The Mysterious Reason Why The 'N' In Nutella Is Black

Have you ever eaten a peanut butter sandwich and decided it just wasn't sweet enough? Then you might just want to reach for a jar of Nutella — but, then again, you probably don't need us to tell you that. The hazelnut and chocolate spread has been gracing pieces of toast since the 1960s, and it can even be used in a Nutella grilled cheese (don't knock it until you try it). But did you notice something strange about its logo? That's right — the very first letter is colored black, as opposed to the cheerful red of the rest of the remaining six letters. What gives? Oh, just a bit of trademark dodging, that's all.

You see, when Nutella first started out in Italy, there was apparently another brand that went by the same name and which had an all-red logo, much like Nutella's. The inventors of Nutella, Pietro Ferrero and his son Michele, decided that tweaking the logo to turn the first letter black was enough to differentiate it from the existing brand, which seems to have worked out okay. It's worth noting, however, that there's no record of this mysterious non-Nutella Nutella brand ever existing, let alone what its logo might have been, so a lot of this is just conjecture. Still, it's as plausible an explanation as any, right?

Nutella is such a perfectly catchy, pleasing-to-the-ear brand name that it's hard to imagine the product existing without it. But Nutella, or a product very much like it, was sold by Ferrero starting in 1951, 12 years before Nutella as we know it hit the shelves. The original paste, called Giandujot, was transformed into a spread and sold as SuperCrema — gianduja is the Italian name for a mixture of blended chocolate and hazelnut. It was a welcome treat after the cocoa shortages of World War II, and, soon enough, Ferrero began to angle towards expanding to other countries. (If the name sounds familiar, yes, the Ferrero family's company is also behind Ferrero Rocher chocolates, and it's the same candy giant that bought the Kellogg cereal brand.)

There was just one small problem. In 1962, the Italian parliament passed a law that said brands couldn't sell products with misleading names. That meant the Ferreros had to either explain exactly what was so "super" about their SuperCrema or change the name. As hilarious as it is to imagine a bunch of straight-faced bureaucrats trying to figure out what makes a hazelnut spread objectively "super," Ferrero decided it would be easier to just change the name — and now, over 60 years later, Nutella remains the gold standard for hazelnut cocoa spreads.