Nutella is 13% hazelnuts, and that number is a supply decision

The Sunday Teardown · Pantry

Nutella is 13% hazelnuts, and that figure was set by what Ferrero can buy, not by what would taste best. A 13 ounce jar holds about 48 grams of hazelnuts, roughly 40 kernels, and in an ordinary year those 40 kernels cost Ferrero close to half of what every ingredient in the jar costs together. Sugar and palm oil fill most of the jar because they are the cheapest things in it by the pound.

Most people read the label as evidence that Ferrero shorted the nut to make room for sugar and oil. Ferrero's hazelnut purchasing shows the opposite. Ferrero buys about a quarter of the hazelnuts grown on earth, most of them from a strip of Turkey's Black Sea coast that grows roughly 70% of the world crop on small family plots. A hazelnut tree takes 5 to 7 years to bear, so growers cannot answer a high price for most of a decade, and one April frost, as in 2025, can take a fifth of the crop and double the price of a kernel in a season. A company that depends on one crop from one coastline has to set its recipe by how much of that crop it can count on in a bad year.

That number is 13%. Ferrero can put that much hazelnut in every jar, every year, at a price the shelf will carry, and the sugar and the oil are what let a scarce crop go a long way. This issue follows that decision from the orchard to the cost sheet, and ends with what I'd buy instead.

The US jar lists sugar, palm oil, hazelnuts, skim milk, cocoa, lecithin as emulsifier and vanillin. That is seven ingredients in order by weight, with no percentages, because US labeling law does not require them and European law does.

The European jar has to give the percentage of any ingredient the name or the picture emphasizes, so it reads hazelnuts 13%, skimmed milk powder 8.7% and cocoa 7.4%. Ferrero says the recipe is the same worldwide, and the nutrition panel on the US jar supports that. A 2 tablespoon serving, 37 grams, carries 200 calories, 11 grams of fat, 4 of them saturated, and 21 grams of sugar. Divide the sugar by the serving and the jar is 57% sugars by weight. Some of that is lactose from the milk powder and a trace of sugar in the nut itself, so the added sugar comes out a little over half. Subtract the declared ingredients from 100 and the remaining fifth of the jar is palm oil, with a trace of lecithin and vanillin.

Sugar. The first ingredient and the bulk of the jar. It provides the sweetness, and it also gives the spread its body, because fine sugar crystals suspended in fat are what hold a spread together at room temperature.

Palm oil. The second ingredient, and the reason the jar sits in the pantry instead of the refrigerator. Palm oil is solid at cool room temperature and softens in the hand, which is the texture a spread needs, and it reaches that texture without hydrogenation. In 2017, after a European food safety opinion on contaminants formed when any vegetable oil is refined at high heat put palm oil in the headlines, Ferrero defended the choice in newspaper and television ads in Italy. The company's answer was to refine at lower temperatures, and it buys its palm oil under a certified sustainable scheme.

Hazelnuts. The third ingredient at 13%. They are roasted, skinned and ground to a paste before they meet anything else in the jar.

Skim milk. 8.7%, as powder. It adds a little protein and a good deal of lactose, and lactose is a sugar the nutrition panel counts even though the ingredient list never has to call it one.

Cocoa. 7.4%, as low-fat cocoa powder. It supplies the color and most of the flavor people describe as chocolate, though nothing in the jar meets the FDA definition of chocolate, which requires cocoa butter.

Lecithin and vanillin. Lecithin is the emulsifier that keeps the oil from separating on the shelf, and vanillin is a flavoring compound that supplies the vanilla note without a vanilla bean.

The recipe has shifted once in recent memory. In November 2017 a consumer organization in Hamburg noticed the spread had gone lighter in color and compared the new label to the old one. Skim milk powder had gone from 7.5% to 8.7%, sugar had gone from 55.9% to 56.3%, and cocoa had moved down the ingredient list. Ferrero called it fine-tuning and said the amount of added sugar had not increased. Milk powder costs less than cocoa, and a lighter spread needs less of the expensive brown ingredient to look the way the jar looks. The hazelnut figure stayed at 13% through that change, as it has through every other.

The label gives no reason for that constancy, so I will. A 13 ounce jar at 13% holds about 48 grams of hazelnuts, roughly 40 kernels, and that handful accounts for close to half the cost of everything in the jar.

Piedmont has been stretching cocoa with hazelnuts for 200 years, and each time the reason was the same, there was a cocoa shortage. The first time was in Turin, 50 miles north of Alba. Napoleon's blockade of British trade cut the city off from cocoa in 1806, the hills south of town were full of hazelnuts, and the city's chocolate makers ground the two together to make the little cocoa they had go further. They called the paste gianduja. The word still means hazelnut and chocolate in one piece, and it is the root of the name Pietro Ferrero gave his first product.

Pietro Ferrero ran a pastry shop in Alba. Cocoa was rationed again after the war, and in the fall of 1945 he made a loaf his company's history describes as a surrogate made from very little cocoa, hazelnuts, sugar and vegetable oil. He called it Giandujot, wrapped it in foil and sold it to be sliced onto bread. The firm was registered in Cuneo on May 14, 1946. Pietro died in 1949. That same year the company put out a spreadable version, Supercrema, sold in kilogram jars. In 1950 his son Michele took over production at 25, and over the next decade he turned the pastry shop into a factory.

Michele and the company's chemist, Francesco Rivella, reworked Supercrema for export and gave it a name that would read the same in any language. Nut is English. The ending is Italian. The first jar of Nutella left the Alba plant on April 20, 1964, and the spread reached North America in 1983. Through all of it, the recipe was built around the one ingredient Ferrero could not count on. In 1945 that was cocoa. Today it is the hazelnut.

Below the line for paid subscribers. I follow the hazelnut from a hillside orchard on the Black Sea to the roaster, and explain why Ferrero bought the biggest nut trader in Turkey and why the Turkish competition authority opened a file on the company. The plant tour runs from roasting through refining and cooling, with the machine that sets the texture and the crystal chemistry that keeps a jar glossy for a year. Then the jar gets priced line by line, with what the 2025 frost did to it, against a store brand and an organic Italian spread at three times the price, and I close with the FDA serving size fight Ferrero has been waging since 2014 and what I buy.