Hazelnut Spread

One US cup of hazelnut spread weighs 296 grams. Going the other way, 100 grams is about 0.34 cups.

Also called nutella, chocolate hazelnut spread, cocoa hazelnut spread, chocolate flavored hazelnut spread, gianduja spread.

TL;DR: 1 cup of chocolate hazelnut spread (Nutella and its private-label equivalents) weighs 296 grams. High confidence, based on exact convergence across every major US retail brand and USDA's reference entry. King Arthur lists 320 g/cup, which is 8% high and is rejected.

Hazelnut spread in this entry refers to the Nutella-class sweetened chocolate hazelnut spread that dominates US retail: sugar + palm oil + hazelnuts + cocoa + skim milk + emulsifier. Ferrero's Nutella is the category-defining product, and every major private label copy (Walmart Great Value, Target Good & Gather, Sprouts Farmers Market, Lidl, and others) uses effectively the same formulation and the same nutrition panel serving weight. This is a distinct product from pure or lightly sweetened hazelnut butter, which weighs 224 to 256 grams per cup depending on brand and sugar content, and from hazelnut praline paste, the 50-50 hazelnut and caramelized sugar patisserie ingredient used in French pastry.

Sugar is the number one ingredient in Nutella by weight, at roughly 55 percent of the product. Palm oil is second at around 30 percent. Hazelnuts contribute only about 13 percent, followed by small amounts of cocoa, skim milk powder, soy lecithin, and vanillin. This composition drives the density: dissolved sugar in the palm oil matrix produces a very smooth, air-free paste, and finely ground solids fill any remaining interstitial space. The result is a bulk density of about 1.25 grams per milliliter, significantly higher than pure nut butters at around 1.08 g/mL. Sugar's own density is roughly 1.59 g/mL when dissolved, and that fraction of the composition pulls the whole product's density upward from what ground hazelnuts alone would produce.

The source data is unusually clean. USDA's FoodData Central maintains a reference entry for 'Chocolate-flavored hazelnut spread' (NDB 19125) at 37 grams per 2-tablespoon serving. Nutella's nutrition panel matches this exactly. Every US private-label producer surveyed (Great Value, Good & Gather, Sprouts, Lidl) also lists 37 grams per 2 tablespoons on their panels. This convergence is what you would expect for a product category where private labels reverse-engineer the market leader's formulation almost identically, then submit nutrition data derived from the same USDA reference. The 296 grams per US cup extrapolation is therefore about as certain as any figure in the ExactCups database.

King Arthur's 320 grams per cup figure is 8 percent above this convergence. The gap is smaller than the sweet rice flour correction (33 percent) or the rice flour correction that preceded it, but it still exceeds the 5 percent tolerance for fat-category products and points in the same direction as the broader King Arthur pattern: a systematic tendency to overweight sticky and dense products, most plausibly from applying a fluid-ounce interpretation to what should be a weight measurement. A baker following King Arthur's chart to substitute Nutella for chocolate ganache filling would end up with about 24 grams more spread than the recipe intended per cup called for.

For practical baking, use 296 grams per cup for any Nutella-class hazelnut spread. The private label alternatives are direct substitutes by weight; Ferrero has trademark protection on the Nutella name and recipe details, but the retail category has effectively standardized around the same nutrition profile and packing density. Weighing directly from the jar is fastest and eliminates any variation from stirring versus settled scoops.

The following published figures for hazelnut spread are rejected here, with the physics or standards reasoning behind each rejection on its own page:

• King Arthur Baking ingredient weight chart: 320 g per cup