After an eight-month hiatus (or "eternity" for rabid snack lovers) Twinkies return to store shelves on Monday (despite Walmart jumping the gun by a few days).
Snack lovers around the nation are cheering and and in Chicagoland, where the treats were first invented in 1931, ovens at the formerly Hostess-owned Schiller Park bakery are fired up and ready to turn out the torpedo-shaped snacks.
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The Twinkie's Sweet Comeback
Despite its familiar look, however, there are changes in the 2.0 version of the beloved treat. As widely reported, Twinkies will now have a shelf life of 45 days, roughly three weeks longer than its previous incarnation.
After some ten percent of company’s retail customers made explicit request for frozen Twinkies, Hostess previously confirmed to HuffPost that some of the snacks will be now be frozen prior to shipping.
According to food blog First We Feast, Twinkies' new owner, Metropoulos & Co. and Apollo Global Management, is exploring the possibility of offering Twinkie alternatives, like Stevia-sweetened Twinkies or gluten-free Twinkies.
Sadly for workers at the former Hostess bakery, CNN reports only about 20 to 25 percent of those jobs will return now that Hostess has Twinkies back in production -- with other treats like Zingers and Snowballs to following the months ahead.
Some 15,000 union workers -- many of whom worked at the Schiller Park plant -- lost their jobs when the snack maker abruptly filed for bankruptcy in 2012 following an employee labor dispute with the previous management, Fox Chicago reports.
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