A sponge cake, a banana filling and a wartime switch.

Hostess is an American sweet-baked-snacks brand whose product line includes Twinkies, CupCakes, Ding Dongs, HoHos, Zingers and Donettes. Its signature product is older than the company that owns the name today. English Wikipedia says Twinkies were introduced in 1930 by the Canadian-born baker James “Jimmy” Dewar for the Continental Baking Company in Schiller Park, Illinois, and that Dewar devised the cake to use machines for cream-filled strawberry shortcakes that sat idle when strawberries were out of season. Wikipedia says Dewar said he took the name from a billboard in St. Louis for “Twinkle Toe Shoes”.

The filling has changed with history. Writing for CBS MoneyWatch on 25 March 2011, Melanie Warner said that when Twinkies launched in the 1930s they were made with a banana cream filling, and that after bananas were rationed during the Second World War, the company, then called Continental Baking Company, switched to a vanilla cream filling and never switched back for the core product. Wikipedia describes the Twinkie, in the words printed on its packaging, as “golden sponge cake with a creamy filling”.

The Hostess name passed through several corporate owners before 2012. Wikipedia’s article on Hostess Brands says the original company, later known as Old HB, was the business formerly called Interstate Bakeries. On 16 November 2012 that company announced it was winding down operations and asked the bankruptcy court for permission to sell its assets, Wikipedia says, after filing for Chapter 11 protection in January 2012.

A new company, a return in 2013 and a Smucker deal.

The current Hostess Brands company dates from June 2013. Wikipedia says it began as a venture by the investment firms Apollo Global Management and C. Dean Metropoulos and Company, which bought certain cake assets of Old HB and took on its name, branding and much of its product line. Those assets, Wikipedia says, included bakeries in Columbus, Georgia; Emporia, Kansas; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Schiller Park, Illinois, the last of which closed in October 2014.

The cakes came back that summer. NPR reported on 5 July 2016 that Hostess Twinkies went back on store shelves in July 2013, and that the company fired up its ovens again that year at bakeries such as the one in Emporia. An Associated Press report carried by USA Today on 16 July 2013 said the new boxes reaching shelves listed a smaller cake than before, and quoted a Hostess spokeswoman, Hannah Arnold, who said the size change had been made in mid-2012 by the predecessor company. In the same 2016 report, NPR said Hostess had announced a deal with Gores Holdings that would take its stock public; Wikipedia says Gores Holdings then renamed itself Hostess Brands, Inc. and changed its ticker symbol to TWNK, after the Twinkie.

The company grew through brand purchases. Wikipedia says Hostess acquired Superior Cake Products on 14 June 2016 and announced on 1 August 2019 that it was selling that business to Sara Lee Frozen Bakery. Wikipedia also says the company named Andy Callahan as chief executive from May 2018. It says Hostess bought the Big Texas and Cloverhill Bakery brands in February 2018 and the Canadian cookie maker Voortman in a deal that closed in January 2020. The current owner arrived three years later. In a release dated 7 November 2023, The J. M. Smucker Co. of Orrville, Ohio, said it had closed its acquisition of Hostess Brands, which it had agreed to on 11 September 2023. Smucker said the deal included the Hostess sweet baked snacks, among them Donettes, Twinkies, CupCakes, Ding Dongs, Zingers and HoHos, the Voortman cookie brand, and manufacturing sites in Emporia, Kansas; Burlington, Ontario; Chicago, Illinois; Columbus, Georgia; Indianapolis, Indiana; and Arkadelphia, Arkansas, which it said was then under construction. Announcing the closing, the company’s chair and chief executive, Mark Smucker, said, “We are excited to formally welcome Hostess Brands.” The J. M. Smucker Co. has owned Hostess since November 2023.

Design and documentation.

The guides in this group look at American snack cakes: small cakes, pies, rolls and buns baked in quantity, sealed in printed wrappers and sold from supermarket shelves, gas-station and convenience-store racks and lunchbox-sized multipacks. Their identity rarely sits in the cake itself, which often looks much the same from one bakery to the next. It sits in the packaging, the name and the characters that travel with them.

Most of the visible design work happens on a thin cellophane or film wrapper that has to carry a name, a flavour and a picture in very little space, and then on the carton that groups several wrapped cakes together. Mascots, cartoon figures and named characters appear often in this category, and a single brand can pass through several bakeries and owners while keeping the same name on the pack.

Each guide follows the same approach: who started the name, who has owned it since, and how its wrappers, logos and advertising have changed over time, using dated independent sources where they exist and marking plainly what rests only on a company’s own account.

Banana revivals, licensees abroad and a ticker symbol.

The CBS MoneyWatch piece of 2011 described Hostess Brands re-introducing its “original” banana cream Twinkies, with a picture of a ripe banana on the package, and said the banana version had last been seen in 2007. Wikipedia says limited editions have followed, including Chocolate Cake Twinkies in April 2017, and that a Twinkies cereal made by Post was introduced in December 2020.

Outside the United States the cake travels under other hands. Wikipedia says Grupo Bimbo’s Vachon Bakery holds the Canadian rights to Twinkies and makes them at a bakery in Montreal; that Twinkies are sold in Mexico as Submarinos by Marinela and as Tuinky by Wonder, both Bimbo companies; and that in Egypt they are produced by Edita. In the United States, Wikipedia says, Twinkies are made in Emporia, Kansas.

For a design guide, Hostess shows how a snack brand can be rebuilt around the names, colours and shapes of its products after a change of ownership, so that the cake in the box carries the continuity. Compare it with Little Debbie, another American snack-cake brand, and Smucker’s, the company whose parent has owned Hostess since 2023. For this guide we use Hostess red, deep blue, sponge gold and cream with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hostess’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.