It’s the first fork in the road for anyone buying hazelnut semi-finished products, and it’s almost always settled by looking at one number: the price per kilo. That’s the number that tells you least.
An honest premise: we make the pure paste, we don’t make the sweetened one. So this isn’t an impartial comparison. What we can do is set out the parameters that matter, give you our answers, and leave the comparison to you.
What they are, in two lines
- 100% pure paste: roasted, ground hazelnuts. One ingredient on the label.
- Semi-finished or sweetened paste: hazelnut paste with sugars already in it, often oils and emulsifiers, sometimes flavourings. The label has several lines, and the hazelnut percentage is one of them.
| What you’re looking at | 100% pure paste | Sweetened semi-finished |
|---|---|---|
| What’s inside | Only hazelnuts | Hazelnuts, sugars, often oils and emulsifiers |
| Hazelnut percentage | 100% | Declared on the label: read it |
| Who decides the sugars and fats in your recipe | You | Whoever made it |
| Dosage | Calculated against the fats in your base | Set by the producer, hard to move |
| Aroma | The hazelnut’s own | Often propped up by added flavourings |
| Price per kilo | Higher | Lower |
| What you’re buying in that kilo | Hazelnut | Hazelnut plus everything else |
Price per kilo compares two different contents
If a semi-finished product declares 50% hazelnut, half of that kilo isn’t hazelnut. It’s the same number applied to two things that aren’t equivalent.
The calculation that actually helps is a different one, and it’s three numbers:
- what it costs per kilo,
- how much hazelnut it contains,
- how much of it you need to reach the flavour you want.
The result is what the hazelnut costs you in the finished portion. It’s the only figure that compares two different products, and it often reverses the ranking: to carry the same amount of hazelnut into your mix, you need roughly twice as much of a 50% product — and that extra also brings sugar, which has to come out somewhere else in the recipe.
The hazelnut holds up everything else
This is the point that moves the needle most, and almost nobody writes it down.
A hazelnut flavour isn’t made of hazelnut alone. Around it there’s a base — milk, sugars, cream, a shortcrust, a coating — and those lines weigh on cost more than people think.
But the hazelnut is the ingredient you taste first and remember last. When it holds up, it holds up everything else: a product built with honest but unremarkable raw materials can become the best seller in the display case, because what the customer recognises and comes back for is the hazelnut.
The reverse works far worse. An expensive base doesn’t rescue a flat hazelnut: something feels missing and nobody can say what. That’s why, when a cost has to come down, it’s worth bringing it down where it isn’t tasted. The hazelnut is tasted.
Don’t pay more for something worth less. And don’t pay less only to spend twice as much in labour.
When the sweetened semi-finished product is the right call
There are cases where it is, and saying so costs us nothing.
- When the hazelnut is an accent, not the flavour. A ripple, a filling where chocolate and sugars dominate and the hazelnut sits in the background: precision of balance matters less there, and a coherent semi-finished product does its job.
- When the recipe is already built around it and it works. Changing paste means redoing the balance. If the product sells and is stable, the recalculation may not be worth the gain.
- When the base isn’t yours to touch. Not every workshop works on its own recipes. If the base arrives ready-made, a semi-finished product built for that base works better than a pure paste used as though it were one.
And there’s the opposite case, where the pure paste is the wrong choice: taking it and using the dosages of the sweetened paste you had before. It’s the only genuine return we’ve ever had, and it wasn’t a fault in the product. Change the paste and the balance has to be redone — the gelato guide explains how.
Six questions to ask your supplier, us included
These are the questions that separate a technical sheet from a promise.
- What’s the hazelnut percentage? If hazelnut is in the product name, the label must state it by law.
- Are there flavourings? If so, why? An added flavouring almost always compensates for an aroma lost earlier.
- What calibre do you use? And above all: do you use broken or undersized nuts?
- Is the particle size you declare the refiner’s capability or the mesh of your filter? They are not the same thing: only the second tells you what’s in the tub.
- Is it one roasting curve for everything? Different calibres in the same roaster means burning some and leaving others behind.
- Will this year’s flavour be the same as last year’s? How do you guarantee that? It’s the question that matters most, because a flavour that shifts mid-season forces you to rewrite recipes on the fly.
Our answers, briefly
- Percentage: 100%. Roasted, ground hazelnuts, nothing else.
- Flavourings: none.
- Calibre: only 11/13 and 13/15 mm, never below 11, never broken. A whole hazelnut is almost spherical, its centre equidistant from the inner surface, so heat travels through it evenly; a broken one has exposed fibres and oxidises sooner.
- Particle size: below 25 µm, because 25 microns is the mesh of our filter — a threshold nothing passes, not a machine’s spec sheet.
- Roasting: a dedicated curve for every calibre, and for every calibre the three grades: light, medium, dark.
- Consistency: the blend is built specifically to land on the same profile even when the harvest changes. How we do it is set out in Our method.
Quick questions
Is a 50% “hazelnut” paste a hazelnut paste? It’s a semi-finished product. The term isn’t forbidden, but 100% means 100%: if there’s a percentage, the other half is something else and it’s written underneath.
Why does pure paste cost more per kilo? Because that kilo is only hazelnut, and because the hazelnut is a high calibre: undersized and broken nuts cost far less, and whoever uses them can sell for less.
Can you switch from a semi-finished product to pure paste at the same dosage? No. Pure paste brings no sugars and is over 60% fat: the sugars have to be made up elsewhere and the fats rechecked. The starting range in gelato is 80–100 g per kilo of mix, to be judged together with your base.
Is the oil rising to the top a defect? No, it’s the correct behaviour of a paste without emulsifiers. Just stir before use. If a 100% paste never separates, it’s worth asking why.
Our formats
Pure paste in 5 and 10 kg tubs, plus the 1 kg format for small production runs. No minimum order: the minimum is one full pack. All the technical data — allergens, nutritional values, packaging, delivery times — is on the pure paste data sheet.
There’s also the 170 g jar for anyone who wants to try it first, or use it in the kitchen: 100% Pure Paste.