Nutella's empire is making a multibillion-dollar play for America's snack market

Baby Ruth, Butterfinger, Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes.

They are all now owned by the same Italian company.

Best known for Nutella and Ferrero Rocher chocolates, Ferrero has spent much of the past decade buying established American food brands and investing in US manufacturing.

The privately held company now has more than 50 brands in its US portfolio, spanning chocolate, candy, mints, cookies, and breakfast cereal.

The expansion has transformed Ferrero’s US business.

The company says the US accounts for about 15% of its global revenue, up from about 4% a decade ago.

Since 2017, its annual US revenue has grown from roughly $600 million to about $3 billion.

Ferrero is still smaller than some of America’s biggest snack companies, like Mars and Mondelez, but its acquisition spree has put a growing collection of familiar brands under the ownership of a company once best known in the US for imported European sweets.

We visited Ferrero factories across the US to see how far its American ambitions go.

Ferrero’s US buying spree kicked off in 2017, when it acquired Fannie May, the century-old chocolate company, for $115 million.

A year later, Ferrero paid $2.8 billion for Nestlé’s US confectionery business, gaining brands including Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, and Crunch.

Then, in 2019, it acquired Kellogg’s cookie and fruit-snack businesses, adding Keebler and Famous Amos. “Ferrero takes a very different approach, which is buy well-established, loved brands, and then turn them back around,” Michael Lindsey, the president and chief business officer of Ferrero North America, told Business Insider.

That strategy gives Ferrero a way to expand without building brand recognition from scratch.

Its biggest US bet yet has taken it beyond the sweets aisle.

In February, Ferrero completed its $3.1 billion acquisition of WK Kellogg, the North American cereal company behind Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes, Corn Flakes, and Rice Krispies.

The deal also presents a challenge.

WK Kellogg reported declining sales before the acquisition was announced.

Lindsey said Ferrero has spent more than $5 billion on US investments over the past five years.

Acquisitions are only part of Ferrero’s strategy.

In 2023, the company opened a 45,000-square-foot innovation and research center in Chicago, where teams work on products for brands including Keebler, Famous Amos, Mother’s, and Fannie May.

Lindsey said Ferrero has found some notable differences between American and European tastes. “US tends to prefer milk a little bit more than dark chocolate,” he said. “Americans love peanut in a way that Europe in particular doesn’t really have peanut as part of the palate in the same way.” That preference helped inspire an unusual change to one of Ferrero’s best-known products.

In April, the company introduced Nutella Peanut, the brand’s first new flavor in more than 60 years.

Ferrero spent about five years developing it and $75 million on a production line at its Franklin Park, Illinois, factory.

The launch is part of a broader shift for Ferrero: Instead of relying solely on products developed for European consumers, it’s increasingly developing and manufacturing products specifically for Americans.

Ferrero has also invested heavily in US manufacturing.

In 2024, it opened its first chocolate-processing facility in North America in Bloomington, Illinois, producing chocolate for brands including Kinder, Ferrero Rocher, Butterfinger, and Crunch.

It has separately invested more than $200 million to add Kinder Bueno production at the site.

Ferrero’s workforce has grown alongside that expansion.

The company says it now employs more than 5,000 people across North America, compared with a few hundred roughly a decade ago.

For Ferrero, the acquisitions and factory investments are part of a longer-term effort to become a much bigger player in the American food business.

Lindsey compared Ferrero’s position in the US with Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the 1920s, when those companies were still building the scale that would eventually make them ubiquitous.

Buying familiar brands doesn’t guarantee consumers will keep buying them, and the WK Kellogg deal gives Ferrero a much larger presence in a cereal business where sales have been under pressure.

But Ferrero is no longer simply the European company selling Nutella and Ferrero Rocher to Americans.

Increasingly, it’s the company behind the American brands already sitting in their pantries.

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