Flowers Foods agrees to buy Wonderbread from Hostess Brands
In better times before the bankruptcy, a worker checks Hostess Twinkies as move through production in their trays prior to cream injection at the Interstate Bakeries Corporation facility April 20, 2005 in Schiller Park, Illinois.
Flowers Foods Inc., the parent company of Tastykake snacks, has agreed to buy Wonderbread and other assets from Hostess Brands Inc. for $390 million, the New York Times reported.
Hostess Brands filed for liquidation in late November and has some 30 brands and 36 plants to unload, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Flowers will be a “stalking-horse” bidder in an auction that will begin on Feb. 28, the New York Times reported.
According to the Wall Street Journal:
In bankruptcy auctions, a stalking-horse bidder agrees to buy assets for a set price that other suitors can later top.
The Thomasville, Ga.-based Flowers has agreed to buy the Wonder, Nature’s Pride, Butternut, Home Pride and Merita brands, 20 Hostess bakeries and 38 depots, the Los Angeles Times reported. It also hopes to buy the Beefsteak bread brand in a separate deal.
“We are pleased with the Flowers offers and look forward to a robust auction process that will allow these iconic brands to continue and to maximize value for all of the company’s stakeholders,” Gregory F. Rayburn, Hostess’s chairman and chief executive, said in a statement, according to the New York Times. “We also continue to negotiate with parties interested in purchasing our snack cake business and remaining bread brands and expect to select additional stalking horse bidders as soon as reasonably practicable.”
Last week, the Wall Street Journal named private-equity firms Apollo Global Management LLC and C. Dean Metropoulos & Co. as possible bidders for the Hostess Brands’ cakes business.
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