Twinkies were originally banana-flavored.

Twinkies and packaging

For as long as most people can remember, Twinkies have gone virtually unchanged: The treat is a space-age yellow sponge cake filled with a sweet-tasting artificial vanilla creme. But this wasn’t always the case. At the very beginning, Twinkies were banana-flavored. Even more surprising, they were made with real bananas.

Back in 1930, the Continental Baking Company’s Hostess brand produced a strawberry shortcake-themed, tube-shaped snack cake. It was available only during strawberry season, so the equipment went unused for the rest of the year. Bananas, which in the U.S. were all imported, weren’t season-specific, so Continental employee James A. Dewar had the idea to make cakes with real banana filling when strawberries weren’t available.Twinkies — named for an advertisement Dewar saw for “Twinkle Toe Shoes” — were a big hit. But Hostess ran into a supply problem during World War II, when bananas were rationed. The company tested a few fruit-flavored alternatives but eventually settled on vanilla, despite concerns within the company that the flavor was too boring and artificial. The snack cakes became more popular than ever, and the flavor stuck. Hostess did eventually bring back banana Twinkies, but real bananas never returned.

By the Numbers

Did you know?

Banana flavor predated bananas in the United States.

Banana-flavored confections became available in the United States in the 1860s, but the vast majority of Americans didn’t know what bananas actually tasted like until at least the 1870s. This is because artificial banana flavor, which is mostly a chemical called isoamyl acetate, was never actually intended to taste like bananas. In fact, in the U.K., it was marketed as pear flavor, but pear cultivars in the United States didn’t smell the same.

Many Americans had seen photographs of banana trees, but very few had a frame of reference for what bananas actually tasted like. So chemical companies started marketing it to Americans as banana flavor. Bananas do have some naturally occurring isoamyl acetate, but the bananas sold in U.S. stores today have far less of it than bananas in the past.