A pastry shop in Alba, a solid loaf and a new name.

Nutella comes from Alba, a town in the Langhe hills of Piedmont known for its hazelnuts. There Pietro Ferrero ran a pastry shop, and in 1946 he sold a first batch of 300 kilograms of Pasta Giandujot, a sweet derived from gianduja, the Piedmontese mixture of hazelnut and chocolate. English Wikipedia, citing the company’s former US history pages and the Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets (2015), says it was first sold as a solid block; the BBC reported in 2014 that it came as a loaf wrapped in foil that had to be sliced with a knife. Italian Wikipedia says Ferrero used hazelnuts and sugar because cocoa was scarce in the war years. The company itself, Ferrero, dates its founding to 1946 in Alba, where Pietro Ferrero was helped by his brother Giovanni.

In 1951 Ferrero began selling a spreadable version, Supercrema. In 1963 Pietro’s son Michele Ferrero, working with the chemist Francesco Rivella, reworked the recipe with the aim of selling it across Europe and gave it a new name, English Wikipedia says. Italian Wikipedia explains the name as the English word “nut” joined to the Italian suffix “-ella”. The first jar of Nutella left the factory in Alba on 20 April 1964. According to Italian Wikipedia the spread reached Germany in 1965 and France the following year; it went on sale in the United States in 1983.

From the start, Italian Wikipedia says, the 200-gram size came in a reusable glass that could be kept as a drinking glass once empty, and those glasses were soon decorated, first with stylised abstract or nature motifs and, from 1990, with cartoon characters. Its Italian slogan “Che mondo sarebbe senza Nutella?” (“What would the world be without Nutella?”) has been used since 1994. The brand’s wordmark is set in lowercase letters.

A fan’s holiday, a stamp and seven million labels.

Some of the brand’s best-known moments did not start with Ferrero. World Nutella Day, held every year on 5 February, was set up in 2007 by Sara Rosso, an American blogger living in Italy, as a fan celebration, HuffPost reported in 2013. In April that year Ferrero sent her a cease-and-desist letter over the use of the Nutella name and imagery, then settled the matter within days, the same report said in an update. Rosso says she ran the day until 2015, when she turned it over to Ferrero, which has managed it since.

For the spread’s fiftieth birthday, on 14 May 2014, Poste Italiane issued a 70-cent stamp designed by the state printing works, the Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, showing a Nutella jar on a gold background, and Ferrero held a Nutella Day that month, ANSA and La Stampa reported. On World Nutella Day 2021, marking Ferrero’s 75th anniversary, the Italian treasury issued a silver 5-euro coin with the jar on one side and the façade of Ferrero’s historic Alba headquarters on the other, the company announced.

The jar itself became a design project in 2017. For a campaign called Nutella Unica, Ferrero and the agency Ogilvy & Mather Italia used an algorithm to draw on dozens of patterns and thousands of colour combinations and give each of seven million jar labels sold in Italy its own design, each with a code to show it was one of a kind, Dezeen and E&T reported in June 2017; the agency said the jars sold out within a month. Later additions kept the jar but changed what was in it: Nutella Plant-Based, with chickpeas and rice syrup replacing milk and a green lid, went on sale in Italy, France and Belgium in September 2024, Italianfood.net reported, and in April 2026 Ferrero North America launched Nutella Peanut, which it called the brand’s first new flavour in more than 60 years.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make jam, preserves or sweet spreads, and they come from France, Belgium, the United States, Britain and Italy: Christine Ferber, Lucien Georgelin, Materne, Sarabeth’s, Mrs Bridges, Thursday Cottage and Nutella. Jam and spread brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from small kitchens that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a village shop to a supermarket shelf.

A jam or spread brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single recipe than by a jar, a label and the breakfast table it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its kitchens or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its jars are actually filled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its jars and labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family company and a map of factories.

Nutella belongs to Ferrero, the privately held group still headquartered in Alba and owned by the Ferrero family. Michele Ferrero led the company’s growth and later handed day-to-day management to his sons Pietro and Giovanni; since 2015 Giovanni Ferrero has been executive chairman, and in 2017 the long-serving executive Lapo Civiletti became the group’s first chief executive from outside the family, the Financial Times reported. English Wikipedia, citing Quartz, says Ferrero bought about a quarter of the world’s hazelnuts in 2014, not all of them for Nutella.

Nutella is made in many Ferrero plants rather than one. In Italy it comes from Alba and from Sant’Angelo dei Lombardi in Campania, according to Ferrero Italy’s own list of sites as cited by English Wikipedia; the plant-based version is made at Sant’Angelo. Ferrero France says its factory at Villers-Écalles, near Rouen, a former textile mill it bought and modernised at the end of the 1950s, is the world’s leading Nutella production site and makes more than a quarter of global output. English Wikipedia, citing Ferrero’s national sites, lists further plants at Stadtallendorf in Germany, open since 1956, Warsaw, Manisa in Turkey, Brantford in Ontario, San José Iturbide in Mexico, Poços de Caldas in Brazil and Lithgow in New South Wales, where Nutella has been made since the late 1970s. La Repubblica put global production at about 350,000 tonnes in 2013.

The spread’s main ingredients include palm oil, which drew political attention in 2012, when a French senator proposed raising the tax on palm oil and the measure was dubbed the “Nutella amendment” in the press, The Guardian reported in November that year. Ferrero has also stretched the name to snacks such as Nutella B-ready and, from 2019, Nutella Biscuits, which Italian Wikipedia says launched in France in April and in Italy that November.

For a design guide, Nutella shows how one name and one jar can carry a regional sweet from a Piedmont pastry shop to factories on several continents. Compare Ferrero Rocher and Kinder, two more Ferrero brands from Alba. For this guide we use jar black, a spread red and a hazelnut brown with a bold lowercase sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Nutella’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.