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Home > FRANCE > Showroom
THE WORLD IS NUTELLA
Rome - (Adnkronos Multimedia) - It's difficult to be sure that it's a record, but it is highly unlikely that anywhere else in the world there is another food product, with such an unmistakable trademark, produced in similar quantities: 180,000,000 kg every year, packed in almost a billion glass jars and individual portion plastic packs. It is no surprise, then, to find out that this trademark, "Nutella" (www.nutella.it), is one of the best-known products in the world, such a common part of the life of millions of families in five continents that it is easy to forget that it is Italian, and owes its creation to the ingenuity of a pastry chef from Piedmont, Pietro Ferrero.
The story of Nutella begins almost 60 years ago, in the autumn of 1945. Pietro Ferrero, together with his wife Piera, ran a small pastry shop in via Maestra, in the historic centre of Alba, in the heart of the Langhe area of Piedmont. He loved his work and was forever experimenting and creating new sweets and cakes. He managed to perfect a cheap and innovative sweet, made with hazelnuts, sugar, vegetable butter and a little cocoa, which in the post-war years was rare and expensive. It was in the form of a bar to be cut in slices, and he called it Giandujot, after the character from Piedmont in the Commedia dell'Arte. The idea was enormously successful, and Pietro opened his first small factory. In one year, he produced over 100 tonnes of Giandujot, which by now was also being sold in small individual portions, under the name of Cremino.
In 1949 Pietro Ferrero died and left the company in the hands of his brother and his young son, Michele. The company grew and expanded at an exceptional rate, also beginning to produce other sweets and snacks. And it was Michele, in 1964, who had a great idea which would allow the family company to be transformed, over the decades, into one of Italy's leading food industries. He decided to change the traditional Giandujot recipe and transform it into a spreadable cream. Thus was born Nutella, as we know it today. It was an immediate success. The name comes from the combination of the English word nut, evoking the hazelnuts inside, with the suffix -ella, which means nothing in particular. It was produced using only fresh genuine raw materials, and was liked by millions of Italian children. It soon also became popular abroad, first on European markets, and then in America and Asia. It soon became known in almost every corner of the world. Already in 1966, thanks above all to Nutella, Ferrero was the second-largest Italian company in terms of turnover on the German market, and at the end of the 1960s around a third of the company's turnover was realised on international markets. This was an exceptional figure, in an age still a long way from the globalisation we know today. Sales grew every year, winning over increasingly large portions of the market and entering the homes of tens of millions of families. It has become the epitome of sweet indulgence and is now even part of cinema history thanks to the director Nanni Moretti, who is seen eating it in every one of his films.
Today, Ferrero is an international industrial group present the world over with an overall turnover of over €5 million and around 16,000 employees. It boasts 15 production facilities, of which 11 abroad, and 31 offices in the five continents. To produce Nutella, over 50 million kg of hazelnuts are used every year, making Ferrero the largest consumer of hazelnuts in the world. The company also gets through over 100,000 tonnes of milk and 70,000 of cocoa, which it also uses to produce another line of Ferrero products known all over the world: Kinder.
Contact:
Ferrero spa
piazzale Pietro Ferrero, 1
12051 ALBA
tel +39017329511
fax +390173363034
www.ferrero.it
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