As guilty food pleasures go, dipping a spoon (or, dare we say it, a pinkie finger) into a jar of Nutella is right up there with ripping open a packet of crisps, tipping your head back and shaking the contents straight into your mouth. It’s unabashedly indulgent.
While we all have our culinary vices, there’s something about this chocolate and hazelnut spread that really does seem to encourage people to abandon all sense of decorum. In a rather extreme example of this, last month, when French supermarket chain Intermarché slashed the price of Nutella by 70 per cent, complete chaos ensued – with reports of punches being thrown, hair being pulled and general bad behaviour that bordered on the farcical.
It is highly unlikely that cut-price jam, marmalade, peanut butter or even Marmite, which is famed for its divisiveness, would cause such a frenzy. So what is it about the sweet, smooth, nutty spread that inspires such adulation?
“I grew up in Paris, where street food meant crêpe stalls, and Nutella was the most popular sweet filling by a long way,” says UAE-based Syrian-German chef and cookbook author Dalia Dogmoch Soubra.
“These days, I’m well aware that Nutella is far from healthy, but I still have incredible memories of lace-thin crepes oozing with melted chocolate and hazelnuts.”
Soubra says that, for this reason, while eating Nutella is by no means an everyday occurrence, there is still a place for it in her kitchen and indeed in her cookbook, Food, Love and Life from Dalia’s Kitchen, which features a recipe for raspberry pancakes with toasted hazelnuts and Nutella swirls.
Raki Phillips, co-founder of Dubai-based online dessert delivery company SugarMoo, confides that when researching popular flavours and ingredients to use, Nutella comes out on top time and time again.
“We dig deep into what our demographic likes and dislikes, and our research has found that people particularly like pairing Nutella and bananas, hence our Nutella banana cake was born.”
It’s not just in the UAE that the taste for Nutella runs deep; the spread is a global phenomenon. It was created in the 1940s by members of the Ferrero family, who hail from the Piedmont region of north-west Italy, a gastronomic area of the world, famed not just for chocolate and hazelnuts, but highly prized white truffles, too. There are now 11 Nutella factories dotted around the globe. The product is available in more than 160 countries and sales are staggering.
It’s estimated that a jar is purchased every 2.5 seconds. The brand has a huge presence on social media, too.
According to the American Nutella website, in the past three years there have been (at the time of writing) 18,565,491 tweets relating to Nutella, and it was mentioned 11.73 times per minute in tweets over the past 12 days.
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