Like a phoenix, Hostess Brands seems to keep coming back to life, as Post Foods has just joined a group of bidders looking to grab it for as much as $2 billion, according to a report in the New York Post.
Mexico's Grupo Bimbo, Flowers Foods and Switzerland's Aryzta are also making nonbinding bids for Hostess to Apollo Global Management (APO) and billionaire investor C. Dean Metropoulos, which, according to earlier reports, has been preparing the snack cake maker for sale for at least a year. All of the bidders submitted offers, as have a few private equity firms said to be interested in Hostess, which two years ago, was purchased by Apollo Global and Metropoulos for $410 million.
At one time, the Kansas City-based maker of Twinkies, cupcakes, Ho Hos, Donettes and other treats brought in revenues of just less than $1 billion before it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2012. Its current revenues are nearly half of what they used to be, but those numbers could soar much higher with a new owner in the picture, the New York Post report indicates.
Hostess today has approximately 1,000 employees and five production facilities versus the 9,000 employees and 14 plants it had before its business reorganization, and it uses contract delivery drivers less frequently than the old company did (the new owners incidentally reformulated the Twinkies recipe so that the snack cakes have a longer shelf life without going stale).
