Every year, hazelnut farmers around the world harvest their crops knowing that a single customer will buy a staggering portion of their entire output. That customer? Ferrero, the Italian confectionery giant behind Nutella.

The numbers are almost hard to believe. Ferrero purchases approximately 25% of the global hazelnut supply annually—roughly 100,000 metric tons of the nuts. To put that in perspective, if hazelnuts were a country's main export, Ferrero alone would be their biggest trading partner by a massive margin.

Why So Many Hazelnuts?

Nutella isn't just hazelnut-flavored—it's built on hazelnuts. Each jar contains about 50 hazelnuts, and when you're selling millions of jars daily across 160 countries, those nuts add up fast.

But Nutella isn't Ferrero's only hazelnut-hungry product:

Ferrero Rocher – The gold-wrapped chocolate balls with a whole hazelnut center
Kinder Bueno – Hazelnut cream-filled wafer bars
Pocket Coffee – Espresso-filled chocolates with hazelnut notes

Combined, these products create an insatiable demand that shapes the entire global hazelnut industry.

The Turkey Connection

About 70% of the world's hazelnuts come from Turkey, grown along the Black Sea coast where the climate is perfect for the finicky trees. Ferrero has become so dependent on this supply that the company has invested heavily in Turkish hazelnut infrastructure.

When a late frost hit Turkey's hazelnut crop in 2014, Nutella prices spiked worldwide. A single weather event in one country's orchards sent ripples through supermarket shelves from Tokyo to Toronto.

Ferrero's Backup Plan

Recognizing the risk of depending so heavily on one region, Ferrero has been aggressively expanding hazelnut farming elsewhere. The company now operates massive orchards in Chile, Australia, South Africa, and the Republic of Georgia.

They've even partnered with farmers in Oregon and other parts of the United States, hoping to diversify their supply chain. It's essentially agricultural insurance—spread the growing across hemispheres, and a bad harvest in one region won't bring production to a halt.

The Scale of Sweet Obsession

Consider this: Ferrero produces enough Nutella each year to circle the globe 1.8 times if spread in a continuous line. The company's factory in Alba, Italy—where Nutella was invented in 1964—runs around the clock, churning out about 365,000 tons of the spread annually.

That's a lot of hazelnuts. A quarter of every hazelnut harvested on Earth, to be exact.

So next time you twist open a jar of Nutella, remember: you're dipping into a supply chain so massive that it literally shapes global agriculture. That creamy spread represents one company's dominance over an entire crop—one delicious, hazelnut-filled spoonful at a time.

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