Nutella began as a cheap solid loaf sliced with a knife
In 1946 cocoa was scarce and expensive in Italy, so the pastry maker Pietro Ferrero stretched it with plentiful local hazelnuts. His first product, Pasta Gianduja, came as a solid block wrapped in foil that had to be cut with a knife. A spreadable successor followed, and in 1964 his son relaunched the recipe under a new name: Nutella.
Ferrero founded his company in Alba, in Piedmont, with help from his brother Giovanni, basing the recipe on gianduja, a traditional hazelnut chocolate from nearby Turin. His son Michele and daughter-in-law Maria Franca turned it into Nutella, opened factories and offices abroad and made it the world's best-selling chocolate and nut spread. The company is now the world's largest buyer of hazelnuts, snapping up around a quarter of global production in 2014.
It remains firmly a family business, and famously private. Ferrero has never held a press conference, does not allow journalists into its factories and builds its own production machines in-house, reportedly to guard against industrial espionage. That reputation has earned it a description as one of the most secretive firms anywhere.
Leadership has passed down the generations. Michele handed daily management to his sons Pietro Jr and Giovanni, but Pietro Jr died of a heart attack while cycling in South Africa in 2011, aged 47. Giovanni became executive chairman and majority owner in 2015, and in 2017 the company appointed its first chief executive from outside the family, the long-serving executive Lapo Civiletti. In 2024 Giovanni was named Italy's richest person.
Today Ferrero ranks second only to Mars among the world's chocolate companies. Its 2025 accounts listed 36 factories, 48,697 employees and 1.5 million tonnes of food produced in a year. There have been setbacks too: in 2022 salmonella traced to its Kinder factory in Arlon, Belgium, triggered recalls across Europe and North America. In 2026 it launched Nutella Peanut, the spread's first new flavour since 1964.
Source: Ferrero SpA
