snack cakes were re-introduced to the wonderment of the young-at-heart everywhere in 2013. In July of 2023, Hostess Brands was taken over by the J. M. Smucker Company.

I will confess that I lacked some enthusiasm for the Twinkie after it was widely reported that the re-introduced Twinkie was smaller than the old one. This (as so much in the news) turned out to be not completely true. The Twinkie did indeed shrink from 42.5 grams and 150 calories per cake to 38.5 grams and 135 calories. However, it appears that this shrinkage was done by IBC in the months leading up to the 2012 bankruptcy in an effort to keep the company afloat, and not by the new owners. In any case, a decade or more has passed and I decided to come to terms with the slightly shrunken Twinkie. Like I needed that extra 15 calories anyway. At least there was a trade-off for the reduced size – an increase in the Twinkie’s shelf life (also by the prior company) to a whopping 45 days. Officially. The unofficial shelf life of a Twinkie? Who knows.

Shelf life was never an issue for me because Twinkies are among the products of a Hostess baking plant that has been on Shadeland Avenue in Indianapolis since 1957 (and which replaced the old Taggart baking plant downtown). Unfortunately, we recently learned that Smucker will “optimizing its resources”, which is biz-speak for closing our local Twinkie source in early 2026.

So, after this long digression into the history of the Twinkie, how do they taste now? After a deliberative process that has seen me consume one at a time (okay, sometimes two), I have concluded that the Twinkie tastes just as good as it always did. I have also concluded that I still probably like the Hostess Cupcake better, for the same reasons I always did. My only complaint with the modern Twinkie is in its packaging. I miss the little piece of white cardboard with the glossy finish that served as a little plate over which to eat your twin Twinkies, especially because of that little bit of sponge cake that could be liberated from the surface of the card and licked from your finger. I always though of it as the dessert following a dessert.

But even I will have to admit that the Twinkie has one thing that the Hostess Cupcake never had – genuine star power. Time Magazine agreed, when it ranked the Twinkie in first place in a list of 10 iconic American junk foods. The term “cupcake” can be pretty generic, but everyone knows exactly what a Twinkie is, because there is only one. It is not healthy in the least, and not even I would binge on them regularly, but the classic Twinkie remains the kind of treat that brings a smile to my face. I’m glad its back and I will try to appreciate it more this time around.

47 thoughts on “Wherein The Author Celebrates The Twinkie”

  2. Wow, I did not know the Twinkie went away for a brief while. That just shows how many I eat.

    This has me thinking of my childhood. We had Twinkies on rare occasion (my father once fussed about how he didn’t even like saying the word “Twinkie” let alone having them in his house) but I did enjoy them. If I remember correctly, my mother would buy them periodically and place them strategically in the pantry where my sister and I could find them but my father would not.

    I won’t burden you with the story about when he did not know that chocolate cupcake he was eating was called a Ding-Dong and my then four year-old sister asking about it…

    Here’s one you might like…several years ago Mrs. Jason got a Twinkie pan for Christmas. She is now equipped to make Twinkies at home – and they are mighty good!

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    • Home made Twinkies would be a treat. But I wonder if Mrs. Jason can duplicate that “creamed” filling. Probably nobody without a home chemistry lab can.

      I love the story about stashing the Twinkies away from your dad. In my house, the only reason to hide them from my father would have been because he might eat them first. Although having been born and bred in the Philadelphia area, he was a TastyKake guy.

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  3. I don’t remember when I stopped liking Twinkies. I do remember being a “casualty” of Hostess marketing when I was in 1st-3rd grade school, mid-80s or so… I begged my mom to buy Twinkies, et al. We got them occasionally, but often got “inferior” substitute products instead.

    But at some point, I just lost interest.

    (You know, my dad had made doughnuts on and off throughout my childhood, and I did eat a lot of those — they often came home with him. It’s possible my tastes were skewed toward a more quality product earlier than most…)

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    • I will also confess that it had been quite awhile since I had bought any Hostess products. Usually, I refuse to pay the convenience tax of buying a single pack at a gas station or from a vending machine, and I have been reluctant to make the commitment to a box of 10 or more that present themselves at SamsCost.

      A father who made donuts – now that would have been a great childhood!!

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  4. The Twinkie was my favorite Hostess snack cake as a kid although I readily ate them all. I took them to school in my lunch pail and to work in my lunch bags. But I did stop eating them (I am sure they would still taste good to me) and we tried to keep the Hostess products from our own kids. Of course, the got plenty of them. Sympathetic relatives from both side of our family would shower the boys with Hostess cakes for Christmas. Unlike me, they probably still eat them at their ages of 45-50. We still have a single pack Twinkie from 1985 as part an experiment on the old “shelf life” joke. Our Twinkie has been in 100 degree weather in a moving van in Kansas and now resides in a refrigerator with a Do Not Eat sign wrapped around the package. It looks the same but is as hard as a rock. Our family friend Bob drove a Hostess delivery van for a living. I am sure he is still sick of hearing all the same old jokes about that.

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    • It is funny how much more careful we were about what our children ate than our parents were. But then, here we all so many years later, having eaten way too many Twinkies and doing just fine.

      The Twinkie shelf life debate is an interesting rabbit hole – it seems that their shelf life is not, in fact, indefinite in the way some like to say. “Creamed” does not last forever, apparently.

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  5. When we are kids, we tried them all: Sno-balls, the chocolate cupcake, Twinkies, etc., etc. I will admit that as a kid, I liked the chocolate cupcake best (as you say, because…chocolate). But, the adult me prefers the Twinkie. Something to do with a more subtle flavor and I always liked angel food cake and the like. Two Packs? Ya gotta be kiddin’. Been inside a gas station lately? All your flavorful pals are there in twin packs. Don’t trip over the display trying to get out of the store! That’s how “adjacent” they are to egress! I probably have a Twinkie about 3-4 times a year. In the pantheon of food snacks bad for you, the Twinkie is hardly anywhere near the top.

    I will say, I think there is a subtle flavor difference between pre-union closing and post reestablishment. Enough to not eat them? Nope! Still hits the spot. Anyone that’s lived in more of a hipster neighborhood with a food and deli co-op, will attest to the fact that the Twinkie has been the whipping boy of the food dilettante for years! Our local had an unpackaged Twinkie on the deli counter for years, with a little card saying how long it had been there without growing mold or getting particularly hard. A blanket condemnation of additives. Did it stop me from eating a Twinkie occasionally? Nope…

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    • You make me think about how foods like the Twinkie were once snack foods consumed by all classes of people, but are now kind of divisive, with some people enjoying them (if only occasionally) while others treat them as pariahs.

      I came across an interesting factoid about the Sno Ball – at its core is an upside down Hostess Cupcake, which is then coated in the marshmallow and coconut. I think the Sno Ball was my least favorite Hostess snack, one that I would avoid unless there were no alternatives.

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  6. i too will now have to go buy some twinkies. I also loved that smear of cake that stayed on the cardboard. Though i had it as an appetizer rather than dessert.

    have a nice day

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  7. Oh I love this topic. Friends of ours’ father was a driver for Hostess way back in the day. They had a cabin on the Illinois river they called ‘The Twinkie Inn’.

    A couple other stories come to mind – The “Twinkie Defense”. Back in 1978 a guy named Don White assassinated the Mayor of San Francisco and another person, stating that he was depressed, and as a result, ate many Twinkies. Upon which, the sugar rush impaired his mental stability, causing him to act irrationally. It may have partially worked, he was convicted of manslaughter instead of murder and only sentenced to slightly over 7 years..

    Secondly, in a high school project, Bill S. Preston Esquire and Ted Theodore Logan brought Genghis Khan to San Dimas mall and introduced him to Twinkies, upon which he totally ravaged Oshman’s Sporting Goods store.

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    • A law school roommate’s father had retired from Continental Baking and was still active with them as a consultant. He sent the best “care packages” of any of the parents of we poor law students!

      I had forgotten about the Twinkie Defense to the murder charge until I was researching this, but left it out in order to keep under 3000 words. 🙂

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  8. It has been a long time since I’ve had a Twinkie. I did – and do – love the creamy filling. At a local Renaissance Faire, a stand was selling fried Twinkies. Let’s just say that Twinkies are best enjoyed in their “natural” state!

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  10. An interesting history of the company and the origins of the name. I didn’t get them very often in my school lunch bag as my mother made her own cakes, but when I did, it certainly made my day. I prefer the cupcakes too for the chocolate. I have a craving now……so I’ll have to check at our grocery store when I go next to see if they are available here. I’m still mourning Stouffer’s pulling out.

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  12. I haven’t had Twinkies in years, but I was a teenager when I first tried them, not packed in my lunch, but at the lunch counter at school. I always brown bagged it, but in junior high, every Monday it was Sloppy Joe Day. We never had Sloppy Joes at home, so my parents always let me have a hot lunch every Monday. Sloppy Joes, corn, potato chips and Twinkies for dessert. My favorite Hostess treat when I got older was Snowballs, especially the seasonal ones. Hostess always made bright green Snowballs around St. Paddy’s Day and orange Snowballs for Halloween. I only had the seasonal ones – the rest of the time they were white or pink (if memory serves me right). I think I’d find all that marshmallow a little sweet now. Thanks for the history of Twinkies. I have heard they have a very long shelf life though Hostess will not admit it. 🙂

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    • Ooh, your Monday lunch actually sounds quite good to adult me!

      I wonder if anyone has kept track of all the seasonal or limited edition variations on Hostess cakes. I’ll bet someone has.

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      • As I was typing that comment, it made me want to have that lunch too. It was the most-popular of all the hot lunches offered.

        That would be interesting to research those special holiday offerings by Hostess. I think you should wow us with those facts and figures JP. I don’t think they touched the Twinkies after changing them from banana creme to vanilla creme, but those Snowballs for sure got a little pizazz for the holiday seasons.

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  14. Well geeze, now I’m jonesing for a Twinkie…and will have to get one (or two) before the weekend is out.

    In college, I got all caught up in the “they last indefinitely” thing and had a package of two that I probably had for 5 or 6 years. “Someone” threw it out during one of the several household moves that occurred prior to 20 years ago (we’ve lived in the same house for the past 20 years), otherwise I’m sure i’d still have it.

    I have to admit fascination with the large variety of “special, limited edition” Twinkies that nowadays turn up regularly in my local supermarket. Mostly these specials just involve different colored cake and cream (currently there are the “spooky” ones with chocolate cake and regular white cream (which seems pretty lazy, if not racist, to just declare that chocolate cake is “spooky”). I think in previous years there have been Halloween ones with orange cake and/or cream, and once GREEN cake and/or cream. That’s pretty creative. The red-white-and-blue speckled ones as “patriotic” Twinkies around the 4th are kinda neat. Among the weirdest ones was a chocolate cake and peanut butter cream variety that seemed to have something to do with country music (I didn’t get that one at all). And yes, I have nearly all of these photographed…because of course I do.

    Oh, and the box photo from the (I think) late 1960s? Who ever served Twinkies cut open like that? What did they do with the pieces they cut off? Then again, the 1960s were rife with ideas about how to take prepared foods and turn them into faux homemade foods. This reminds me of Ritz Cracker Apple Pie (I actually made one of those once…it weighed about 3 times what a real apple pie weighed, but darn if it didn’t sort of taste like an apple pie)…and of course of the wedding cake made entirely out of a massive number of Twinkies. I recall suggesting that for my own wedding a long long time ago. Come to think of it, it may not have been long after that when my “it lasts forever” Twinkie disappeared.

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    • I have never tried the Ritz apple pie, but now you have me craving one. Yes, those recipes that the food companies used to promote would make a great blog post. For every green bean casserole that hit the big time we probably got 600 bad concoctions using Spam or lime Jello.

      I will admit to being a curmudgeon about the “special” editions of things like Twinkies. When I want a Twinkie I want a Twinkie. If I wanted something with chocolate and peanut butter, it would be something by Reese’s.

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  19. I’m glad to learn the “creamy filling” version of the Twinkie tastes just as good as the “creamed filled”. I LOL’d on “The Sweetest Comeback in the History of Ever” advert, so I hope someone picked up a sizable paycheck for that clever line. I also cringed at the older advert with the cartoonish woman looking more scary than sexy. But most important, you brought back all the little details that made the Twinkie so unique, and some important trivia (like the origin of the name). I haven’t had a pack in decades but I remember the taste like it was yesterday. And I would’ve missed the cardboard “plate” as well.

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  20. Maybe the best milkshake I have ever had was a Twinkie Milkshake at the Burger Bar in Las Vegas. It came in a large traditional Milkshake glass and included a whole Twinkie in each glass! Each strawfull or spoonfull an ice creamy Twinkie dream.

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