William Salice, who helped create the hugely popular Kinder Surprise chocolate eggs for children, died in Italy on Thursday aged 83, his foundation said. Salice had been undergoing treatment for a stroke in a hospital in the northern Italian town of Pavia, his Color Your Life foundation and Italian media reports said Friday.

He joined the Ferrero food group in 1960 and went on to become right-hand man to company boss Michele Ferrero, a visionary who invented the Nutella chocolate and hazelnut spread and who died in 2015. In the 1970s, the chocolate baron was seeking a means to get around the seasonal nature of Easter eggs and find a use for the manufacturing moulds that served no purpose for much of the year.

The outcome was the Kinder Surprise, a chocolate egg containing little plastic parts of toys to be assembled by children. The contents of the capsules inside the eggs varied widely and the success of the product was swift and lasting. Ferrero has sold billions of Kinder Surprise eggs in more than 40 years and claims that its monthly output consists of enough chocolate to pave the 400,000 square metres (4.3 million square feet) of the Monterrey Macroplaza in Mexico.

Copyright Agence France-Presse, 2017