From the most personal memories to that day when one of the most famous products in the world was created. In an interview with Corriere della Sera, Maria Franca Fissolo Ferrero talked about his years together with Michele Ferrerothe entrepreneur who revolutionized the business world in Italy who passed away in 2015.
Fissolo Ferrero, president of Ferrero International, spoke about that day when Michele Ferrero invented the name Nutella. “We were in Frankfurt where there had been a celebration of our German activity”, we read in Mario Calabresi’s interview with Ferrero’s widow on Courier. “At 5.30pm we returned to the hotel, his mother was also there and we had to go to dinner at 6pm, as was the custom in Germany. But he said he would go out for a moment. The window of the room overlooked the Main and I saw him walking back and forth along the river together with his closest collaborator, Severino Chiesa. Half an hour passed, then an hour, her mother impatiently wanted to go down and call him, I held her back telling her that she must have something important on her mind. After two hours I came down and met him in the hall, we got in the lift and he said to me: ‘Maria, don’t tell me anything, my head must be free, give me a moment more time because I’m almost there’. He stood at the window staring at the river and then turned and said to me: ‘Nutella’. I looked at him like you look at a madman and said: ‘What are you talking about? What is Nutella?’. And he, as if he had a vision, answered me: ‘It’s the name of the product that will race around the world’. I would have seen that fever in his eyes again for the idea ofKinder egg: to convince mothers and grandmothers to buy it, he explained to me, he had to put more milk and less cocoa and a little surprise inside. And then he lit up: ‘It will be Easter all year round’”.
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The Ferrero Foundation
Among the characteristics of the Ferrero Group there is undoubtedly the attention towards corporate welfare and the satisfaction of workers and those who have been in the company, even after retirement. For this reason, the Piera, Pietro and Giovanni Ferrero Foundation was founded in 1983. “Michele Ferrero”, we read on the Foundation’s website, “has always strongly wanted those who had worked alongside him for the growth of the company, investing material and intellectual resources, and demonstrating a commitment and team spirit that went well beyond the formal working relationship, they also found in retirement age the opportunity to be active, valid and incisive people on their own and others’ lives, in an environmental and emotional framework of security and solidarity”.
But to tell how the idea for this Foundation was born it was the same Fissolo Ferrero al Courier. And to do so it starts from an accident on the French Riviera. “We were in a restaurant by the sea,” recalled Fissolo Ferrero, “at the end of lunch Michele told me that he was sleepy and that he would take a nap in the car before leaving again. I went for a walk up the hill, but on the way down I fell: I couldn’t walk anymore and there were no cell phones. When he woke up and couldn’t find me he came looking for me: I had broken my knee. That evening, when we returned home from the emergency room, we talked for a long time and he said to me: ‘While we were in the hospital I thought about how many good things we have done in life, we have been very lucky, but something great is missing, something that gives back what we had‘. Thus the Ferrero Foundation was born. We have done things that I am very proud of, including offering a different quality of aging to all those who have worked with us: I think of the gyms, the social programs, the healthcare, the laboratories but also of happy moments such as the inclusion of the elderly in the activities we offer for children”.
Then a thought also for his son Giovanni, heir to the Group. “Ferrero continues to grow, Giovanni carried on his father’s legacy“, concluded Fissolo Ferrero.
The Ferrero heritage
According to the billionaire rankings of Forbes, Maria Franca Fissolo Ferrero has assets of 2.1 billion dollars. Her husband Michele Ferrero passed away in February 2015, leaving most of the company to their son Giovanni who now presides over the company. Giovanni Ferrero is the richest man in Italy, with a fortune estimated at Forbes of about 43 billion dollars.
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