The Nutella Empire: How Ferrero Is Conquering the US Candy Market

Baby Ruth, Butterfinger, Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes — these iconic American brands all now belong to a single Italian company. Ferrero, famous for its Nutella spread and Ferrero Rocher chocolates, has spent the past decade snapping up major American food brands and investing in local manufacturing. The privately held company now holds more than 50 brands in its US portfolio, spanning chocolate, candy, chewing gum and breakfast cereal.

The expansion has fundamentally reshaped Ferrero's US business: the company says the United States now accounts for roughly 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 $3 billion. Ferrero still trails America's biggest confectionery giants, such as Mars and Mondelez, in size, but its acquisition spree has turned a company once known for European sweets into a major owner of familiar American brands.

Ferrero's US buying spree began in 2017 with the $115 million acquisition of Fannie May, a chocolate maker with a century of history. A year later, it paid $2.8 billion for Nestlé's US confectionery business, gaining the Butterfinger, Baby Ruth and Crunch brands. In 2019, it acquired Kellogg's cookie and fruit-snack business, including the Keebler and Famous Amos brands. According to Michael Lindsey, President and Chief Business Officer of Ferrero North America, "Ferrero takes a different approach — buying well-known, beloved brands and then breathing new life into them." The strategy lets the company expand without having to build brand recognition from scratch.

The company's biggest and riskiest move yet took it beyond confectionery altogether: in February, Ferrero completed its $3.1 billion acquisition of WK Kellogg, the North American cereal maker behind Froot Loops, Frosted Flakes, Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies. The deal doubles as a stress test of sorts — WK Kellogg had reported declining sales even before the acquisition was announced. Lindsey noted that Ferrero has poured more than $5 billion into US investments over the past five years.

Alongside its acquisitions, Ferrero has also been working hard to tailor its products to American tastes. In 2023, the company opened a 45,000-square-foot innovation and research center in Chicago. As Lindsey observes, "milk chocolate is preferred over dark chocolate in the US, and Americans like peanuts to a degree not typically seen in Europe." That insight drove the creation of Nutella Peanut, unveiled in April as the brand's first new flavor in more than 60 years. Developing the product took the company five years and $75 million to build a production line at a plant in Illinois.

Ferrero is also shifting manufacturing to US soil: in 2024, it opened its first chocolate-processing plant in North America, in Bloomington, Illinois, where it makes chocolate for the Kinder, Ferrero Rocher, Butterfinger and Crunch brands. The company's North American workforce has grown as well, now topping 5,000 employees, up from just a few hundred a decade ago. Lindsey likens Ferrero's current position in the US to that of Coca-Cola and Pepsi in the 1920s, when those companies were still building the scale that would later make them ubiquitous. Bold as the comparison is, buying familiar brands is no guarantee that consumers will keep choosing them — especially with sales under pressure in the cereal market.