hazelnuts

Roasted at the very last moment

Hazelnuts are one of the carefully selected ingredients used to prepare some of our most loved products, like Kinder Bueno. We start from whole hazelnuts and roast them at the very last moment when creating our products, to retain their flavour in our recipes.

Experts in selecting and roasting the hazelnuts

Over the years we have developed a deep expertise in selecting and in processing hazelnuts.

We only source whole, shelled and un-toasted hazelnuts and we take a lot of care in selecting them and monitoring them from tree to harvest and throughout transport and toasting.

When hazelnuts arrive at our factories, we carry out quality controls to make sure that they meet our strict standards. Finally we process and roast 100% of our hazelnuts ourselves, to guarantee that their quality, aroma and freshness is best maintained, enhancing the taste of our products.

We roast them in our factories, next to the production lines, right before combining them in our recipes together with the other ingredients. In each of our plants we have a "master roaster", who carefully calibrates the parameters of the roaster depending on the origin of the hazelnuts, their moisture and size, in order to enhance their fragrance.

We roast the hazelnuts in batches of the same calibre to ensure better sensory uniformity and adopt low temperatures and slow processes. Every day the experts in our laboratories carry out specific tests to assess the hazelnuts aroma, taste and texture at every stage in the process.

Where they come from

Our hazelnuts come from orchards in different parts of the world, but mainly from Turkey and Italy, where they are harvested between August and September.

To ensure the availability of quality and fresh hazelnuts throughout the year we have also established hazelnut farms in countries from the Southern Hemisphere like Chile, Argentina, South Africa, and Australia. Through these agrifarms Ferrero is working with local farmers to develop a sustainable business model, sharing and promoting good agricultural practices through nurseries, training, agronomic assistance.

Responsible sourcing and traceability

We work closely with farmers, mostly smallholders, to empower them with knowledge of good agricultural and social practices for hazelnuts. Within this program we have also developed a hazelnut Production Standard in collaboration with SCS (Scientific Certification Systems) Global Services, a leading global certification and sustainability provider. The standard encompasses four major areas: Good Social Practices, Good Agricultural Practices, Post-Harvest Quality and Traceability. Every year SCS Global Services, together with local auditing firms, carries out specific audits of farmers chosen at random.

In January 2021, Ferrero published a Charter document dedicated to hazelnuts, the Charter is applicable across all our hazelnut sourcing with an approach that is based on ensuring compliance with our policies all along our value chain, identifying specific commitments based on selected priorities and initiatives.

Following the launch of our Hazelnut Charter, we developed our Hazelnut Action Plan and released our first Progress Report.

Our hazelnuts are already 100% traceable in some countries like Chile and USA, and our aim is to reach full traceability down to farm level of all our hazelnuts globally by 2023.

To help achieve this goal, we are partnering with Sourcemap, a leading provider of supply chain mapping and digital transparency.