Hostess Milky Way and M&M's Brownies: Can the Brownian Knot Be Cut?

The Hostess Hitting Streak Grinds to a Halt
Hostess had been on a tear since their miraculous resurrection by Greek-American billionaire turnaround artist C. Dean Metropoulos, using their newly-modernized manufacturing processes to crank out novel new items like the delish Caramel Sea Salt Cupcakes.  But their two new themed brownies, coated with M&M's or with caramel frosting and Milky Way pieces, fall flat.   Or perhaps it's better to say they simply fall prey to the seeming impossibility of creating a truly great brownie in a factory setting.  We'll have more on that later, but first let's talk about the factors that were at least under Hostess's control.

Untruth in Packaging
As a general principle, anyone who complains that a food product doesn't look like the picture on the package just needs to grow up.  Companies have a right to photograph their products in the best light possible and the package depictions will always be somewhat idealized; you mustn't mistake the cardboard carton housing your microwaved pasta dinner for a representation of reality.  The perfect chunks of chicken in the picture will always be a little plumper than what comes out of your oven, the gloss of the sauce a little smoother, the colors in the vegetables a little brighter.  But with these two brownies, Hostess crosses the line into deception, promising a totally different kind of brownie from what they deliver.  Let's first look at the Milky Way brownie.

The picture on the box promises that the base brownie will be smothered in chewy, gooey caramel, with hefty chunks of Milky Way candy thrown on top for good measure, adding textural diversity and an added boost of milk chocolate taste.  What you get instead isn't even caramel, but a gritty, sandy icing.  It might be the same icing that Hostess puts on their Sea Salt Caramel cupcakes, but while that icing works in the context of a thick cupcake, it's a real letdown when the consumer was expecting a rich caramel-turtle-like taste experience.  As for the Milky Way pieces, they're not the chunks that you see in the picture, but cast-off fragments, shards and particles of Milky Way dust.

Hostess promises chewy, stretchy caramel atop its brownies, but actually delivers a crumbly caramel-flavored icing sans sumptuousness, stretch, or even richness.

The M&M's brownie isn't quite so dishonestly presented, for at least it boasts a goodly amount of the candy-coated chocolate pieces, more in fact than are shown on the package.  Once again, however, Hostess gives us a substantially different icing than you get in the photo.  On the box we see a velvety sheet of glossy chocolate draped over the brownie, with a rainbow of chocolate pieces gently nestled into the soft, accommodating dimples of fudge that the icing affords.  The real icing, in contrast, is a dry and brittle crust of cocoa-stained confectioners icing.  Rather than draped, it looks laser-printed and bolted on, a rigid encasement more than an enticing adornment, and since the brownie underneath is a dry biscuit-like slab of cocoa bread, the whole act of eating it is a pleasureless affair.

Which icing would you rather eat?  And don't say it makes no difference.  Perhaps if Hostess hadn't done such a great job of meeting expectations in recent months, this bait-and-switch would feel like less of a betrayal.

Why Are Boxed Brownies So Difficult to Get Right?
All of the above complaints notwithstanding, Hostess's primary sin here may not be faulty execution so much as a lack of wisdom in once again trying to bring a shelf-stable packaged brownie to market. This is something that food companies have struggled to get right for decades and each time they fail. Intriguingly, these individually-wrapped brownies almost always fail in nearly identical ways.  Here's a list of the most common offputting traits.

The Scent of Dried Prunes - Next time you try an industrially baked brownie, hold it up to your nose and inhale deeply.  Usually a strong aroma conveys a mixture of wet coffee grounds mixed with dried fruit of the raisiny or prunish variety.  Though these brownies don't actually contain dried prunes, that was once a featured ingredient in a low-fat brownie from nearly two decades back which attempted to reduce the amount of fat by replacing shortening with prune puree.  Amazingly, that brownie didn't taste significantly worse than these.

A Uniformly Damp Texture - Why are brownies so popular in the first place?  Apart from intense chocolate taste, I'd argue that the other great attraction is their two simultaneous textures: crackly on top and around the edges, soft, dense and fudgy on the inside.  Packaged brownies never seem to be able to replicate this.  The medium-dense crumb on the inside is unchanged at the edges, and the cake square is limp and flabby throughout, robbing each bite of the excitement that comes with variability.

This picture gives a good view into the depressing sameness of texture that is common in packaged brownies.

I've often wondered why, with the arsenal of food technologies at our disposal, we should have such trouble creating a boxed brownie that's crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside.  One theory, though, is moisture migration.  When you wrap the brownie, you create a closed system where all the moisture inside the brownie simply has nowhere to go.  If it escapes into the air, it's still trapped inside the package and will get reabsorbed into the brownie's outside skin.  If the moisture is trapped in the center, it will eventually migrate through the cell structure of the brownie into the edges.  We forget that even the best homemade brownies only hold their double texture for a few hours uncovered and only a few days under plastic wrap.  After that, they dry out.  So if you're a manufacturer whose brownies will ship long distances and sit on shelves for long periods, you have two options: create a brownie that's uniformly dry or uniformly damp; that choice you have, but the uniformity is not optional.  It's a decent theory, but just as I was considering it, a co-worker brought a complication to this idea into the breakroom: brownie bites.

This supermarket brownie bite was everything that the Hostess brownies weren't.  Check out the crumbly, crusty, uneven skin and the dark tender interior.

Somehow brownie bites, those miniature cupcakes of baked brownie batter, manage to overcome all the aforementioned difficulties and taste just like a brownie should; fudgy and soft in the center, light and crackly at the edges.  Does this mean that the packaging theory is invalid?  I've actually written to an industrial food scientist to get a clear answer on this, and I'll update this post should I get an answer, but my instinct is to say no.  I think brownie bites succeed where industrial brownies fail because of a different delivery and consumption schedule.  Brownie bites are usually made by a local commercial bakery and shipped the same day to the retail outlets that sell them in under a week's time.  If they were to sit on a shelf for several weeks, they would probably dry out completely. Brownies such as Hostess sells have to sit for many weeks, if not months, and have to be formulated differently so that they stay reasonably fresh and moist for a much longer window of time.  Hostess has figured out a way to make this work for Twinkies and cupcakes, but brownies are still a struggle.   Still, there are tantalizing hints out there to a better way to make an industrial brownie.  Consider, for instance, Keebler Soft Batch chocolate chip cookies.  Those are crisp on the outside but soft and chewy on the inside.  What are they doing that industrial brownie bakers might duplicate?  The consumer desire is out there.  We'll see how the nation's food scientists respond.