18 Sep Nutella spurs global rush to grow hazelnuts
Nutella, the indulgent chocolate-hazelnut spread, turns 50 this year, and it’s come a long way – from wartime make-do to global favourite today.
There’s even a “Nutella bar” in midtown Manhattan, right off Fifth Avenue, tucked inside a grand temple of Italian food called Eataly. There’s another Nutella bar at Eataly in Chicago. Here, you can order Nutella on bread, Nutella on a croissant, Nutella on crepes.
“We create a simple place,” explains Dino Borri, Eataly’s “brand ambassador”, a man so charming that he should be an ambassador for the whole Italian country.
“Simple ingredients, few ingredients. With Nutella, super-tasty, super-simple. When you are simple, the people love!”
Nutella was the product of hard times. During World War II, an Italian chocolate-maker named Ferrero couldn’t get enough cocoa, so he mixed in some ground hazelnuts instead. Then he made a soft and creamy version.
“It was one of the greatest inventions of the last century!” says Borri.
It’s a bold claim, but greatness, you have to admit, is a matter of taste. In any case, Nutella conquered Italy and, eventually, the world.
The recipe for world domination, it turns out, isn’t too complicated: Sugar, cocoa, palm oil and hazelnuts. Three of those ingredients are easy to get. Sugar, cocoa and palm oil are produced in huge quantities.Hazelnuts, though, which some people call filberts, are a different matter. Most of them come from a narrow strip of land along the coast of the Black Sea in Turkey.
Karim Azzaoui, vice president for sales and marketing at BALSU USA, which supplies hazelnuts to the US, says the hazelnut trees grow on steep slopes that rise from the Black Sea coast. The farms are small; grandparents and children help to harvest the nuts, usually by hand.
“It’s a very traditional way of life,” Azzaoui says. “The Turkish family farmers are extremely proud of the hazelnut crop, as it has been part of their family history for centuries. Farmers have been growing hazelnuts here for 2,000 years.”
Nutella is now making this traditional crop extremely trendy.
Ferrero, the Nutella-maker, now a giant company based in Piedmont, Italy, uses about a quarter of the world’s hazelnut supply — more than 100,000 tons every year.
In July Ferrero announced it had bought Turkish company Oltan, one of the world leaders in the production and marketing of hazelnuts. No financial details were disclosed, but it did say that Oltan had revenues of more than $500-m and five production plants exporting to the EU and other important markets. The deal is subject to regulatory approval.
Ferrero’s demand has pushed up hazelnut prices. And this year, after a late frost in Turkey that froze the hazelnut blossoms and cut the country’s hazelnut production in half, prices spiked even further. They’re up an additional 60 percent since the frost.
Because they’re so valuable, more people want to grow them. Farmers are growing hazelnuts in Chile and Australia [and South Africa]. America’s hazelnut orchards in Oregon are expanding.
And now, one can even find a few hazelnuts in the Northeastern United States, where they’ve never been successfully grown before. They’re standing in a Rutgers University research farm, an oasis of orchards tucked in between highways, just outside New Brunswick, NJ.
“All the green leafy things you see here are hazelnut trees. But in the beginning, they all used to die from disease,” says Thomas Molnar, a Rutgers plant scientist who is in charge of this effort.
The disease, called Eastern Filbert Blight, is caused by a fungus. Some relatives of the commercial hazelnut, native to North America, can withstand the fungus. But the European hazelnut, the kind that fetches high prices, cannot. When the fungus attacks, it ruptures the bark around each branch, and the tree dies…..