Every day four million parents worldwide have reason to feel grateful, or perhaps otherwise, to William Salice. It was he who created the Kinder Surprise, the small chocolate egg with a toy inside synonymous with silent toddlers and pester power.
Salice worked closely for almost half a century with Michele Ferrero (obituary, February 17, 2015), the entrepreneur who built his family business into one of the world’s largest confectionary businesses. The company established a reputation for secrecy (it never gives press conferences) and for trustworthiness, and in the process made Ferrero Italy’s richest man with an estimated fortune of £15 billion.
Much of that success was based on Nutella, the chocolate spread derived from a thick hazelnut paste traditionally made in his native Piedmont. Ferrero transformed this paste into an everyday pleasure by adding vegetable oil (although the palm oil used has recently been deemed a potential health risk by the European Food Safety Authority).
Salice joined the company in 1960 as a travelling salesman. However, he had studied marketing, at the time a discipline new to Italy, and soon caught Ferrero’s eye. Products that they collaborated on included Tic Tac mints and Ferrero Rocher, the glitzily wrapped chocolates whose knobbly shape supposedly derives from that of the grotto at Lourdes. Ferrero devoutly visited the shrine every year. The differing appreciation in Britain and Europe of the product’s desirability at ambassadorial receptions, however, arguably embodies the present differences in outlook between the two places.
The Kinder Surprise was born of a wish to make chocolate more of a regular treat for children (kinder being the German word for children). Ferrero hoped to find a way to replicate more than once a year the fun that the young had with Easter eggs, and to get more uses from the moulds that made them.
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In 1974 Salice saw through to market the idea of a small milk chocolate egg with a gift inside. Housed in a plastic shell, the toys were usually childhood staples, such as spinning tops, or figurines now commonly tied in to films. A high proportion of those available in Italy contain Smurfs.
Salice would later say that he wanted the toys to be more easily available to Italian children. For him the success of the line, however, depended on the fiddly plastic surprise often needing to be assembled by a parent, providing an opportunity for interaction within families.
This may have been wishful thinking, because what many children really liked about the toys was the possibility of collecting and trading them in the playground; and now on eBay. In 2014 the highest amount earned via YouTube — about $5 million — was made by a pair of hands seen unwrapping dozens of chocolate eggs.
Similar videos have now achieved billions of hits, mesmerising infants (and grown-up infants) worldwide, testament to the eternal thrill of surprises and the innocent joys of consumerism.
Giuseppe William Salice was born in 1933 at Casei Gerola, a small town south of Milan. He grew up in a postwar Italy that had yet to experience its economic boom.
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Provision for schooling was patchy and opportunities to better oneself were hard to come by. He got a diploma in commerce at Voghera and then, while in his first job, jumped at the chance to study marketing at weekend classes in Turin.
He never married (his great passion was supporting Inter Milan) and after he retired in 2007 he decided to spend a large proportion of his pension helping the next generation of Italians to realise their potential. His Color Your Life foundation runs short courses at its campus near Savona for talented children with artistic, academic and entrepreneurial ambitions.
In a society where advancement still depends frequently on family contacts, the foundation encourages young people to raise their sights and allows them to meet leading figures in a variety of professions. Its supporters now include Kinder.
“Inspiration doesn’t exist,” Salice would say of success. “What does is hard work, research and trying to understand the customer.”
William Salice, confectioner, was born on July 18, 1933. He died on December 29, 2016, aged 83