The History of Hazelnuts — The Nut Behind Nutella's Dark Secret

One company buys a quarter of every hazelnut grown on the planet. Ferrero, the maker of Nutella, processes so many of them that it has become the single largest buyer, supplier and processor in the entire global hazelnut chain. And nearly all of those nuts come from one country, Turkey, where a BBC investigation filmed children as young as 10 dragging sacks of hazelnuts across steep hillsides for about 10 euros a day. But this story starts a lot further back than any boardroom or factory. It starts about 8,000 years ago, on a tiny island off the coast of Scotland, where someone was already roasting hazelnuts over a fire. In 1995, archaeologists digging on Collinsay, a small island in the Scottish Inner Hebrides, uncovered a pit packed with the charred remains of hundreds of thousands of hazelnut shells. The site dated to around 6,000 BC, deep in the Mesolithic period, making it one of the most significant concentrations of processed hazelnuts ever found from that era. These were not snacks grabbed in passing. The sheer volume of shells pointed to organised seasonal harvesting, on a scale that suggested entire communities were travelling to this island, specifically to gather, roast and process hazelnuts in bulk. Some researchers believe the nuts were being preserved for winter storage, or traded across long distances. These people were doing all of this thousands of years before the ancient Egyptians started planting their wheat fields. Across Britain, the story was similar. After the last ice age, around 10,000 years ago, hazel trees were among the first to recolonise the landscape. For a while, hazel was the dominant forest tree across the British Isles. Early human communities leaned on it hard. Fossils recovered from Germany, Sweden and Denmark confirmed that hazelnuts were a core part of the prehistoric European diet, going back thousands of years. Some botanists estimate that hazel has been native to Britain for somewhere between 8,000 and 11,000 years, making it one of the oldest continuously harvested food plants on the islands. Halfway around the world, a similar pattern was taking shape. In China, written sources place hazelnut cultivation as far back as 2838 BC. The Chinese considered hazelnuts one of five sacred foods bestowed by the gods, and archaeologists have since found fossilised hazelnut remains at 13 separate Neolithic sites across the country. Ancient Chinese farmers selected the best trees from wild groves and grafted their branches onto younger stock to improve yields, a technique that sounds modern but predates recorded history. The nut was not just food, it carried spiritual weight. That spiritual dimension travelled west with force. In Ireland, the Celts believed the hazelnut held the secret to all knowledge. Their mythology tells of nine hazel trees growing around a sacred pool, dropping their nuts into the water where salmon ate them and absorbed all the wisdom of the world. Catching one of those salmon meant gaining infinite knowledge. The Irish divided their island into three parts ruled by three gods, and one of them, Macool, took his name directly from the hazel tree. In Scotland and England, hazel groves marked the boundaries of sacred pagan sites, places understood as doorways to the other world. There is even a legend that the original abbey at Glastonbury was built from hazelnut branches. Wands were carved from hazelnut wood. People believed the tree could not be struck by lightning. Spirits were said to guard the unripe nuts, and the guardians had names, Melchdick in northern England and Churnmilkpeg in Yorkshire. And the Pacific Northwest tells a similar story. A recent study confirmed that indigenous peoples in what is now British Columbia had been actively transplanting and cultivating the beaked hazelnut for at least 7,000 years. These First Nations communities used every part of the tree. The twisted twigs served as rope. The stems were woven into baskets, baby carriers and fish traps. Straight chutes became arrows. Linguistic evidence shows that the word for hazelnut in the languages of northwestern British Columbia was borrowed from the coast Salish further south, suggesting a hazelnut trade network that spanned the province long before European contact. The Greeks and Romans folded hazelnuts into daily life with equal enthusiasm. Herodotus, writing around 450 BC, described hazelnut cultivation along the eastern coast of the Black Sea and documented how people extracted hazelnut oil by placing kernels in a bag and pressing them, a technique still recognizable in rural oil production today. The philosopher Theophrastus wrote detailed instructions on how to domesticate wild hazeltrees by transplanting them from their original roots. He described two varieties, one round and plump, the other long and pointed. Pliny the Elder catalogued the nut under the name Avelinia, linking it to the town of Avella near Naples. He also attributed medicinal properties to the hazelnut, recommending it for coughs when mixed with honey and pepper. Greek and Roman cooks ground hazelnuts into sauces, mixed them into desserts and featured them at elaborate banquets. The grammarian Athenaeus, writing around 200 AD, included hazelnuts in recipes for honey and nut desserts that sound like they could appear on a modern menu in Athens today. By the Middle Ages, hazelnuts had become a household staple across Europe, used in folk remedies and regional cooking from England to the eastern Mediterranean. So, for thousands of years, across dozens of cultures, on multiple continents, the hazelnut was food and symbol, survival and ceremony, carried by hand from forest floors to kitchen hearths across the entire northern hemisphere. Nobody owned the supply. Nobody controlled the trade. If you could find a tree and shake the branches, the hazelnuts were yours. That free-for-all ended in 1806, and the man who ended it had no idea he was doing it. In 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte imposed the Continental System, a sweeping trade blockade designed to crush Britain by cutting off its access to every port on the European mainland. The plan was economic warfare on a continental scale, but the blockade had a side effect nobody in Paris anticipated. It strangled the flow of cocoa beans into Europe, and in Turin, the capital of Italy's Piedmont region, that was nothing short of a catastrophe. Turin was one of the great chocolate cities of Europe. Its chocolatiers had been refining cocoa into luxury confections for over a century, and suddenly their most essential raw material became scarce and wildly expensive. Shops that had thrived for generations were staring at empty supply shelves and customers they could no longer serve. So, the chocolatiers improvised. They looked at what was growing in abundance right outside their workshop doors, in the rolling green hills of Piedmont. And the answer was hazelnut trees. Thousands of them, heavy with nuts every autumn. Hazelnuts were cheap. They were everywhere, and when roasted and ground into a fine paste, they had a texture and richness surprisingly close to cocoa powder. Turin's chocolate makers started blending ground hazelnuts into their remaining cocoa supply, stretching it further and further to keep their businesses alive. The resulting mixture was rich, smooth, aromatic, and genuinely delicious. They named it Gianduja, after a beloved carnival character from Piedmont who symbolized warmth and indulgence. What started as a desperate workaround turned into something entirely new, a confection that people wanted even after the cocoa shortage ended. It took about four decades for the technique to be truly perfected. At first, the chocolatiers were simply tossing whole or chopped hazelnuts into their chocolate to bulk it up. The result was edible, but crude. A Turin company called Cafarel is generally credited with cracking the method that made Gianduja what it became. Developing a way to roast the hazelnuts at precisely the right temperature, grind them into a fine paste, and blend that paste with cocoa so smoothly that the result was homogeneous and silky. Softer than ordinary chocolate because of the hazelnut oil, which stays liquid at room temperature. By the 1850s, Gianduja was an established product with a real commercial market. In 1852, Cafarel sold the first solid candy combining chocolate and hazelnuts on the streets of Turin. A small confection shaped like an upturned boat called a Giandujoto. It predated the invention of milk chocolate by more than 20 years, making the hazelnut chocolate combination the second solid chocolate product ever created, right behind the plain dark bar. The hazelnut had gone from ancient foraged food to the ingredient that rescued an entire city's chocolate industry during a wartime blockade. The candy survived long after the blockade ended because people kept buying it for the taste alone. And that rescue mission was going to replay itself almost exactly under much darker circumstances, less than a century later. By the 1940s, Europe was at war again. World War II brought rationing, aerial bombardments, and severe food shortages across the entire continent. Allied bombing campaigns destroyed Italian ports, rail lines, and agricultural infrastructure. International trade ground to a halt. In Italy, cocoa all but vanished from civilian markets. What little remained was reserved for military use or sold at prices that put it completely beyond the reach of ordinary working families. Sugar was heavily taxed and restricted. Butter was scarce. Even basic bread was rationed in many regions. And in the small town of Alba, nestled in those same hazelnut-rich Piedmont hills that had bailed out Napoleon's chocolatiers, a pastry chef named Pietro Ferrero was watching factory workers walk to their morning shifts, carrying nothing but bread and tomatoes. He wanted to give them something better, something sweet and filling and affordable. But he could barely get his hands on cocoa. Pietro had been experimenting in a small laboratory on Via Ratazzi since 1942, working constantly on new recipes, trying to develop cheap sweet products from whatever ingredients he could actually find. His wife helped. Workers in the town were eager to be hired by his lab because jobs were so scarce. And the solution Pietro eventually landed on was the same one Turin's chocolatiers had discovered during Napoleon's blockade 140 years earlier. He took the abundant local hazelnuts, ground them into a paste, mixed in the small amount of cocoa he could afford, added sugar and vegetable oil, and created a thick, dense, sliceable loaf. He wrapped it in aluminum foil and called it Pasta Gianduja after the same carnival character who had lent his name to the original hazelnut-chocolate blend. Workers could buy a piece, lay it on their bread, and have something that tasted like an actual treat in the middle of wartime austerity. It sold immediately. He launched it commercially in 1946 and founded the Ferrero company to produce and distribute it. But Pietro died suddenly just three years later, in 1949, leaving the entire operation to his son Michel, who was only in his mid-twenties. Michel Ferrero did not just keep the business running. He rebuilt it from the ground up. He took his father's solid loaf and transformed it into a softer, creamier spread called Supercrema, making it easier to use and more appealing to a wider audience. And then, in 1964, he renamed it. He took the English word nut, combined it with the soft Italian suffix "-ella", and called it Nutella. The name was designed to travel across borders and languages, and it did exactly that. Nutella spread through Europe during the 1960s, reaching Germany, France, and the United Kingdom, before eventually making its way around the globe. Today, Ferrero sells Nutella in more than 160 countries. The company produces over 400,000 tons of the spread every year, a weight greater than the Empire State Building. A jar is sold roughly every two and a half seconds somewhere on the planet. And the Ferrero family's confectionery empire, which also includes Ferrero Rocher, Kinder Chocolates, and Tic Tacs, pulls in more than $14 billion in annual revenue. Michel Ferrero became one of the richest men in Italy before passing the company to the next generation. Michel Ferrero did not stop at Nutella. He oversaw the creation of Ferrero Rocher in 1982, wrapping a whole hazelnut inside layers of chocolate and crushed nut pieces to create a gold-foiled luxury candy that showed up at dinner parties across the world. He launched the Kinder brand to market directly to children, and he turned a small breath mint called Refreshing Mints into Tic Tacs, which went global in the 1970s. By the time Michel died in 2015, the Ferrero group had grown into one of the largest confectionery operations on the planet, with more than 30 manufacturing facilities worldwide and a workforce approaching 50,000 employees. And at the center of all of it, requiring more raw ingredients than anything else the company made, was Nutella. That kind of scale demands a staggering volume of hazelnuts. And that is where the story cracks open. About 70% of every hazelnut grown in the world comes from Turkey, specifically from a narrow, lush corridor stretching along the southern coast of the Black Sea. The crop is spread across roughly 600,000 farms, and the average farm is tiny, around four acres. Most are family operations, tucked into steep hillsides covered in dense green canopy. They are too small to attract corporate oversight, too scattered for regulators to reach. And during the harvest season between August and September, they need thousands of extra hands to pick the crop before it falls from the trees and rots. Those hands belong to seasonal migrant workers. Many of them are Kurdish families who travel from southeastern Turkey, following a circuit of agricultural jobs that stretches from April through November, picking apples, peppers, tomatoes, and then hazelnuts. And increasingly, those workers are Syrian refugees who crossed the border fleeing a civil war, carrying no work permits, and possessing no legal protections under Turkish law. The Fair Labor Association, a Washington-based non-profit, has been assessing working conditions on Turkish hazelnut farms since 2011, first on behalf of Nestle and later in collaboration with Turkish suppliers. What they found was systemic and grinding. Workers reported widespread wage theft, perilous conditions on hillsides so steep that a stumble could mean a serious fall, and a near total absence of safety equipment or training. More than 72% of workers surveyed said they barely had enough money to survive. 99% reported working seven days a week. The workdays were punishing, often stretching from seven in the morning to seven in the evening with minimal breaks, under full sun, in heat that climbed through the afternoon. The hazelnut harvesting region centers on Ordu province, where about a third of Turkey's entire crop comes from. In Ordu alone, an estimated 20,000 seasonal workers arrive each summer, and roughly 12,000 of them are Kurdish migrants from southeastern Turkey. These families bring their children because there is no one at home to watch them, no child care available at the farms, and the extra hands, even small ones, mean more nuts picked and a slightly larger paycheck at the end of the day. The child labor is what draws the cameras. A BBC investigation sent a reporter into the hazelnut fields of Turkey's Black Sea coast and filmed children as young as 10 picking hazelnuts alongside their parents. These children earned an average of roughly 10 euros for each full day of backbreaking labor, and even from that tiny amount, employers deducted a 10% commission fee, plus charges for transportation to the farm and basic accommodation. The children's hands bled. They carried heavy sacks. Some were Syrian refugees whose families had literally nowhere else to go. Many of these kids were missing school entirely. Some had never been enrolled. They traveled with their families from harvest to harvest across hundreds of miles of Turkish countryside, and the hazelnut season was just one stop on a year-long cycle of agricultural work that consumed their childhoods. And here is the structural problem that makes all of this grind forward year after year. Turkey's labor code does not apply to agricultural operations with fewer than 50 employees. Since virtually every hazelnut farm in the country falls well below that threshold, they are effectively exempt from labor inspections, minimum wage enforcement, and safety regulations. No one is watching. The supply chain runs through middlemen called day basis. Labor brokers who recruit migrant workers from southeastern Turkey manage the crews, arrange transport, and take their cut from the workers' wages before the harvested nuts are passed along to regional traders. Those traders sell in bulk to the international commodity market, where the major candy companies buy in enormous quantities. By the time a hazelnut reaches a Ferrero processing plant, it has passed through so many hands that tracing it back to a specific farm is nearly impossible. The company buying those nuts often has no reliable way to verify whether children picked them, and the single largest buyer of Turkish hazelnuts, by a margin that dwarfs every competitor, is Ferrero. Ferrero purchases roughly 25% of the entire world's hazelnut output. Think about that number for a second. Not 25% of Turkey's crop. 25% of every hazelnut harvested on the planet in any given year. The company has inserted itself at every level of the supply chain, from farmland ownership to processing plants to finished product. It acquired Altan, Turkey's largest hazelnut producer, giving it direct control over a massive portion of the Turkish harvest. It built its own hazelnut agricultural companies in six countries, Chile, Argentina, South Africa, Georgia, Australia and Serbia, to reduce its dependence on Turkish weather patterns. It created a dedicated division called the Ferrero Hazelnut Company, or HCO, to manage sourcing on a planetary scale. No other buyer on Earth comes close to this level of vertical integration in the hazelnut market. Ferrero is not merely a customer of the hazelnut industry. Ferrero is the hazelnut industry. And yet the product at the center of this empire is not exactly what the branding suggests. Nutella's main ingredients, listed by weight, are sugar and palm oil. Together, they make up more than 50% of every jar. Hazelnuts account for about 13%. Fat-reduced cocoa powder sits at just 7.4%. The rest is skim milk and a handful of additives. Under Italian law, Nutella cannot even be classified as a chocolate cream, because it fails to meet the minimum required cocoa content. The spread that built the Ferrero dynasty is, at its recipe level, a sugar and oil product enhanced with hazelnut flavoring. That did not stop the company from running advertisements in the United States, for years, suggesting Nutella was part of a balanced, nutritious breakfast. In 2012, Ferrero paid $3 million to settle a class-action lawsuit over those misleading health claims. The palm oil carries its own controversy. In 2015, France's ecology minister publicly urged consumers to stop buying Nutella if they cared about protecting tropical rainforests, pointing to the link between palm oil demand and deforestation in Southeast Asia. The statement nearly triggered a diplomatic crisis with Italy. Ferrero responded by noting it sources roughly 170,000 metric tons of palm oil annually, representing a fraction of global production, and pointed to its membership in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil and its use of satellite monitoring to track deforestation across its supply chain. Greenpeace called Ferrero one of the more progressive major companies on palm oil sourcing. But environmental groups closer to home, in Italy's Tuscia region, where hazelnut monoculture plantations are expanding rapidly into formerly diverse landscapes, argue the company has done far less to address the ecological damage growing in its own backyard. The politics of Nutella have spilled beyond the factory floor and into national headlines. In late 2019, the Italian nationalist politician Matteo Salvini, who had publicly praised Nutella on social media for years, announced he would no longer buy the product, because it used Turkish hazelnuts instead of Italian ones. The statement landed in the middle of a broader debate about food nationalism in Italy and exposed attention at the heart of the brand. Nutella is an Italian icon, a point of national pride, but the nut that defines it comes overwhelmingly from Turkey. Ferrero responded by pointing to its investments in Italian hazelnut farming, but the damage was done. The company's dependence on Turkish supply was suddenly part of a political conversation it could not control. Climate change is tightening the pressure on all of it. In 2014, a late frost in March struck Turkey's Black Sea hazelnut belt, followed weeks later by a freak hailstorm that shredded the remaining crop. Together, they wiped out more than 30% of the country's hazelnut harvest in a single growing season. Global hazelnut prices surged by 60% practically overnight. Ferrero absorbed the hit because it could afford to. Smaller buyers were squeezed out of the market entirely, unable to compete for what remained. The crisis laid bare how dangerously concentrated the world's hazelnut supply really is. One stretch of bad weather in one region of one country and the entire global market lurches. Hazel flowers have been failing to bloom in parts of Turkey for several consecutive years now, and climate projections suggest the trend is accelerating. Giovanni Ferrero, the current company chairman and the grandson of founder Pietro, holds a personal fortune estimated at more than $22 billion. He ranks among the wealthiest people in Europe and rarely grants interviews or allows media visits to the company's headquarters in Alba. When journalists ask questions about labor conditions, a Ferrero spokesperson typically responds by email pointing to the company's hazelnut charter and its partnerships with organizations like The company says it is committed to eliminating child labor and achieving full traceability across its hazelnut supply chain. But as of the most recent available data, full traceability in Turkey, the source of the vast majority of its hazelnuts, has remained difficult to achieve. The farms are too small, the middlemen too many, and the seasonal labor force too fluid for any monitoring system to fully track. Ferrero published its hazelnut charter with three stated priorities human rights and social practices, environmental protection and sustainability, and supplier transparency. The language is polished. The commitments sound firm, but the Fair Labor Association, which Ferrero itself has partnered with, published assessment after assessment noting that child labor remained a consistent finding on the farms it visited. The company acknowledged in its own communications that child labor issues had, in its own words, deteriorated in recent years because of the Syrian refugee crisis. The problem was getting worse, not better, even as the pledges accumulated. The hazelnut started as one of the oldest, most freely available foods on the planet. For millennia, it belonged to whoever could reach a branch. It was sacred in Celtic mythology, a staple in Roman kitchens, a lifeline during two separate wartime cocoa shortages, and the accidental foundation of what became one of the largest candy empires on earth. And now it is locked inside an industrial supply chain where a 10-year-old Syrian refugee can spend 12 hours on a hillside picking nuts that will be crushed into a 13% ingredient in a jar that sells for a few dollars The next time you unscrew the lid on a jar of Nutella and spread it across a warm piece of toast, that is the full chain you are touching. 8,000 years of history, two wartime reinventions, a family fortune worth more than the annual economic output of some small nations, and somewhere at the far end of it all, a steep hillside along Turkey's Black Sea coast where the harvest still begins before the sun comes up. What connects that hillside to your breakfast table is a supply chain that has resisted serious reform for decades, not because the abuses are hidden, but because the economics work too well for the people at the top to feel any urgency to change them. 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