his love of privacy also had a commercial purpose. he needed to keep secret the recipe for his hazelnut-chocolate spread, nutella, of which 365 m kilos are now consmed each year round the world, and which along with more than 20 other confectionery lines made him italy's richestman, worth $23.4 billion. He laughed when he eard that the recipe for cocacola was known to only a few directors of the company. Even fewer knew exactly what went into each jar of nutella.
Several other trade secrets, though, were revealed to the man from la stampa. The first was "always do something different from the others. Nutella was a case in point. the basic gianduja paste, ground hazelnuts with a little cocoa, had been nkown in northern Italy since Napoleonic times. His father Pietro, who ran a corner cafe and pastry-shop in the small town of Alba, had revived this idea in the second world war when cocoa was hard to get. Finding the perfect blend became a passion and the teenage Michele caught it too as his father laboured in a back room, running out at all hours to test sweet spoonfuls on his wife and sons with the cry,"what do you thing?" The paste was sold in solid loaves at first, then, as semi-solid "super-crema" in jars, but michele, taking over the recipe after his father's death in 1949, did what no one else had and added enouth drops of vegetable oil to make it beautifully spreadable. The result was revolutionarychocolate-eating transformed from a special event to something everyday, children lining up after school in bakers'shops to get it smeared on bread, and by the late 1950 a fleet of 1000 cream and chocolate vans criss-crossing italy to keep shops supplied. In 1964 he vented the name Nutella and the glass jar, and the rest was history
He did something very different, too, with Mon Cheri, his cherry-liqueur chocolates. when he went to psot-war Germany to market them he found the country so ruined that he decided to sell them not in the usual boxes, which were unaffordable, but singly, to raise the morale fo the german and bring something seet into their lives, he still wept a little, with both happiness and sadness, to think of that.