Maria Franca Fissolo is the widow of Michele Ferrero, who built Ferrero Group into one of the world’s leading sweets companies, best known for its iconic Nutella chocolate hazelnut spread, Kinder chocolates and Tic-Tac mints. Ferrero died in February 2015, but the family business lives on. Her son Giovanni, who took over as co-CEO in 1987, continues to lead the company and has reiterated plans to keep it in family hands. His brother Pietro, who ran it with him for more than two decades, died in 2011 during a bicycle training ride in South Africa. It was Maria’s father-in-law, Pietro, who started the business during World War II in the northern Italian city of Alba, where he set up a lab to supply his wife’s pastry shop. Faced with rationed cocoa, he used the region’s plentiful hazelnuts to create the spread that would eventually become Nutella. In 1949 Pietro died, briefly leaving the company in his brother’s hands before his son Michele took over.
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