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.
