Twinkies vs. Atkins

Good health is bad for the bakery business.
The headlines on the business section of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette testified to that reality Thursday with the announcement that the makers of Wonder Bread, Twinkies – and a few other brands such as Home Pride, Sunbeam and Dolly Madison products – had to file for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy on Wednesday.
The company called itself a “casualty of rising costs and reduced demand for carbohydrate-rich breads and pastries.”
And you thought you were just trying to cut back on your caloric intake when you cut out your daily Twinkie break. No … it was worse than that, you not only trimmed the fat around your middle with Atkins, but you trimmed the fat around the middle of the Interstate Bakeries – which in the past two years laid off 800 employees and closed several bakeries.
What were you thinking about! Twinkies are an American icon with nearly 75 years of history. We can not do without our Twinkies – not when carnival food providers have just developed calorie rich deep-fried Twinkies.
While you embraced your leaner, healthier self, Interstate Bakeries faltered and may fall. It no longer enjoys the robustness it once had. You had neglected their products, shunned the aisles filled with Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Hostess cakes. Instead you reached for an apple, shopped for boxes labeled low-carbs and embraced the protein products listed in the Atkins Diet.
Okay, so thanks to sensible eating and that daily jog, you have succeeded in your weight loss goal. Now would you kindly take a little jog around the corner to the local convenience store and help out the economy and buy a Twinkie or two? They have been part of the American way of life since Chicago bakery manager Jimmy Dewar invented them in 1930 and named the creme-filled golden snack cake after a billboard advertising the Twinkle Toe Shoe, according to the junkfoodnews.com website.
No one at Interstate Bakeries could believe so many of you would shun Twinkies – and for so long. They waited for you to come back, but you held on to your diet. Slowly the executives at IB realized they needed to do something, but it took them until February to release a low-carb product, according to Thomas Morabito, a food analyst at Longbow Research in Cleveland.
It was too late. They should have moved more quickly and figured out some way to trim the crusts off Wonder Bread and feed it to you as a low-carb product.
Okay the executives blew it, but it was your healthy diet that started the whole thing and now more than 30,000 employees working in the 54 IB bakeries and untold bread stores live under the threat of future lay-offs and closings. Although no one has planned any lay-offs, “it’s very rare in this country that anyone goes through Chapter 11 and is layoff-free,” said Tony Alvarez, head of the turn-around firm Alvarez & Marsal and the baker’s new chief executive
Leave Atkins behind, quit the South Beach and come home to the taste you remember and help all the employees of Interstate Bakeries Corp. They do not want to be embrace the Starvation Diet.
There is still time to do something. Run, do not walk, to the corner convenience store and ask for Wonder Bread by name. Grab a box of Twinkies and save their jobs!
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)


Posted

in

by

Tags: