Where People Got The Wild Idea That Nutella Is A Health Food

I lived in Italy for 10 years, and it seemed like everyone was obsessed with Nutella. I'd see people spreading it on bread at breakfast and packing it into school lunches. Heck, they'd if presented with the opportunity.

At this time, a lot of these people, and others all around the world, genuinely believed that this spread (and ) was good for them, as if the product were on a par with yogurt or oatmeal. That idea didn't come out of nowhere. In the United States, Nutella ran an infamous ad campaign that framed the chocolate-hazelnut spread as being part of a nutritious breakfast.



One commercial showed a busy mom serving it to her kids on multi-grain toast, claiming it was made from "simple, quality ingredients like hazelnuts, skim milk, and a hint of cocoa." There was no mention that sugar and palm oil are the spread's two main ingredients. This messaging, and other marketing schemes including the line "an example of a tasty yet balanced breakfast" which featured on the product's packaging for years, implied that Nutella belonged in the same category as protein-packed breakfast staples like peanut butter.

The campaign was even misleading enough to spark a class-action lawsuit in 2011, which Ferrero, Nutella's parent company, settled for just over $3 million a year later. Still, by that point, the health halo had stuck, and many people were convinced they'd found another tasty, healthy spread to put on their toast. Nutella is anything but healthy The Nutella marketing strategy worked so well because it played to parents' desire for convenience without guilt.

Nutella ads leaned into the idea of it being a staple of busy mornings, showing the spread as a quick and wholesome breakfast solution. In other words, they marketed Nutella as something you could feel good about putting on your kid's toast before they went to school. In these ads, Nutella was often positioned right alongside fruit, cereal, and juice, like it was just another part of a balanced meal.

But, the numbers tell a very different story. Just two tablespoons of Nutella contains 21 grams of sugar. That's only 2 grams less than the amount of sugar in an entire KitKat.

This same serving also contains 12 grams of fat thanks to the large amount of palm oil in the product. Because of the presence of lots of fat and sugar, this small serving of Nutella contains 200 calories. Once people realized they were essentially giving their kids , the backlash came fast.

Two mothers filed the lawsuit that Ferrero ended up settling for over $3 million. This lawsuit also meant that Nutella had to change its packaging, removing the sentence "an example of a tasty yet balanced breakfast" from its jars. The ads that inspired the lawsuit were also pulled from the air.

Thanks to this, Nutella's reputation as a healthy food has diminished over the years. Recommended.