Did you know that the good old Butterfinger bars we like to fill our Halloween bowls with have Italian roots? And no, it’s not a trick. The family behind Nutella also owns Butterfinger, Baby Ruth and Crunch.

Those familiar American wrappers all lead back to a pastry shop in Alba, a small town in northern Italy where, in 1946, Pietro Ferrero was in the middle of making sweets in a country where cocoa was scarce. But the man was driven by a passion strong enough to go wake up his wife in the middle of the night anytime he discovered a new flavor or texture, recalls his grandson Giovanni. So, he got creative. Hazelnuts grew nearby, and Pietro started using them to stretch the cocoa he could get. The result was a sweet loaf that customers could slice onto bread. Friends called Pietro “the Scientist” while his brother handled sales, driving around in his Fiat and taking the shop’s products well beyond Alba.

The legacy passed on to Pietro’s son, Michele, who kept working on the hazelnut-and-cocoa idea. Nutella arrived in 1964, and the family eventually gave the world Kinder chocolates and gold-wrapped Ferrero Rocher, too. Under Michele, the business opened factories abroad and developed sweets with identities of their own, while still being owned by the family.

Giovanni, who in the meantime grew up alongside what he called “his little broter”

– nutella – came of age. He, however, went in a bit of a different direction. In 2018, Ferrero paid $2.8 billion for Nestlé’s American candy business, acquiring sweets that already had histories of their own. Butterfinger, Baby Ruth, Crunch... These were sweets Americans already knew how to choose from a crowded bowl, and it was exactly on that familiarity that Giovanni bet on. And now you know it. The next time you steal a Butterfinger from your kid’s Halloween candy bowl, I hope you will remember this little secret and how it all started with a man who loved inventing sweets so much that he’d wake up his wife in the middle of the night to taste them.