Final Shipment Of Twinkies Lands At Chicago's Jewel Grocery Chain

By Chuck Sudo in Food on Dec 11, 2012 3:00PM

(Photo illustration by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Keep calm and don’t panic, Chicago area snack cake lovers: Jewel-Osco announced Monday the final shipment of Hostess baked goods, including Twinkies, will hit their shelves Tuesday. None of us here are old enough to know what a Depression-era bank run looks like; this could be the closest we get to seeing one.

Mike Siemenas, a spokesman for Jewel parent Supervalu, told the Chicago Tribune they received a call from a Hostess plant in Georgia had some inventory left, so they jumped on the entire shipment. This is a fitting end (for now) for the Twinkie, which was invented in Schiller Park, Ill. in 1930 by James Alexander Dewar, who was simply looking for a way to use the machines in his plant that injected strawberry filling into shortcakes when strawberries were out of season. (See? Seasonability isn’t a recent term to describe farmers markets.)

Jewel-Osco listed the 150 stores that will be selling the final 20,000 boxes of Twinkies and 5,000 boxes of Ding Dongs (YAY!), Orange Cupcakes (eh) and Zingers (blech!) throughout the day on its Facebook page. Hostess announced last month it planned on liquidating its assets and would go out of business because a strike by union bakers crippled the company to the point where they had no other options. Hostess tried to cut its contributions to workers pension plans to workers while asking a bankruptcy judge to approve a plan to pay 19 executives with the company $1.75 million in bonuses.