The back of a pastry shop served as his experimental laboratory
And it's here he created the first ever "chocolate-no-chocolate" tasty treat (and built a confectionary empire worth $13.6 billion)
The Langhe … you’ll find it sits in a hilly area located in Northern Italy and dates back to over 30 million years ago.
Geologists say that as the prehistoric waters known as Tethys Ocean gradually withdrew from the land, it left behind deposits of sandstone and layers of clay.
But those mixed layers of clay and sandstone also created the finest sediments known to man for farming.
In fact scientists have a name for this special area … ‘Marne di Sant’Agata.’
And it’s here that some of Italy’s finest wines are made including Sannio Sant’Agata dei Goti, which is made from Piedirosso grapes.
But people here don’t just grow grapes and make wines. They also grow nuts … hazelnuts.
The trees are rooted on hills that surge 820 feet upward … some peak at almost a quarter mile high.
This region of Italy is one of the main growers of hazelnuts, producing 17,636,981 pounds annually.
Heck, yes that’s a lot of nuts.
But you won’t just find vineyards and hazelnut trees here. There are several small villages scattered across the Langhe, including Farigliano, which is located in the community of Alba, near Piedmont.
This is where Pietro Ferrero was born.
And it’s also where he intended to set up his small confectionary company.
Pastry, Breads, and Other “Cakery Delights”
Pietro was a military man. And he proudly served in the Italian Armed Forces until 1923. From there, he worked as an apprentice baker and learned to make all kinds of pastries, candies, and cakes.
In truth one of his specialties was baking Italian cakes such as sospiri, a little sponge cake like sandwich filled with lemon pastry cream and topped with a sweet glaze or garnish.
And when he wasn’t making sospiri, he was baking Ciambella cake, which is similar to an American Bundt cake. And then there is torta di noci, an Italian chocolate walnut cake.
While the town folk gobbled up his “cakery delights,” one person in particular loved them … his soon to be wife Piera Cillario.
In fact the two married in 1924 and just one year later in 1925, their son Michele was born.
As much as he liked baking, Pietro was an ambitious man … one determined to make a name for himself and his family. And he would stop at nothing to become the most perfect baker.
Unfortunately the picturesque town surrounded by hills where he grew up was suddenly too small for him to become the baker he was meant to be.
So this little family of three spent the next several years moving between cities, as Pietro perfected his baking skills while working at more sophisticated, more established pastry shops.
Baked Intentions
As Pietro was improving his baking skills, he came up with what he thought was the most perfect military “baking plan.” It was a plan filled with good intentions … a way for him to help out fellow soldiers
Since he had served time in the army, the one thing he knew the troops wanted was a hearty meal or snack they could eat out while in the field. And he decided he was going to be the person who supplied that snack.
So in 1938 he moved his family to Somalia, East Africa where he began making panettoni (a traditional Italian dessert bread cake). Then he would sell those cakes to the Italian troops that were dispatched there by Mussolini.
This could be his big pastry breakthrough.
After all, with thousands of troops stationed here, he’d have a never ending line of paying customers. But things don’t always work out the way we hope. Sometimes they just don’t work at all.
After two years of trying, his lucky break fizzled out completely. So Pietro returned back home to Italy, settling in in the quiet hills of Turin.
He then opened his own pastry shop … one that had seven windows where he could proudly display all of his baked goods. The shop was indeed the talk of Turin, and customers lined up routinely to buy one of Pietro’s cakes.
But things happen that you can’t control like when war breaks out.
In 1939 the German forces invaded Poland, which drove Great Britain and France to declare war on Germany. And by 1940, allied forces were dropping bombs throughout Turin of which Mussolini had taken control.
The Mad Lab Experiments
Looking for a safer place to live, Pietro moved his family back to Alba in 1942. And once again opened up a bakery but a much smaller one as compared to the other shops where he baked delicious delights.
But Pietro didn’t mind that the shop was small in size. In fact he used the shop in two ways.
The front of the store is where he served his regular cakes, candies and pastries and the back of the shop … well that became his secret confectionery laboratory.
In his make-shift lab, Pietro played around with different combinations of ingredients to create newer pastries.
One such experiment was making chocolate without chocolate.
What do I mean?
Well because of the ongoing war, the Italian government had imposed high taxes on cocoa beans, making it almost impossible to create conventional chocolate-based pastries because it cost so much money.
But one ingredient that was super cheap to use were hazelnuts. Remember the Langhe is known for growing some of the world’s finest hazelnuts. And since the orchards were right in his hometown, Pietro decided to use the nuts as a replacement for cocoa beans.
On one of several experiments, he blended together molasses, hazelnut oil, coconut butter and a small fraction of cocoa, to form a paste known as Giandujot. He put the spread in-between two thin wafer like bars.
He then wrapped the bar in foil and called his new pastry, Pasta Giandujot and began selling it out of the back of his shop.
Well Dear Reader, our baker Pietro was onto something. His bars were popular with town folk because they were inexpensive yet so sweet a snack.
Demand for the product increased rapidly, so much so that producing it by hand became impracticable. To keep up with production, Pietro had no choice but to buy a factory and hire workers so that he could mass produce the bars.
Teaming with his brother Giovanni, who was also a pasty maker, Peitro formed a new company, Ferrero International, SA in 1946 that would now make all the company’s pastries.
And it wasn’t much later, in 1949, that the new company launched a more spreadable version of Giandujot, which they named Supercrema. The packaging for Supercrema read, “A delicious, genuine product with high energy value, it in fact has no fewer than 5,100 calories.”
It was a huge success. Part of the reason it sold well was that Supercrema came in receptacles like jars and pots so that penny-pinched customers could reuse the containers over and over again.
Ferrero International was now gaining recognition throughout Italy for it’s “chocolate-not-chocolate” tasty treat.
Sadly, Pietro didn’t live long enough to see the full success of Supercrema. He died of a heart attack in 1949 at the age of just 50.
A Trio of Bakers
After Pietro’s passing, the company was reorganized so that all three remaining family members maintained a role in running the company including Pietro’s widow, Piera Cillario Ferrero; their son, Michele; and Pietro’s brother, Giovanni.
The family divided up the work that had to be done in three ways: Michele, age twenty-five, deals with production; “Uncle Giovanni,” with sales, while “Mamma Piera” oversees the skilled workers.
It didn’t take long for the trio to turn Ferrero International SA into a huge company. They hired over 300 workers and were churning out 17 tons of baked goods a year. And they continually added new products to their list of pastry goods too.
For instance, they created cherry-liquor-filled chocolates called Mon Chéri, which of all places were a big hit in Germany. In fact to keep up with demand, the trio bought an old abandoned Nazi missile factory and converted it to a pastry making operation.
Then came another early death for this working family of three. In 1957, at age 52, Giovanni suffered a fatal heart attack. At just 33 years old, Michele was thrust into command.
But he had been trained well by his father and mother. And he was ready to take on this new role. In fact he was ready to make changes to some of the pastries and baked goods the company made.
For instance, in 1962, Michele decided to upgrade the quality of Supercrema. Since the war had ended, the country could finally afford real chocolate, so he added more cocoa and cocoa butter to the mix.
But it also forced him to make another change. The Italian government began regulating the use of superlatives in advertising such as the word super — potentially putting the name Supercrema in peril.
So Michele did the only thing he could think to do to save their hazelnut paste … he chose to rebrand. His team pondered a label that would evoke the flavor of hazelnuts in languages across many markets. Ultimately, they settled on Nutella and began shipping jars under the new name in April 1964.
Nutella was now being sold around the world. Today, Nutella is used in many ways — from sweetening peanut butter sandwiches, adding fragrant richness to desserts, being infused into hot cocoa and cocktails, or simply creating a sweeter tasting flavor profile to any food it touches.
In fact, Nutella is so outrageously popular that its production rate is more than sky high ... literally. In just a single year, a whopping 730 million pounds — 365,000 tons — of Nutella is produced.
So Tiny, Yet So Big
Michele was a bit of an experimenter like his father, Pietro. But instead of concentrating on chocolates, he wanted to create something brand new … a new kind of confectionary.
He messed around with different concoctions of sweeteners until he settled on a small pill-like white mint, which he named Refreshing Mints. He debuted his little mint in 1969. And while it was selling “just enough,” to keep producing, he came up with an idea to improve sales.
Since the mints were being sold in cute little pellet like containers, which people loved to carry around in their pockets or purses, maybe it should be renamed … and maybe … just maybe the new name should be the sound the container makes when you pop it open … the sound of click-clack or tic tac.
And just like that in 1970, Refreshing Mints were renamed Tic Tac Mints.
Ferrero's rapid growth and expansion continued on. New products were introduced at a steady clip: the Kinder line in 1968 and Ferrero Rocher pralines in 1982. By 1986, annual sales reached 926 billion lira, about $1.5 billion in U.S. dollars.
By the time Michele handed the reins to his sons in 1997, the once tiny operation had become a heavyweight with roughly $4.8 billion in annual sales.
Today Ferrero Rocher chocolates, Nutella spread, Tic Tac mints and other confections made by the Ferrero company are sold in more than 170 countries. The company is still owned by several family members and annual sales are around of $13.6 billion.
Just think Dear Reader … If Pietro had not been insistent on experimenting with different ingredients, we might never know the taste of Nutella. And the same is true of Michele … had he not experimented with new confections, we might not be able to pop a Tic Tac in our mouths at all.
Awesome Quotes by Awesome People
“The true method of knowledge is experiment.”— William Blake