And so it
happened to Michele Ferrero, Italy’s richest man and the maker of Nutella, who
died on Feb. 14 at the age of 89, after a long life of hazelnut
chocolate-coated success that took him from a small town in Italy all the way
to a fortune worth $23.4 billion.
Ferrero
inherited the homonymous company in 1957 from his father, Pietro Ferrero, who
owned a bakery in Alba in Piedmont, a region known for the production of
hazelnuts. As the story goes, Pietro Ferrero had created in the 1940s a paste
of hazelnuts and chocolate (in short supply during the war) which he then
turned into a spreadable product called supercrema gianduja.
In 1964,
Michele Ferrero rebranded the spread, giving it a more international-sounding
name: Nutella. And that was about it.
Nutella’s
success—soon followed by other international chocolate and candy hits such as
Ferrero Rocher, Kinder Surprise Eggs, and Tic Tac—turned what was a small town
business into the fourth-largest candy maker in the world. Ferrero now buys up
25% of the world’s production of hazelnuts.
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