Buyer of distressed brands Apollo Management Group has cheered the hearts of Twinkie lovers everywhere with its$410 million purchase of the snack food favorite.
Big relaunch plans have been made including having Dennis Rodman bring several cases of Twinkies to North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, to offering giant Wonder Bread size promotional sizes, to taking up giant swaths of shelf space in stores in Twinkie takeovers. Super-sizing Twinkies will surely upset Mayor Bloomberg. And shelf-space is going to prove an ongoing and daunting problem.
Apollo bought Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos, but another company (Flowers Foods) bought Wonder Bread. Grupo Bimbo bought the Beefsteak brand, and McKee bought Devil Dogs, Yodels and others. In consumer packaged goods, the war is in the store. Where once a Hostess truck could drive up, elbow itself a lot of shelf space, then optimize the mix of products within it, now lots of companies and individual brands are vying for the space. Grupo Bimbo is probably the only company with the size to dominate. Twinkies will have a tough time regaining its former stature, much less achieving growth outside its core of die-hard brand fans. Paying off its $410 purchase price will be tough.
That said, with die-hard fans beings so important, that idea of promoting with Kim Jong-un looks the a winner.