Inside Ferrero's Factory: More Secretive Than Area 51

Source: My First Million | Published: 2026-07-31T13:00:00Z

A journalist who gained rare access to a Ferrero factory found it more locked-down than Area 51—armed guards protect proprietary production machinery that no outsider is ever meant to see.

Customer feedback was blunt: too hard to spread.

A Failed Product That Became Nutella

He rebuilt the formula from scratch, turning the chocolate into a soft, spreadable paste, packed into glass jars, and named it Supercrema. This was Nutella's ancestor.

When the government later banned the word "Crema" in food product names, his son Michele took over, reworked the formula to make the hazelnut flavor more pronounced and aromatic, and renamed it Nutella. What sits in those brown glass jars on supermarket shelves today was forged through a generation of complaints and iterative reformulation.

Bitter cocoa powder only becomes what it is after enough butter and sugar. The raw material is bitter — that's easy to forget.

Tic Tac Was Designed to Be Given Away

Michele also spotted a structural problem in the breath mint market. At the time, mints came in bulky metal tins — awkward to open, worse to share. If you wanted to offer someone a piece, they had to reach in and rummage through a pile of candy just to grab one. The whole experience was anti-social.

He redesigned the container — a small, transparent flip-top box that could flick out a single mint with a light tap. More importantly, he redefined the product itself. Tic Tac's advertising didn't lead with fresh breath. It kept showing one person placing a Tic Tac into another person's open palm. The candy was a social tool — something to give, not just something to eat.

Owning a box of Tic Tacs meant you could offer someone a small, spontaneous moment of delight. That positioning made it a natural fit for pop culture, because the name itself — "Tic Tac" — is fun to say, almost onomatopoeic. Ads even ended with a question mark: "Tic Tac?" — a standing invitation.

Three Generations, Three Completely Different Playbooks

The Ferrero family now does around $20 billion in annual revenue. The third-generation heir is Italy's richest person, with a personal fortune of roughly $40 billion.

Three generations, three distinct business philosophies.

The grandfather was a tinkerer — he got the first product wrong, fixed it, and found his footing, but never achieved a breakout hit. His son Michele brought genuine product innovation: Nutella's modern formula, the reinvention of the breath mint, and later the Kinder chocolate line and Kinder Surprise. Each of these products became a benchmark in its category. They had nothing to do with each other — each was its own independent explosion.

The third generation took a different route entirely: stop inventing, and start acquiring other people's neglected brands. Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, Crunch — household names in America that had lost their momentum. He bought them one by one and rebuilt them. What this generation is doing, in today's terms, is value investing in the consumer goods space.

The Factory Is More Locked Down Than Area 51

For a long stretch, Ferrero was one of the most secretive family food businesses on earth. Decades without a single media interview. Factories never open to the public. A journalist who somehow managed a visit later wrote that he expected something out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — what he found felt closer to Area 51: armed guards, strict controls.

The reason is specific: they use proprietary manufacturing machinery they developed themselves, and they have no intention of letting competitors see any of it. Nutella's formula, the mechanics of their machines — all classified. The founder's public photographs almost always show him in sunglasses. He simply didn't want to be seen.

Only in recent years has the family begun making occasional public appearances. They didn't use secrecy as a marketing strategy. Secrecy was instinct, habit, the way they ran their empire.

Six to Sixteen: A Window You Can't Get Back

Investor Mohnish Pabrai has one criterion for the CEOs he backs: if they didn't run a lemonade stand or some kind of small hustle at age ten or eleven, he mostly passes. His reasoning is that real entrepreneurs start early — always.

He says there's neuroscience behind it. A person's core character is largely set by age six or seven. From six to sixteen, there's roughly a ten-year golden window — if you find something you're genuinely obsessed with during that period, the brain is highly plastic, and repeated immersion creates a depth of specialization that compounds beyond what most people reach later. Warren Buffett bought his first stock at eleven and has thought about business and investing every day since. MrBeast said he decided at eleven he'd be a YouTuber — by his mid-twenties he'd been doing it for nearly twenty years. "You think I'm talented. I've just been doing this longer than you."

Lamine Yamal entered La Masia at seven and spent his entire development steeped in football. Being named one of the world's best players at eighteen isn't mysterious.

Pabrai's own golden window was time spent helping with his father's jewelry business. The business ran at a loss for years, and from age eight, Pabrai was expected to help figure out why. He listened to his father talk through payment terms and excess inventory, piecing together why a business with strong sales never had any cash on hand — he was internalizing the concepts of revenue, profit, and cash flow before he had words for them.

Taking Kids to the Showroom Beats Hiring a Coach

Shaan says what he actually wants for his own kids isn't intensive specialized training — not the tiger dad regime of "5am runs every morning." His instinct is more like taking them to Costco for the free samples: expose them to enough different things and see what makes their eyes light up.

He points to his friend Ramon van Meer. Ramon became a single father when his son Victor was two. Around age seven, Ramon started bringing Victor into real business negotiations. When he sold a company, Victor was about ten — he sat through the entire meeting without saying a word. Afterward, Ramon asked him: did that person seem trustworthy to you? What would you have done?

When Ramon traveled to China to meet manufacturers, Victor came too, sitting in the corner watching the whole thing. After the meeting: what did you think of that factory?

Shaan notes that no child will give you a satisfying answer in these moments. "It was fine." "Kind of interesting." They won't say "Dad, I finally grasped the fundamentals of cash flow management today." But those scenes get stored somewhere. At the most neuroplastic stage of development, they leave a mark.

School is a highly standardized conveyor belt — eight hours a day, the same content as every other kid. You happen to love photosynthesis? You happen to love trigonometry? Almost certainly not. By the time you're thirty and realize you might love podcasting, or baking, or something else entirely — that discovery window is long gone.

The Quietest Person in the Room

Shaan recently attended a dinner where he was seated next to a remarkably low-key man — quiet, unassuming, easy to overlook. The two got talking about AI, and the man started describing how his firm uses it to make trading decisions — at timescales measured in fractions of fractions of a second. Shaan said he didn't even know the name of the unit the man was referring to.

He looked the man up afterward. Founder of one of the top financial services firms in the world, with profits running into the tens of billions — one of the highest profit-per-employee institutions on the planet.

The man mentioned they'd been doing AI-related work for a long time, before the term existed. The new wave of technology made things easier, but the underlying logic had been running for years — their own data centers, their own algorithmic infrastructure, all of it built before any of this was fashionable.

Shaan asked him: what makes your firm great? The man paused, then said: "I think the culture is solid, the compensation is competitive, and the offices are nice." That was the answer from the founder of one of the highest-paying institutions on earth.

On their way out, they took a wrong turn and ended up in the service elevator, wandering the building for twenty-five minutes. Shaan barely held back the line: "How many billionaires does it take to find the exit?"

Ben Wilson's Journal

Six weeks ago, Ben Wilson received his diagnosis: stage four lung cancer, spread to the spine and brain. He had never smoked, never drank. He is a Mormon with four children, all under five.

In six weeks, he accomplished the following: sold his house and moved closer to his primary physician; launched a $400,000 crowdfunding campaign; drew up a will and put all his affairs in order; ran a relentless schedule of hospital appointments while simultaneously pursuing both conventional and experimental treatments.

When Shaan went to see him, Ben had a journal with him — the cover read "0 to 365." He said he planned to fill all three hundred and sixty-five days. Maybe he won't finish it, but he intends to try. He hopes this journal will have a sequel someday, something his children can read. If not, he said, he's at peace with that — he told Shaan he is "looking forward to meeting his Creator."

Ben hosts a podcast called How to Take Over the World, about history's great conquerors — Napoleon, Caesar, the ones who built empires and changed civilizations.

Being That Person and Achieving That Thing Are Not the Same

Sam said on the show that he listened to Ben's episode two or three times — the second time in the car with his mother.

He said watching Ben now made him truly understand the difference between achieving greatness and becoming a great person. Napoleon's story is the former. What Ben is doing is the latter. The goals set in youth — Forbes 30 Under 30, the first million in the bank — those are achievements. The way Ben is facing this: the journal, the steadiness, that line "I'm looking forward to it" — that's something else.

Shaan said his own reactions to everyday setbacks are nowhere near what "great" looks like. His takeaway wasn't "prepare for the worst." It was this: if you respond better to the small things every day, those responses accumulate into something real — something you can actually draw on when the moments that matter finally arrive.

The qualities Ben is showing at his hardest moment — calm, focus, the absence of self-pity — didn't suddenly materialize after the diagnosis. Shaan's read is that Ben has always been this person. We're only seeing it now.