A private business investor and an equity firm have purchased Hostess Bakery. It's not clear from this article and others I've seen if it will be the father or the son running the new! improved! Hostess Bakery, but I'm pretty sure that the equity firm is just supplying part of the $410 million needed to buy Hostess.
While the one has some experience in running a brewery (Pabst Brewing Company), as far as I can find, neither has any experience in bakeries.
I know, I know, people will say a business is a business, you move product from factory to store as efficiently as possible using the minimal labor and the consumers will just eat it up! You don't need to know about baking to run a bakery. And I suppose brewing is close enough to baking that running one should make running the other a piece of cake, eh?
I guess we'll be having Snoop Dogg and Will Ferrell performing in commercials for Twinkies...
What saddens me is that they were the only bidders, and after all the hype about Hostess having a bidding war for their product. I was kind of expecting Bimbo to win that bidding war, only Bimbo didn't bid at all.
I wonder if the Metropouloses are surprised their minimum bid was the only bid?
And how will this lengthy delay play out for Twinkies, when other bakeries such as Little Debbie have rushed to market their "cloud cakes" in place of Twinkies? Will the bakery keep its iconic name of "Hostess", and will Twinkies really remain Twinkies?
These are questions we'll learn the answer to in the coming months. The Metropouloses have said they hope to have product on the shelves by this summer, so the answers aren't too far away.