Featured Image Credit: (Deb Lindsey for The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Topics: Food And Drink, Viral
Brenna Cooper
Topics: Food And Drink, Viral
Earlier this month it was confirmed that Italian chocolatier and Nutella creator Francesco Rivella had passed away at the age of 97 on Valentine's Day.
The news that the father of such an iconic sweet treat passed away on a day typically associated with the giving and receiving of chocolate gave many sugar lovers pause for thought.
And it turned out that plenty of people were all thinking the same thing.
Why the hell is the 'N' in the Nutella logo coloured black when the rest of it is red?
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Let's discuss.
It didn't take long after Rivella's death to see questions about the lettering decision surface on the internet once again, which one response to the 97-year-old's death on social media reading: "NOOOOOO I wanted to ask him why the N is black."
"Gone too soon, now we'll never know," a second person replied.
Curiosity about the stylistic decision isn't anything new either, with a simple search of Nutella in TikTok bringing up dozens of people staring at their jars of chocolate spread and looking confused.
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Fortunately for all of these confused souls, Rivella didn't take the secret to his grave, with the decision being made to avoid a trademark issue (according to both Startuptalky and Logos World).
When Rivella created the creamy hazelnut spread back in 1964 alongside Michele Ferrero, son of the founder of the Ferrero dynasty, it was originally called Supercrema gianduja before morphing into the Nutella we all know and love today.
According to Food Non-Fiction, the sudden rebrand came about after a change in legislation on food marketing in Italy. The new law prohibited the use of words such as 'super' in brand names, due to the belief that it may mislead customers.
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The pair then settled on Nutella, which is a combination of the word 'nut' and the Italian word for sweet, 'ella', which accurately sums up the contents within the jars.
However they soon came into another roadblock when securing the perfect moniker their invention.
When trademarking their renamed treat, as there was another trademark in place for Nutella written in all red at the time. Rather than return to the drawing board, the pair changed the colour of the first letter from red to black — and the rest is history.
The iconic colour scheme has since been replicated throughout several of parent company Ferrero's other brands, with the Kinder logo also sporting the same colour scheme.