Nutella inventor died: How did Ferrero come about?

It is the crème de la crème of the sweet spreads: Nutella. The Germans can eat about one kilogram of the nut nougat cream per year per head. Now her co -inventor, Francesco Rivella, has died at the age of 97. Rivella worked as a technical director at Ferrero from the mid -1950s and always tested new variants of hazelnut cream in the laboratory.

Ferrero recently changed the recipe of the spread and launched a vegan variant. The “Plant-Based” Nutella is now also available in German supermarkets. The plant -based version of the hazelnut cream could be another success in Ferrero’s company history.

This begins – you can hardly come up with it – in northwestern Italy at the foot of the Alps: Pietro and Giovanni Ferrero are born as sons of bitterly poor farmers in the hilly Piedmont. There is only one in the small town: hazelnuts. They are even fed to pigs and chickens. But the two brothers do not want to become a farmer, but opened a first café in their home village in 1923, a “Pasticceria” where they sell sweets and chocolate.

They expand into the nearby town of Alba. There they expand their pastry shop into a small chocolate factory including a laboratory in the 1940s. You open another pastry shop in Turin. The Second World War initially destroys further expansion plans, cocoa is hard to get and if only very expensive. But the need leads to an invention that still establishes the fame and wealth of the Ferrero family. Pietro creates the forerunner of the Nutellacra: the Giandujot. It mainly consists of sugar syrup and ground hazelnuts, plus coconut butter and-because of the color-a mini-prise cocoa.

The pseudo-chocolate packed in stanniol paper becomes a hit in the starved post-war Italy: sweet, greasy, an excellent calorie bomb at a time when there was little else and calories were not yet a dirty word. When Pietro Ferrero died of a heart attack in 1949 at the beginning of fifty, brother Giovanni and Pietro’s son Michele continued the family business. The latter discovers that the chocolate can be spread out much better on bread, “cremalba”, later renamed “Supercrema”, conquers Italy and Europe. A first work in Germany was opened in 1956, the next one in France a little later. It is the start of a quick expansion in Europe. In the following decades, Ferrero founded new companies and production facilities worldwide.

Because the Christian Democratic Government of the post -war period prohibits superlatives in brand names as blasphemy, Michele Ferrero thinks a new name in 1964: Nutella. The spread becomes a symbol of the economic boom of the 1960s. “Nutella is more than a crème made of hazelnut and cocoa, it is a spiritual category. It is more than a spread, it is a symbol of the generations,” cheered the daily newspaper “La Repubblica” recently.

Michele Ferrero turns out to be a natural talent for marketing, product placement, customer loyalty, emotional customer approach and in the branding of his confectionery: Mon Chéri (1956), Nutella (1964), TIC TAC (1969), children’s surprise (1974) and finally Ferrero Rocher (1982 ) are still iconic names in the global candy world. In his homeland in Piedmont, the family entrepreneur, who died in 2015, is considered a hero who built many factories and brought jobs and prosperity to the poor farmers.

To date, the group is completely in family hands. Giovanni-son of Michele, grandson of Pietro, has been head of the Ferrero Group since 2015. He operates his company from Luxembourg, where the group has its tax headquarters, reports Forbes. He should live in Brussels.

Giovanni Ferrero is not only the richest man in Italy, but according to the “Bloomberg Billionaires Index” he is one of the 30 richest people in the world – he takes 29th place to be precise. His esteemed fortune amounts to around 42 billion euros. As President of Ferrero, Giovanni took the first company takeovers in the history of the company – and hired the first chairman, who did not belong to the family, writes “Forbes”. In addition to his work for the Ferrero brand, he diligently writes novels, eight have already been published.

To date, Nutella is one of the most important sales charms of the Ferrero Group. Every day, 350 tons of Nutella are consumed a day worldwide, 770 million glasses a year, which would result in the range of earth.

The Germans have always been among the most loyal customers of Nutella. In 2022/2023, Ferrero achieved sales of 17 billion euros. The Ferrero Group today has over 47,212 employees who work in 106 country companies and 37 production facilities. With Hershey and Mars, the Italians are among the largest confectionery sellers in the world.

“How Nutella Italy eats” is the title of a settlement with Ferrero in Swiss magazine reports. After that, Ferrero is currently ruthlessly expanding the hazelnut cultivation in Italy. According to the “Haselnut Italy” plan, Ferrero “wants to get at least another 22,000 hectares of cultivation space” and thus increase its production by 30 percent.

The background of the plan is problems with the main supplier of Türkiye. It is about Kurdish child labor during the harvest and the lower quality as well as the amount of hazelnuts per hectare compared to Italy. Ferrero has already signed plans with several Italian regions, including Tuscany and Umbria. The opponents criticize that completely unsuitable terrain is used for hazelnut production, which leads to a desolation of the soil and landscapes. In addition, there is demonstrably high pesticide use.

This text was created in 2024, and it was published again for the death of Francesco Rivella.