The Rise And Fall Of America's Favorite Junk Foods | Rise and Fall | Insider Business

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Published 2023-11-09
Kraft cheese, Jell-O and Twinkies are iconic American brands that are lucky to be alive. Here's the story of how they became dinner table staples - and why they almost disappeared.

00:01 Intro
00:30 Kraft Cheese
8:24 Jell-O
15:30 Twinkies

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#RiseandFall #Kraft #Jello #Twinkie

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The Rise And Fall Of America's Favorite Junk Foods | Rise and Fall | Insider Business

All Comments (21)
  • @Monsux
    I always thought that Twinkies were good tasting because I saw them always in movies. I finally tested Twinkies on my US trip. Holy hell, it was just horrible! The same was true on most other processed food products. This made me appreciate most of my local food products.
  • @girlinvt
    Twinkies, Ring Dings, Devil Dogs all used to be creme filled. Now Twinkies' white filling isn't made up of cream but a sugar and vegetable shortening mix that has been blended with corn syrup, water, salt, and cellulose gum. Shortening, by definition, is any fat that is solid at room temperature and used in baking. This actually includes a few things that you may have thought were definitely not shortening before–like lard, and margarine, and hydrogenated vegetable oils, for instance. Now you know why they aren't as popular. Creme filling to doctored lard, to be blunt it doesn't taste the same not even close.
  • @TheLightFish
    I had vanilla roll cake in Japan yesterday. It was so good...like a gourmet twinkie. Not like anything twinkies are today,closer to a 70s twinkie. It was amazing.
  • @Itsmarkyoung
    “What went wrong, and can they recover” Should they recover? 😂
  • @artheemisia
    A friend’s cat loved cheese. But she wouldn’t touch a piece of a Kraft Single…
  • Its great to see more, and more people moving away from junk food. If they knew how many junk food businesses held shares in the pharma industry no one would ever buy it again. They earn on both ends! They make you sick, and then they try to cure you.
  • @Dave-zt7su
    My dad was a truck mechanic for Hostess back in the 70's. Everytime a truck broke down he would go out to repair it and the driver would give him a case of twinkies. We gave them to anyone that wanted them!
  • i find that all these "foods" don't taste the same as they once did. a great example is coca-cola, the closest you'll get to that O.G taste is Mexican coke in a glass bottle made with cane sugar not corn syrup they've substituted one ingredient for a cheaper variant, thinking people wouldn't notice, and while they boost their profits for a short time their dedicated customers move on to something else
  • @ZS89908
    As with many products these products seem to start with real ingredients like the twinkie with banana cream filling which probably had whole milk. But once you start selling to the masses and not just your neighbors you cut all good things out. Now their products have barely anything real in them to cut costs. And like the video states delivery is a huge cost as well so that's another thing that eats up the budget leaving you with a piece of sugar wrapped in plastic essentially. They've stripped all nutrients from their items and its all artificial so that they can make more. Nothing but greed.
  • As a kid, my mom was very strict about us not getting junk food cakes like snowballs, Dingdongs, etc. Every once in a while, though, she’d let us get one as a treat if we needed a sack lunch for a school field trip. I remember loving them. I tried one as an adult and was completely underwhelmed. What was I thinking? lol
  • @CinnamonQuills
    I remember when the reformulated Hostess snack cake line hit shelves again in 2013. The products are terrible compared to what they used to be. They're smaller, more chemical-tasting, blander, and made with taste-ably cheaper ingredients. I used to LOVE Ding Dongs, but the "new" version is tiny, wrapped in plastic instead of foil, has cake that's identical to the chocolate cake in their Cupcakes instead of a denser cake, a tiny jot of frothy cream in the middle, and has the world's thinnest chocolate coating that tastes way too sweet instead of the thick, darker outer shell they used to have. They likely could've fixed most of Hostess's problems just by fixing the supply chain and automating a lot of the manufacturing, but by cheaping out on every step for the sake of the bottom line they ruined what they had. Now instead of buying an occasional box I buy zero boxes.
  • @jaredsummers1846
    I think it is a shame and a disaster these food processing companies DIDN’T go out of business. The more of them that go bankrupt, the healthier Americans and America will be…
  • @omacjames1969
    When I was a child and my father would visit America, when he came back to Jamaica he would bring Twinkies, bubba gum and Pringles. Those are the days I remember most.
  • @shanac5536
    Another fun fact: Kraft makes lunchables in the same building that used to make cool whip and pudding pops, and is in the same town as Barilla noodles and is only a couple miles away from Leroy, NY where the Jello factory is and the next town is the old factory that made Fisher-price toys❤
  • my high school anatomy class was sooo excited when we started our dissection lessons with twinkies. more than half the class had seen twinkies in popular tv shows and movies, but never tried them. Well, when we finished “dissecting”, our teacher gave us the ok to eat the twinkies. And seconds later there was a collective groan of disgust from about 30 students packed into the small classroom. They were gross We flooded the prof with questions, thinking we were gypped and he simply got expired twinkies. He adamantly denied it and showed us the receipt that he’d picked them up only an hour or two before school that day started. In one blow, a good 30 kids’ delicious twinkies dreams were broken. 😩
  • @slbellue6874
    As a kid I loved all this crap. As an adult, trying them again after so many years….it ruined what I remember from my childhood. As much as processed foods disgust me, I still crave these horrible treats when I’m feeling nostalgic. It’s a shame that our government is so wrapped up in taking money and power, that they’re in bed with the industries (medical, pharmaceutical, insurance, veterinary, meat, dairy, etc.) that they push for the citizens and pets to consume foods and beverages that are wholly unhealthy.
  • @yourpaljake6024
    Last year I went on a 2 week holiday to the US & Canada, and found myself making sure to not eat too much, because all the food I did have was so powerful especially in the US, it made me glad that here in the Netherlands and EU our food isn’t too artificial and less sugary
  • @nikkimendoza2720
    Love that fact that I don’t want to put any of this in my body anymore
  • @user-pn9db8sm5w
    I used to eat Hostess products occasionally, they did taste good before they were sold off. Then the new buyers changed the recipes which don't taste very good. The twinkies and cakes are smaller, much less cake and way too much filling and frosting. By the time you peel off that horrible frosting and try to discard at least half that cream filling, your left with a small amount of cake that just doesn't taste like it used to. The pies on the other hand are mostly crust, very little gel filling, no real fruit. A very disappointing experience I now avoid.