Nutella

Pietro Ferrero, the heir to the largest state of the Italian group Ferrero, manufacturer of Nutella, Kinder and Tick, died Monday from a suspected heart attack in South Africa. He was 47.

Ferrero reportedly died after falling from a bicycle during his trip to the coast road near Cape Town while on a break in a company meeting.

He was on a business trip with his father, Michele Ferrero, who turned the company into an international manufacturer of candy and invented the successes including Nutella and kinder in 1960, according to the Daily Mail.

Passer-by saw him fall off a bike, and he was pronounced dead at a suspected heart attack shortly after the ambulance arrived, Western Cape police spokesman said.

"Italy has lost a businessman who personifies the best qualities of our industrial history - the constant striving for excellence, creativity and determination to compete, even in difficult moments, to protect the brand and make it a symbol," Foreign Minister Franco Frattini told Bloomberg.

Ferrero's grandfather, also called Peter, founded the company in Alba in the Piedmont region in Italy in 1942, when it was difficult to get candy from a lack of wartime. He transformed a small coffee bar and pastry factory in sweets.

Since cocoa is expensive, as Italy was rebuilt from the war, the company experimented with locally abundant nuts as a substitute ingredients according to the company's website.

The use of cocoa-hazelnut base, developed Ferrero Nutella, is currently the best selling sweet spread in the world.