Hostess Expands Emporia Bakery, Closes Schiller Park

Sept. 8, 2014
Historic home of Twinkies to close in October.

Hostess Brands in July cut the ribbon on a $30 million expansion at its Emporia, Kan., bakery, the Emporia Chamber of Commerce announced. The Hostess/Dolly Madison plant was closed when new investors bought Hostess assets in a bankruptcy sale in April 2013, but within weeks reopened it.

Additions include a baking line, distribution center and 36,000-sq.-ft. warehouse. A new bakery line can produce 1.6 million Twinkies per day. The company plans to invest an additional $20 million in the facility. 

Hostess Brands said in September it will close its Schiller Park bakery, in suburban Chicago, where Twinkies were produced for 84 years. Twinkies were invented in the Chicago area in 1930. The Chicago Tribune reported union officials were notified of the closure on the same day they were set to start negotiating a new labor contract.

The plant was reopened when Apollo Global Management and C. Dean Metropoulos & Co. bought some assets of the former Hostess Brands company, which had liquidated. Although Schiller Park and other plants had been unionized, workers were hired back by the new Hostess Brands without a union. About 280 of the workers had voted to unionize in May.

Sponsored Recommendations

Revolutionizing Healthcare: The Impact of Digitalization in Biopharma Innovation

Biopharma enables an entirely new level of innovation that’s simply not possible in conventional drug development. It’s an approach that can fundamentally change the way healthcare...

Navigating the Automotive Industry's Electric Future

The automotive industry is at a turning point. Bloomberg estimates that by 2040, 54% of new vehicle sales will be electric. And by 2030, we’re looking at 100% of passenger vehicles...

Unified Process Control Brings Operational Clarity

Inland Empire Utilities Agency replaces its SCADA enterprise system with the PlantPAx Distributed Control System and reduces complexity for operators

PlantPAx DCS Improves Operational Reliability

KC Water calls on R.E. Pedrotti to replace obsolete wastewater SCADA solution with a unified Modern Distributed Control System (DCS).