How A Shoe Brand Is Responsible For The Twinkies Name
The cream and sponge cake snack known as a Twinkie is perhaps one of Hostess's most famous snack foods today. But while it is now just one of many in Hostess's line of goodies — which includes other treats like HoHos, Snoballs, and Honey Buns — the Twinkie was once its single, star performer.
Before Hostess became a leading snack brand company, they were just a small Illinois-based bakery operating under the name the Continental Baking Company, according to The Spruce Eats. In the 1930s, the Continental Baking Company was managed by baker and eventual Twinkies founder James Dewar, who devised the new product as a cost-saving measure in the midst of the Great Depression. Times were tough, sales were down, and Dewar was looking for a product that would entice people to buy more of his baked goods — without straining the company's tight budget. "The economy was getting tight, and the company needed to come out with another low-priced item," he explained, via the Chicago Tribune.
The name was inspired by an advertisement for Twinkle Toe Shoes
So Dewar set his mind to creating a product that would sell well on a budget. "We were already selling these little finger cakes during the strawberry season for shortcake, but the pans we baked them in sat idle except for that six-week season," Dewar explained, via the Chicago Tribune. So he decided to put those empty shortbread pans to good use, baking a golden sponge cake that he filled with banana cream filling. The end result was a cheap, yet tasty, new snack that could be sold at just two for a nickel, according to the Washington Post. Now, all Dewar needed was a catchy name for his new product.
As luck would have it, one day not long after he baked his first cream-filled sponge cake, Dewar just happened to be driving by a billboard for "Twinkle Toe Shoes," according to The Spruce Eats. The name caught his eye, so he decided to repurpose it for his own creation. Dewar simply shortened "Twinkle Toes," which was a bit of a mouthful, to just Twinkies "to make it a little zippier for the kids.'" Twinkies (both the name and the product) took off, and now — almost 100 years later — the name has never been changed.
The original Twinkies recipe changed in the 1940s
However, although the name never changed, the snack cake itself did undergo a few changes before reaching its peak. During World War II, just a few years after its invention, the country faced a nation-wide banana shortage. As a result, Hostess was forced to swap out its banana cream filling for vanilla, per Culture Trip. The vanilla flavor proved to be even more popular than the original, and that version is the one that took off.
But not all publicity about the famous Twinkie has been good publicity. Twinkies have often been criticized for their lack of nutritional value, and have even come under scrutiny for their unusually long shelf life. While the common myth that Twinkies don't ever go bad has been disproven, per NPR, there is no denying that Twinkies are not a health food. A package of two Twinkies contains 280 calories and 32 grams of sugar, per Hostess.
However, that never seemed to bother the Twinkies founder. In interviews throughout his life, Dewar defended his invention, saying "I believe in the things. I fed them to my four kids, and they feed them to my 15 grandchildren. My boy, Jimmy, played football for the Cleveland Browns. My other son, Bobby, was a quarterback for the University of Rochester. Twinkies never hurt them.” Dewar later called the Twinkie "the best darn tootin' idea I ever had," per the Chicago Tribune.