The Ingredient That Made Retro Twinkies Irresistible Is Missing Today

That sweet little cream-filled sponge cake known as the Twinkie is still going strong on supermarket shelves nearly a century after it was created. The confection first found its audience in 1930, and snackers the world over have been enjoying it ever since. But today's Twinkies are quite different in composition from the ones that first rolled off the assembly line at the Continental Baking Company in Illinois — including a key ingredient that is no longer used in the standard Twinkie flavor.

For the first 10-plus years of the Twinkie's life, the cakes were filled with a banana-based cream. While we don't know precisely which types of bananas first gave the snacking cakes their creamy centers, we do know bananas were chosen for their plentiful availability in all seasons of the year. This was in contrast to strawberries, which aren't available year-round, and it was this fact that helped lead to the invention of the Twinkie. The creator of the treats, James Dewar, a manager at Continental Baking Company, wanted to find a use for strawberry shortcake equipment that sat unused when strawberries weren't in season. He came up with the idea of taking the same, spongy cakes used to make strawberry shortcakes and injecting them with banana cream instead of strawberries and cream.

Banana seems like an ideal flavor pairing for Twinkies, with the fruit's mellow sweetness mixed into cool, smooth cream, playing off the more saccharine qualities of the sponge cake — kind of like a little snack-sized banana cream pie. Consumers seemed to agree, and the treats became widely popular. Twinkies were made with banana cream until the 1940s. Ironically, it was once again scarcity that prompted a change, this time spelling banana's demise.

It was that fresh banana flavor in Twinkies that first captured the attention — and taste buds — of consumers. When World War II impacted the importation of bananas, though, the company was obliged to pivot and use a cream-flavoring ingredient more easily obtainable during wartime: vanilla. Vanilla cream became the standard filling inside Twinkies — a fact that didn't change after the war ended and banana imports were coming in freely again.

Due to the loss of the original banana cream and other changes along the way, Twinkies definitely don't taste as good as they used to. The retro banana taste is gone but not forgotten, though. Banana-flavored Twinkies have been reintroduced multiple times by Hostess (the name the maker eventually transitioned to). As of December 2025, Twinkies Banana Flavor is now a permanent part of the product lineup, alongside standard Twinkies and a chocolate flavor.

While banana-flavored Twinkies do exist once again, they aren't quite the same treat that first struck gold in the snack market. The filling inside old-school Twinkies contained bananas and cream as the primary ingredients. In today's version, the inclusion of actual banana is rather far down the ingredient list — surpassed by other ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup, modified food starch, and glycerine. The way the cakes are made is very different, too. Original Twinkies were manually injected with banana filling one treat at a time by "Twinkie Stuffers," who used machines operated by foot pedal to fill them. These days, with automation and machinery that didn't exist back then, it takes about 10 minutes to bake a Twinkie, after which the cooled cakes are injected with their present-day cream (sans banana) by three automated injectors.