IN THE only interview he ever gave, to La Stampa, Michele Ferrero did not once remove his sunglasses. This was not just to shield his weak eyes, but to conceal himself. Modesty was a habit. People sometimes called him a genius; he would turn the question gently back on them by saying that, yes, his second name was indeed “Eugenio”, and his mother liked to call him that; but he was glad to be simple Michele, the boy with the thick Piedmontese accent whose life had come to revolve round the farmers of the Alta Langa and their abundant, delectable hazelnut crop.
His love of privacy also had a commercial purpose. He needed to keep secret the recipe for his hazelnut-chocolate spread, Nutella, of which 365m kilos are now consumed each year round the world, and which along with more than 20 other confectionery lines made him Italy’s richest man, worth $23.4 billion. He laughed when he heard that the recipe for Coca-Cola was known to only a few directors of the company. Even fewer knew exactly what went into each jar of Nutella.
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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 known in northern Italy since Napoleonic times. His father Pietro, who ran a corner café 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 think?” The paste was sold in solid loaves at first, then, as semi-solid “Supercrema”, in jars; but Michele, taking over the recipe after his father’s death in 1949, did what no one else had, and added enough drops of vegetable oil to make it beautifully spreadable. The result was revolutionary: chocolate-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 1950s a fleet of 1,000 cream-and-chocolate vans criss-crossing Italy to keep shops supplied. In 1964 he invented the name Nutella and the glass jar, and the rest was history.
He did something very different, too, with Mon Chéri, his cherry-liqueur chocolates. When he went to post-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 of the Germans and bring something sweet into their lives.” He still wept a little, with both happiness and sadness, to think of that.
Keep doggedly at it, was his second secret. He liked to move at his own pace, and thus resisted all acquisitions (save for one Turkish hazelnut company), and refused to be listed on the stock exchange. That way he kept the company as a family, one whose 4,000 workers were treated so kindly that they never went on strike and, when the Alba factory was flooded in 1994, just before Christmas, turned out with buckets and brooms to reopen it in 15 days.
Tics-Tacs in the vanguard
By not going public, he could also resist outside pressure. He waited until 1983 to take Nutella to America, sending his tiny white Tic-Tac mints first, because he did not want to compete with the national staple, peanut butter. He insisted in 1974 on introducing Kinder Surprise, little chocolate eggs with plastic toys inside, though everyone around him objected that eggs should only be large and only for Easter. (He, typically playful, wanted it to be “Easter every day.”) Those, too, were a success.
Each product was exhaustively researched in his two labs, one in Alba and one in Monaco where he lived later, and tested out on board members. (“We eat all day,” one complained.) New technology was eagerly tried. He took five years, it was said, to find a way of bending the wafers inside his Ferrero Rocher pralines. Wherever he went he would visit shops incognito to check that his products were fresh.
His third secret was more mysterious and surprising. At the centre of his business strategy were two women. The first was “la Valeria”, his name for the typical housewife, mother, nonna or aunt who had to decide what to buy every day, who might want a little treat for herself or something, besides kisses, to spoil a favourite child. Unless he could keep her custom, he was finished. His introduction of milkier white chocolate was done with la Valeria in mind, for what could please a mother more than giving milk to her bambino?
The second woman was Maria, the Virgin Mary. He could achieve nothing without her. Each morning he prayed to her and placed his business in her hands. Every year he went on pilgrimage to Lourdes, and arranged for his workers to go. (One company legend was that the shape of Ferrero Rochers was inspired by the grotto there.) A statue of the Virgin, with white robe and golden rosary, stood at the entrance of every Ferrero office and factory round the world. Under her influence, he and his foundation channelled much of his wealth back to Piedmont. It was done, though, with no fanfare, and after a brief appearance in his dark glasses il Signor Michele would, as usual, slip away.