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Today, we're putting the icing on the history of Hostess
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In the late 1800s, Hugh Ward and his son Robert moved from New York City to Pittsburgh
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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
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He started yet another bakery just across the Allegheny River. This third business, the Ward Bread Company, would slowly grow into the largest single bakery in America by the 1900s
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With loads of cash in hand, Robert decided to turn the whole ship around and head back to New York
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He was able to build two huge factories right from the jump These two state-of-the-art facilities opened up in 1911
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By 1925, William had changed the company's name to Continental Baking Company
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and had bought up three other bread-making competitors, including Wonder Bread Around this time, the company began producing its first ever cupcakes
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It helped to launch an all-new brand of pre-packaged desserts for continental baking
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They called the brand Hostess, and the world would never be the same
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By 1930, because there really wasn't a way to transport fresh produce across long distances
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Hostess was only able to produce strawberry shortcakes for a few months each year
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But what if, during the off-season, they filled their strawberry shortcakes with a simple sugar cream
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At the low low cost of two for five cents Twinkies were an instant success with Depression families In 1948 a man by the name of D Doc Rice sweetened up the cake mix and the chocolate
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icing, pumped the cupcakes full of cream filling, and drew a sweet squiggly line across the
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top of each one. And voila! The modern Hustus cupcake was born and released to the wider public in 1950
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From there, they went hog wild with cream filling. 1961 saw the release of the Suzy Q
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While 1967 saw the release of both the Ho-Ho and the Ding Dong
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In 1984, Ralston Purina 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 IBC filed for bankruptcy and attempted to rebrand
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Changing their name to Hostess Brands in 2009 But in 2012, Hostess Brands filed for bankruptcy again
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In the months that followed, Twinkies, Ho-Hos, Ding Dongs, and more vanished without a trace
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In the aftermath of the Great Twinkie Collapse, the snack cake portion of Hostess Brands was sold to Apollo Global Management and C. Dean Metropolis & Company for $410 million
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And less than a year after going off the market, Hostess products slowly made their triumphant return to store shelves
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And on September 11th, 2023, Smuckers revealed it was buying Hostess for $5.6 billion
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The company pumps out over 1 million Twinkies every single day, producing about 400 million Twinkies each and every year
