Michele Ferrero

Michele Ferrero was born in 1925 in Alba, a small town in Italy's Piedmont region, where his father Pietro ran a modest pastry and confectionery shop. During and after the Second World War, cocoa was scarce and expensive, so Pietro experimented with mixing a small amount of chocolate into a paste made largely from the region's abundant hazelnuts, creating an affordable sweet treat that could be sliced and spread on bread for families who could not afford chocolate on its own.

Michele joined the family business as a young man and, after his father's death in 1949, took over alongside his uncle, refining the hazelnut paste recipe over several years. In 1964 the company launched a smoother, creamier spreadable version under the name Nutella, aimed squarely at ordinary breakfast tables rather than as a luxury confection, and it became an enormous, enduring success across Europe and eventually the world.

Ferrero built the wider company on the same instinct for affordable indulgence, later launching Kinder chocolate and Tic Tac mints, and expanded internationally while keeping the firm's headquarters and much of its culture rooted firmly in Alba. He was known for extensive worker welfare provisions at the company's factories, including health clinics, subsidised housing and family support, reflecting a paternalistic but genuinely generous approach to his workforce that echoed older Italian industrial traditions.

He remained an intensely private man who rarely gave interviews despite becoming one of Italy's richest people, and stayed close to Alba for his entire life, dying there in 2015.