Nutella creator Michele Ferrero dies at 89 Rachel Sanderson in Milan ©EPA
Michele Ferrero, creator of chocolate-like spread Nutella and Italy’s richest man with a fortune estimated at about $23.4bn, has died after a long illness just two months short of his 90th birthday. Ferrero, who created Nutella, Tic Tacs and Kinder Eggs, was in many ways the Willy Wonka of real-life chocolatiers, with a personal mythology that evokes the protagonist in Roald Dahl’s children’s tale. At home in his personal laboratory in northwest Italy, the legend goes, Ferrero took five years to discover how to bend the wafers that go into his Ferrero Rocher chocolates.
Publicity shy Ferrero spoke in the dialect of his native Piedmont region and died having never given a newspaper interview. Yet while avoiding the world’s gaze, he built a multinational company with revenues in 2013 of |