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Italian Nutella maker to buy Britain’s Thorntons

The board of British chocolate maker Thorntons said on Monday it had agreed a takeover deal by Italian rival Ferrero that values the firm at about £111.9 million (€156.2 million, $177.4 million).

Published: 22 June 2015 12:27 CEST

Italian Nutella maker to buy Britain's Thorntons

A Thorntons shop in Oxfordshire in the UK. Photo: Stratford490/Wikicommons

Thorntons chairman Paul Wilkinson urged shareholders to accept the offer of 145 pence a share, a 42.9 percent increase on Friday's closing price.

“Ferrero is a successful global confectionery business with a strong family heritage and as such represents a good cultural fit for Thorntons,” he said in a statement.

“The board of Thorntons therefore has given its unanimous recommendation for the offer from Ferrero.”

The Italian company, which makes Nutella spread and the Ferrero Rocher and Kinder chocolates, said it wanted to expand further in an important market.

“Our business was founded nearly 60 years ago out of a passion for chocolate and with a commitment to quality,” said chief executive Giovanni Ferrero.

“We delivered our best ever results in the UK in 2014, giving us confidence that now is the right time to broaden our roots in this important market.”

Thorntons was established in 1911 and employs about 3,500 people, many of them located at its key factory in Alfreton in Derbyshire in northern England.

Ferrero was at the centre of a Franco-Italian spat last week when France's Ecology Minister Ségolène Royal explained on a popular French television programme that abstaining from Nutella was one measure to protect the environment – due to the spread's controversial palm oil content.

“We have to replant masses of trees because there's been a massive deforestation, which also leads to climate change,” she said.

“For example, we have to stop eating Nutella because of its palm oil, which is seeing trees getting replaced and causing considerable damage.”

Her comments provoked an angry backlast from her Italian counterpart Gian Luca Galletti who tweeted that Royal should “leave italian products alone”, adding that it would be “bread and Nutella for dinner tonight”.

The French minister later apologized.

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Swiss chocolate consumption falls to 40-year low in pandemic

Photo: STEFAN WERMUTH / AFP

Swiss chocolate makers were perhaps expecting a sweet spot as people turned to comfort food during the pandemic but are instead facing devastating 2020 figures showing consumption in Switzerland melting to a 40-year-low.

Chocosuisse, the national federation of Swiss chocolate makers, painted a bleak picture this week of the impact that the Covid-19 crisis had taken on the industry, with plunging production, exports and even consumption.

And Lindt and Sprungli, one of the wealthy Alpine nation’s most famous chocolate makers, published its annual results Tuesday detailing a nearly 11-percent drop in its 2020 revenues, to 4 billion Swiss francs ($4.4 billion, 3.6 billion euros).

Amid lockdowns and a pandemic-fuelled economic crisis last year, it may not be surprising that Swiss chocolate makers overall saw their production fall, shrinking 10 percent compared to 2019, to 180,000 tonnes, according to Chocosuisse.

And exports, which account for nearly 70 percent of Swiss chocolate makers’ revenues, fell by more than that, slumping 11.5 percent in 2020, to 126,000 tonnes.

More surprising perhaps is that the country renowned for its love of high-quality cocoa products, where people gobble up more chocolate per capita than anywhere else in the world, also saw consumption drop.

Lowest since 1982

In fact, annual consumption fell to below the symbolic threshold of 10 kilogrammes (22 pounds) per person, dipping to 9.9 kilos — the lowest level since 1982.

A major contributor to the drop, Chocosuisse chief Urs Furrer told AFP, was the steep decline in foreign tourists, who tend to tip the consumption scales.

The per capita chocolate consumption in a country is calculated by dividing the volumes sold by the number of inhabitants, leading to inflated figures in Switzerland, where chocolate treats are a favourite souvenir.

“It would be impossible to calculate the exact consumption of residents, because in shops, the salespeople do not know if their customer lives in Switzerland or is a tourist,” Furrer said.

But the absence of tourists is not the whole explanation for last year’s decline. In Switzerland as elsewhere, the health crisis and accompanying restrictions including forced teleworking, has had a clear impact on consumption habits.

“Consumption also dropped in areas that are usually crowded with passers-by, like train stations and city centres,” Furrer said, pointing out that chocolate was often an impulse buy by people on the move.

Physical distancing requirements have also taken a toll on social occasions where handing over a box of chocolates might be expected.

“The sale of gift boxes of pralines has also declined,” Furrer said.

At the same time however, the sale of raw products like chocolate masse usually used by chocolatiers, bakeries and patisseries rose last year as more amateurs delved into making their own sweets at home.

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