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Weird History Food is getting snacky with the History of Hostess. Maker of some of our favorite cakes and snacks, including Twinkies, Ding Dongs, Cup Cakes, and Ho Ho's, Hostess has been the mainstay of America's cupboards for decades. But where did Hostess begin? Well, get ready for a sugar high, we're going unwrap Hostess' long, sweet, and sometimes bitter, history.
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0:00
Nothing's more American than baseball and the Hostess Twinkie
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except maybe Mark McGuire belting a Twinkie 400 feet out of Bush Stadium
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And for the past 100 years, Hostess has been hitting home run after home run
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with iconic snacks like cupcakes, snowballs, ding-dongs, and ho-hos, until they almost struck out for good
0:20
Today, we're putting the icing on the history of Hostess. Okay, time to see how many donuts we can eat before the end of this video
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The hostess story begins with a father-son baking team at the turn of the 19th century
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In the late 1800s, Hugh Ward and his son Robert moved from New York City to what was then called Allegheny City
0:44
a municipality that would eventually be annexed by the ever-growing Pittsburgh. Some of Pittsburgh's other famous annexations include ketchup and Terry Bradshaw's hair
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Back in New York, Hugh and his own father had run a small bakery on Broom Street
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Eager to keep the family trade alive, Hugh and Robert opened up an all-new operation in Pennsylvania
1:05
Robert grew up immersed in baking. And once he got a little bit older, he started yet another bakery just across the Allegheny River
1:13
This third business, the Ward Bread Company, would slowly grow into the largest single bakery in America by the 1900s
1:21
Turns out getting in on the ground floor of bread was a good move for the Wards
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With loads of cash in hand, Robert decided to turn the whole ship around
1:29
and head back to New York, the bacon state. But this time, he was able to build two huge factories right from the jump
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one in the Bronx, the other in Brooklyn, for a cool $2 million in construction costs
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That's over $60 million in today's money. In other words, Robert Ward was planning to do a s***load of baking
1:48
Yeah, boy. These two state-of-the-art facilities opened up in 1911 and were capable of turning out more than 800,000 loaves of bread each and every day
1:58
Their most famous product soon became Ward's Tip Top Bread, which is a less thrilling lunchbox treat than a Twinkie
2:05
But you gotta start somewhere. The company trucked along over the following decade
2:09
with Robert's son William taking over operations in 1921. By 1925, William had changed the company's name to Continental Baking Company
2:17
and had bought up three other bread-making competitors, including Wonder Bread. But like many short-sighted sandwich artists
2:25
they were still stuck on bread when the world of sugary cakes was right in front of their eyes
2:30
Luckily, around this time, the company began producing its first-ever cupcakes. Though this early version of the snack lacked both the creamy center and the signature white squiggle of frosting on today's cupcake
2:41
it helped to launch an all-new brand of pre-packaged desserts for continental baking
2:47
They called the brand Hostess, and the world would never be the same
2:54
In 1920 James A Dewar began his career with Continental Baking Company selling pound cakes out of a horse carriage which is one of the most 1920 professions you could possibly have By 1930 he climbed the corporate ladder
3:07
into a plant manager position at Continental's Chicago-based Hostess Bakery. Among the bakery's best-selling products
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were their strawberry shortcakes. But back then, fruits and vegetables were only available during certain times of the year
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because there really wasn't a way to transport fresh produce across long distances
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and have it still be, well, fresh. Consequently, Hostess was only able to produce
3:28
strawberry shortcakes for a few months each year. This should have been enough to inspire any human
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to invent interstates and refrigerated trucks, but Dewar had a different and much more practical idea
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What if, during the off-season, they filled their strawberry shortcakes with a simple sugar cream
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Creamy! After seeing a visually striking advertisement for Twinkle Toe Shoes, he decided to adapt that branding for his new desserts
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and dubbed the Frankensteined new treats Twinkies. At the low, low cost of two for five cents
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they were an instant success with Depression-era families. If only everyone had been able to invest in Twinkies
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Black Tuesday may have been avoided. Over the next half century, Dewar's product would grow into a cultural phenomenon
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For instance, the 1974 song The Ballad of the Junk Food Junkie
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which features a man who secretly eats Twinkies in the dark of night, like every single one of us has done at one point in our lives
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spent 15 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. Likewise, Archie Bunker of the 1970s sitcom
4:27
All in the Family loved Twinkies. And I was just about to open up my lunchbox
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By the way, there wasn't no Twinkie in with the sandwiches today. Eh, maybe not the most ringing endorsement
4:38
but it was a popular show. However, the runaway success of the Twinkie
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almost backfired on Hostess in 1978 after disgruntled former San Francisco City Supervisor
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Dan White assassinated Mayor George Moscone and city supervisor Harvey Milk. When White stood trial the following year
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he claimed he wasn't in his right mind at the time of the crime because he was in the midst of a sugar-fueled mania
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brought on by binge-eating Twinkies and Coke. The media dubbed it the Twinkie Defense
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And despite sounding like an excuse you would have concocted at age five to explain why you bit Jimmy Donaldson
5:11
the jury miraculously bought it. White's so-called Twinkie Defense saved him from first-degree murder charges
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and landed him only seven years in prison for manslaughter. But, like most things we love that aren't good for us, Twinkies carried on
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In 1984, the Twinkie was featured prominently in Ghostbusters, in a memorable scene comparing the spongy yellow snack cake to an impending paranormal cataclysm
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That's a big Twinkie. When Dewar passed away the following year at age 84
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he'd allegedly consumed two whole packs of Twinkies each week throughout his life
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Assuming we're talking twin packs, That's well over 10,000 Twinkies between their invention in 1930 and Dewar's final ride on the Twinkie train in 1985
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That enough cream filling to fill several wading pools and convince everyone to leave your 4th of July barbecue early As the post years wore on Hostess was on the lookout for their next home run
6:07
And in 1940, they found just the thing, the donut, a tiny donut that could be shipped to stores across America
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and that were, due to their tiny size, a bit more affordable for cash-strapped Americans
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They also have the notable advantage of being smaller than a standard donut, which means you can eat more of them faster
6:24
Seven years later, after World War II's sugar rationing came to an end, Hostess came out with a product that made full use of the lifted sugar restrictions, the ever-luxurious Snowball
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Snowballs are marshmallow-covered cupcakes coated in coconut flakes, making them the perfect treat for sugar-starved post-war Americans and anyone who really likes coconut
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A year later, in 1948, a man by the name of D.R. Doc Rice was put in charge of revamping Hostess' 30-year-old cupcakes
6:54
Once again, the company wanted to make full use of their newly unlimited sugar supply
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And so Doc sweetened up the cake mix and the chocolate icing, pumped the cupcakes full of cream filling
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and drew a sweet squiggly line across the top of each one, like they're wearing little sneakers
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And voila! The modern Hustus cupcake was born and released to the wider public in 1950
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The company then took this cream-filled idea and applied it to snowballs
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which is like adding rockets to a skateboard. You just made a cool thing even cooler
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From there, they went hog wild with cream filling, as if they were trying to make enough to produce the giant Twinkie from Ghostbusters lore
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1961 saw the release of the chocolatey, cream-filled Suzy Q, while 1967 saw the release of both the Ho-Ho and the Ding Dong
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Stuffed with enough chocolate and cream to drown the Keebler elves in their hollow baking tree
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And just three years after that, Hostess released yet another cream-filled snack, the Zinger, which comes in devil's food, vanilla, and raspberry
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As Hostess' product line grew even larger, so too did their reliance on mascots and media tie-ins
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You can't sell food to kids without putting eyes on it and giving it a name
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It's the law. Of their original characters, arguably the most famous is Twinkie the Kid
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the little cowboy-looking sponge cake who may have grown up to become a doctor someday
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if we could have just stopped eating him. Then there's Captain Cupcake, who looks like a snack Ringo hallucinated on the yellow submarine
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Happy Ho Ho, who is, uh, Robin Hood, maybe? Peter Pan? Whatever he is, they did a good job of making us want to bite his head off immediately
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Chief Big Wheels, who, uh, yeah, we can just leave that one in the past
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They also had King Ding Dong, a genial monarch loved by his people until he was slain in a war for succession in 1457
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Chauncey Chocodile, who looks like he gives free airboat rides to anyone who can answer how many number one singles Willie Nelson has
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and Fruit Pie the Magician, who actually kind of looks more like a taco
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Maybe that's the magic trick. All of these lovable characters were used on packaging and in television commercials to hook the children of the 1960s 70s and 80s Each snack these mascots represented has likewise had many variations over the years
9:07
The cupcake alone can today be found in orange, red velvet, and iced lemon
9:12
but has seen an additional 20 or so flavors come and go with the passing seasons
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including candy corn, pumpkin spice, and shamrock. What flavor is shamrock? All the while, Twinkies have seen more remixes
9:24
than Daft Punk. They've had peppermint, chocolate peanut butter, deep-fried banana, cotton candy, and orange creme pop, among dozens of other flavors
9:35
In 1984, Ralston Purina, the creators of both cereals and pet foods, bought Continental Baking Company for about half a billion dollars
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only to sell it to Interstate Bakeries Corporation 11 years later. Oh, hot potato. Or would that be hot Twinkie
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It would indeed be Hot Twinkie, as Twinkies were involved in yet another legal scandal in 1986
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71-year-old Minneapolis City Council candidate George L. Belair was accused of using Twinkies and Ho-Ho's to bribe senators and election officials
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Belair was indicted and arrested for the incident, but he pled not guilty, claiming that his handing out of hostess snacks was simply a nice gesture and was in no way meant to influence the way anyone voted
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Belair successfully got the charges dismissed, narrowly avoiding a potential $700 fine and three whole months in prison
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After struggling for years, IBC filed for bankruptcy and attempted to rebrand, changing their name to Hostess Brands in 2009
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But in 2012, as the world braced for a Roland-Emerick apocalypse, Hostess Brands filed for bankruptcy again
10:42
In the months that followed, Twinkies, Ho-Hos, Ding Dongs, and more vanished without a trace
10:47
Not even Emmerich could have predicted that disaster. In the aftermath of the great Twinkie collapse, the snack cake portion of Hostess brands was
10:57
sold to Apollo Global Management and C. Dean Metropolis and Company for $410 million
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And less than a year after going off the market, Hostess products slowly made their triumphant
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return to store shelves, like snowballs finally emerging from their hiding place in your sock drawer
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Over the three years that followed, the brand was whipped into shape like a tub of Twinkie filling and built back to its former glory
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And on September 11, 2023, Smuckers revealed it was buying Hostess for $5.6 billion
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Now that is a big Twinkie. Hostess continues to sell all of their classic snacks, including honey buns, coffee cakes, fruit pies, and mini muffins
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What's more, the company pumps out over 1 million Twinkies every single day
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producing about 400 million Twinkies each and every year. That's more than the total population of the US
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But despite the urban legend that all of us have heard, Twinkies will not survive a nuclear war
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They can't even survive all that long on the shelf, with an expiration date just 65 days from the point of being baked
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No wonder Woody Harrelson was so desperate
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