Italy fights hazelnut cream-filled civil war
MILAN — As Marianna Farina and her husband did some Christmas shopping on a windy night in Milan, she noticed lots of people walking around with small brown packages of cookies.
“I was curious,” she said. “Because I had heard about the cookie wars.”
She had found her way to a promotional pavilion set up to hype the introduction of Pan di Stelle Biscocrema, a new hazelnut cream-filled cookie by the venerable Italian breakfast brand, famous for its round cocoa cookies dotted with 11 white sugar stars.
About a month earlier, Nutella, the juggernaut of hazelnut spreads, had encroached on Pan di Stelle’s turf by introducing, after what the company said were 10 years and $133 million in research and development, Nutella Biscuits. Farina had tried and liked them. Now she bit into the Pan di Stelle cookie. She liked it, too. “It’s a tough one,” she said.
In the popular imagination, Italy is a country of ripe tomatoes, fresh pasta, virgin olive oil and other staples of the Mediterranean diet. In practice, increasingly corpulent Italians — and especially Italian children — are united by an insatiable hunger for snack food.
Children eat cookies for breakfast. So do many of their parents. The supermarket aisles are full of breakfast cookies and snacks called merendine, which, generally speaking, are industrialized miniatures of traditional Italian cakes and tarts. It’s all more Hostess than homemade, but, in a country of regional cuisines, it is also the sugary, sticky stuff that binds.
And so the Christmas cookie battle between two cultural and culinary touchstones, Pan di Stelle and Nutella, and their superpower parent companies, the pasta giant Barilla and the chocolate giant Ferrero, strikes right at the Italian aorta.
The civil war, with competing philosophies on health, deforestation, liberty and cream filling, has roots in the postwar boom. The website Merendine Italiane, an authority on Italian snacks, reports that the first Italian snack was a miniature version of the Motta Panettone Christmas cake in the 1950s.
In 1964, the Italian and global junk food landscape was transformed by Michele Ferrero, who created Nutella. By 1984, the cocoa-hazelnut spread had permeated Italian culture, even appearing in the 1984 film Bianca, in which Nanni Moretti, the darling director of the Italian left, eats in the nude out of a shoulder-height vat of Nutella. An ode to Nutella, written mostly in pig Latin, (“Nutella Nutellae”) has sold 1.5 million copies since it was published in 1993. Yet the breakfast cookie market was cornered by Barilla and its white-bread, family values-promoting subsidiary, Mulino Bianco — whose very name has become synonymous in Italy with storybook perfection.
In 1983, it introduced Pan di Stelle as chocolate breakfast biscuits. It also acquired fanatics. Silvia Proserpio, a 41-year-old graphic designer in Milan, eats them every day for breakfast, and sometimes after lunch. “It’s all about the stars,” she said. “The stars make you think of something beautiful, outer space, or a dream.”
In January 2018, Barilla made a move. It introduced jars of Pan di Stelle Crema, a spread made from “100% Italian hazelnuts and ‘dreamlike’ chocolate,” the company’s news release said.
Ferrero was not about to let the aggression go unanswered. The company raised the stakes in early 2019 by quietly dipping across the Italian border and testing Nutella Biscuits in other countries. In April, it rolled out the cookie in France to start spreading buzz and demand among Italians living and traveling abroad. “This is our modus operandi,” said Claudia Millo, a Nutella spokeswoman.
And then, as it unleashed a take-no-prisoners publicity campaign, with ads for the cookies papering subway stations, glowing on television screens, hanging from the rafters of Rome’s main train station, they brought Nutella Biscuits home to Italy in November. It was an enormous success. Nutella sold 5.9 million boxes of cookies in its first four weeks, according to IRI, a sales data company.
A month later, Pan di Stelle answered, unveiling Pan di Stelle Biscocrema during a press event at a rooftop bar in Milan decorated with star-shaped lights and catered with the cookies, which are topped with a solid star made of cream. “They’re a gem, a piece of art,” said Julia Schwoerer, the deputy chairwoman of the Mulino Bianco and Pan di Stelle marketing division.
But Barilla, which has invested in a foundation dedicated to environmental sustainability and better nutrition (including, of course, plenty of grains), wants to make it clear that the cookies are occasional treats, not daily bread.