Michele Ferrero inherited a small pastry shop in Piedmont and grew one of Italy’s favourite food empires. He was born on 26th April, 1925. There won’t be many Italians who haven’t had Nutella at some point in their lives!
Michele Ferrero was born in Dogliani, a small town in the Langhe hills of Piedmont — hazelnut country. He would go on to become Italy’s richest man, the architect of one of the world’s great food dynasties, and the person responsible for the small, brown-labelled jar that has sat on breakfast tables across the globe for more than sixty years.
He was not the founder of Ferrero, that distinction belongs to his father, Pietro, who opened a bakery and café in the nearby town of Alba. During the difficult years after the Second World War, Pietro began experimenting with ways to make chocolate stretch further. Cocoa supply shortages after the war pushed Pietro to supplement the expensive raw material with roasted hazelnuts, which were abundant and cheap in Piedmont. In 1946, Pietro launched Pasta Gianduja — a chocolate-hazelnut mixture sold in solid blocks wrapped in aluminium foil, which workers could slice and spread on bread. It was nourishing, affordable, and irresistible. Italians couldn’t get enough.
Pietro Ferrero died on 2 March 1949, aged just 51, exhausted, it is said, from personally driving his little Fiat Topolino through the hills of Piedmont to distribute his product. He left behind a company, a recipe, and a son who would take everything his father had built and transform it into something the world had never tasted before.
The making of Nutella
Michele joined the firm in 1949, barely out of his twenties, and immediately began pushing the recipe forward. In 1951, he revolutionised his father’s formula, making it creamy and spreadable, and called it SuperCrema. It was a hit across Italy for more than a decade. But then Italian law intervened: a new regulation banned superlatives like “super” in brand names, and Michele needed a new name for his spread.
The solution was elegant in its simplicity. He combined the descriptive English word “nut” with the Italian suffix “-ella,” giving it an approachable, transparent, and culturally distinct identity. The first jar of Nutella left the factory in Alba on 20 April 1964. Michele Ferrero was 38 years old. His son Giovanni, who would eventually succeed him as head of the company, was born that same year.
The product was an immediate success, arriving at exactly the right moment. Nutella’s global rise took place during Italy’s post-war economic boom, and it became popular across the board. Within a year, it had crossed the Alps into Germany. Within a generation, it had conquered Europe.
The empire behind the jar
Nutella was only the beginning. Under Michele’s stewardship, Ferrero became one of the great creative engines of the global confectionery industry. The brands he built include Mon Chéri, Kinder Chocolate, Ferrero Rocher, Tic Tacs and Kinder Eggs. Each one is a carefully crafted product that balanced novelty, quality and a kind of warm, family-centred pleasure that felt distinctly Italian even when sold in eighty countries.
He was famously private, rarely giving interviews, and ran the company as a close family operation with a culture shaped as much by his personal values as by commercial strategy. A devout Roman Catholic, he made annual pilgrimages to Lourdes and erected statues of the Virgin Mary in all of the factory buildings he owned. He spoke directly to his workers and to take a personal interest in the conditions of his factories, which were among the most modern in the industry.
By the time of his death, Ferrero SpA was Europe’s second-largest confectionery company, and he had surpassed Silvio Berlusconi in 2008 to become Italy’s wealthiest individual, with a personal fortune of $26 billion. Yet he lived modestly, based for much of his later life in Monte Carlo, and kept the company entirely out of public hands.
A jar every 2.5 seconds
The scale of what Michele Ferrero created is almost impossible to comprehend in human terms. Today, a jar of Nutella sells somewhere in the world every 2.5 seconds. The company uses around 25% of the global hazelnut supply — some 100,000 tonnes annually. The spread is sold in more than 75 countries and has generated cultural flashpoints of its own. When Ferrero slightly adjusted the recipe in 2017, the backlash made international headlines.
The Ferrero Group is now one of the world’s largest sweet-packaged food companies. It has over 35 brands sold in more than 170 countries and more than 50,000 employees worldwide.
Michele Ferrero died on 14 February 2015 at his home in Monte Carlo. He was 89. Leadership passed to his son Giovanni, who remains executive chairman today, continuing what began in a small Alba bakery nearly eighty years ago.
