(p. B1) MILAN — As Marianna Farina and her husband did some Christmas shopping on a windy night in Milan, she noticed lots of people walking around with small brown packages of cookies.
“I was curious,” she said. “Because I had heard about the cookie wars.”
She had found her way to a promotional pavilion set up to hype the introduction of Pan di Stelle Biscocrema, a new hazelnut cream-filled cookie by the venerable Italian breakfast brand, famous for its round cocoa cookies dotted with 11 white sugar stars.
About a month earlier, Nutella, the juggernaut of hazelnut spreads, had encroached on Pan di Stelle’s turf by introducing, after what the company said were 10 years and 120 million euros (about $133 million) in research and development, Nutella Biscuits. Ms. Farina had tried and liked them. Now she bit into the Pan di Stelle cookie. She liked it, too.
“It’s a tough one,” she said.
. . .
(p. B6) And so the Christmas cookie battle between two cultural and culinary touchstones, Pan di Stelle and Nutella, and their superpower parent companies, the pasta giant Barilla and the chocolate giant Ferrero, strikes right at the Italian aorta.
“When it comes down to Barilla and Ferrero, there can be a war,” said Michele Boroni, a marketing expert in Milan. “It’s a competition between Italy’s last food giants that have remained Italian.”
. . .
But in January 2018, Barilla made a move. It introduced jars of Pan di Stelle Crema, a spread made from “100 percent Italian hazelnuts and ‘dreamlike’ chocolate,” the company’s news release said.
Ferrero was not about to let the aggression go unanswered. The company raised the stakes in early 2019 by quietly dipping across the Italian border and testing Nutella Biscuits in other countries. In April, it rolled out the cookie in France to start spreading buzz and demand among Italians living and traveling abroad.
“This is our modus operandi,” said Claudia Millo, a Nutella spokeswoman.
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(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “Italy Is in a Hazelnut Cream-Filled Civil War.”)