The Ferrero family built a $20B+ secretive empire by combining product innovation (Supercrema → Nutella, Tic Tac form factor, Ferrero Rocher packaging) with a founder's mindset of extreme secrecy and a third-generation M&A strategy.

Turns out this family invented Nutella. They invented Tic Tacs. They invented like a whole bunch of Kinder the Kinder bars and Kinder eggs. They invented like several of these like really big things. And now they own a whole bunch of other businesses. So, I want to tell you that the story of this this company that's it's one of the most secretive family-owned businesses in the world. They do like $20 billion a year in revenue. The founder is the the the main guy that this the heir. He runs the company and is the richest man in Italy. And the way they did it is really fascinating. So, um back in the day this was post right after World War II, Italy, which was like, you know, not in great shape post-World War II, um it was trying to kind of bounce back. And so, this guy uh the grandfather uh of of this guy, he decides, 'I'm going to start um making chocolate.' Chocolate was really expensive. It was like this luxury item. It wasn't like a little common thing you found at every store. Not everybody was eating it. And so, he starts and he the he had the form factor wrong. He was trying to make a a bar like a a spread. So, it's like butter. It would be like this kind of hard chocolate like butter stick essentially. And his idea was like people would put this on toast and you'll have like a chocolatey toast. [He tries the bar, people don't like it, too hard, doesn't spread easily.] So, he's like, 'Okay, I got to solve the spread problem.' And he comes up with a jar with like a creamy chocolate, like a a jam basically. And it's like a precursor to Nutella. It wasn't quite Nutella yet. Um but the idea was like make it super spreadable, put it in a jar. And it was called Supercrema. [Over time, the son takes over, rebrands to Nutella, tweaks the recipe.] The son starts innovating. He gets in the lab, and he basically creates he notices that breath mints are great, but there's all these problems. They come in these like big tins, hard to carry around, right? It's like big giant rectangle. To open it up, you had to like kind of find the seam and pop it open, and then, you know, if you wanted to like share it with somebody, they had to like dig through, touch all of them. And so, he creates the Tic Tac form factor. So, way easier to open, smaller box, smaller form factor, and the ads were all like one person's hand out, and then putting a Tic Tac in. And it was basically like a Tic Tac was almost like a social gift. It was a social icebreaker, something you want from somebody else. So, carrying it was almost like a a thing of power. [And now they're super secretive. Up until four or five years ago they had never done an interview.] It was like the one journalist who got in was like, 'This is actually less like Willy Wonka, it's more like Area 51.' There was armed guards. They cuz they build their own machinery to produce the the chocolate. So they didn't want anyone to know the engineering behind their machinery, the recipes behind Nutella. [Then the third gen takes a totally different strategy.] He went Warren Buffett. He was basically like, all right, inventing these products really hard, really expensive, really low hit rate. What if we went and found value brands that we could turn around? And so he went and bought Butterfingers and Baby Ruth and Crunch and like all these brands, acquired them, tried to revitalize the brand and then bring them back.

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