Since negotiations broke down between management and workers and the mass-consumption snackery Hostess liquidated, American consumers have been left bereft and Twinkieless. No one really cares about Wonder Bread, but Twinkies hold a special place in our national imagination, even for people who haven’t tasted one of the hydrogenated delights in decades. But are the generic Twinkie-ish cakes you see on store shelves worth your time?

Sure, you can read amateur musings about generic Twinkies all over the Internet, but only one publication brings you a panel of professional tasters. That would be our sister publication, Consumer Reports. Their flavor pros in the Foods & Sensory department performed blind taste tests on original Twinkies and Safeway’s Snack Artist Crème Cake.

What was their verdict? The Safeway version doesn’t use hydrogenated oils, if that’s important to you, but the flavor isn’t quite the same. Maybe it’s this difference that means the filling of the Snack Artist cakes is gritter, and the cakes denser. They found the original Twinkies dryer, but that may have been because they had to turn to the aged cakes available on the secondary snack-cake market, paying as much as $17.45 for a box of ten.

Hostess Twinkie and The Snack Artist Crème Cake taste test [Consumer Reports]

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