Snoep is an English-language encyclopedia of the confectionery of the Low Countries — the Netherlands, Belgium, and the small set of products that overlap with the wider European tradition. The encyclopedia exists in roughly forty entries, organised into six departments (Drop, Sinterklaas, the Canon, Belgian, Makers, Reference), and is published as a static HTML site at snoep.org. There is no database, no advertising, no tracking, and no membership requirement. Pages are versioned, dated, and revised in public, with the revision history visible in the per-entry metadata.

The project began in 2025 from a simple observation: that the present web has no good English-language reference on Dutch and Belgian confectionery. Most existing English coverage of the subject is shallow ("10 weird Dutch candies you must try"), partial (Wikipedia's Dutch confectionery articles are present but brief), or both. Several Dutch-language reference works exist — most notably Egbert Hovenkamp's Het Drop Boek (2007) and Renske Heddema's Lekker Nederlands (2018) — but neither is widely accessible to English-speaking readers, and neither attempts the encyclopedic coverage that the subject can sustain. Snoep is intended to fill that gap.

The editorial principles

The encyclopedia is written under a small set of explicit editorial principles, which the contributors are expected to apply consistently across entries:

  • Encyclopedic tone. The entries are written for an adult reader, in the register of a serious reference rather than a food blog. Declarative, dry but not bloodless, occasionally dryly funny but never twee. No exclamation marks, no "let's dive in," no second-person address.
  • Specificity. Names, dates, places, percentages, regional distinctions. If a sentence cannot be specific, it is not written.
  • Citational honesty. Where a claim is disputed or uncertain, this is marked. The encyclopedia attempts to distinguish documented facts from received tradition, and treats the latter with appropriate scepticism.
  • English-first but Dutch-aware. Dutch and Flemish terms are used in italics on first mention with a brief gloss; the original terms for the candies themselves are not anglicised.
  • Length where length earns it. Entries are written to length appropriate to the subject — substantial for the headline categories, more compact for the supporting ones — with no padding and no thin content.

Where these principles conflict — and they sometimes do — the editors' judgment is final. The colophon describes how the project is technically built and how it expects to remain accurate over time.

The people

The encyclopedia is written and edited by a small group based in Amsterdam and Ghent, with contributions from several Belgian and Dutch consultants who are credited in the per-entry author records (presently held in the editorial system rather than published; this may change). The principal editors are:

  • Anna Bakker — Amsterdam-based food historian, lead editor for the Drop and Reference departments.
  • Pieter De Wilde — Ghent-based confectionery writer, lead editor for the Belgian department.
  • Emma van Doorn — Utrecht-based researcher, lead editor for the Sinterklaas and Canon departments.

The biographies above are placeholders pending the publication of fuller author records. The contact and correction-submission procedures described below apply to the project regardless of the specific personnel.

Licensing and reuse

The text of Snoep is published under a Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 licence. Readers are free to copy, adapt, and redistribute the material, including commercially, provided that:

  1. Attribution is given to Snoep with a link to the original entry.
  2. Derivative works are released under the same CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
  3. Any modifications are clearly marked as such.

The site's design, the inline SVG illustrations, and the typographic choices (Fraunces with the specific variable-font settings used here) are not covered by the BY-SA licence and are reserved. The site's wordmark and other identifying marks are similarly reserved. The contents of the cited reference works (those listed in the per-entry references and further reading sections) are subject to their own copyright terms, which the encyclopedia respects through fair-dealing quotation rather than reproduction at length.

Corrections, additions, and feedback

Snoep is intended to remain accurate over time, and the editors actively welcome corrections, additions, and substantive feedback from readers. If you have:

  • identified a factual error in an entry,
  • encountered a claim that is missing a citation that you can supply,
  • noticed an internal inconsistency between entries,
  • found a typographic, grammatical, or formatting error,
  • or have substantive expertise in a subject area covered (or that should be covered) by the encyclopedia,

please contact the editors at [email protected]. Submissions are reviewed by the relevant department editor, with substantive corrections incorporated into the next regular revision cycle (typically monthly). Significant corrections — those that materially change a published claim — are noted in the revision history of the affected entry, with the date of the correction and the substance of the change.

The encyclopedia does not, at present, accept user-generated content for direct publication. Entries are written and revised by the editorial team. This is a deliberate choice: the project's editorial standard depends on consistency of voice and rigour of fact-checking, both of which are difficult to maintain across an open-contribution model. The trade-off is that coverage expands more slowly than it would under a wiki-style approach; the editors regard this as acceptable given the project's quality goals.

What Snoep is not

A short note on what the encyclopedia does not attempt to do, partly to manage reader expectations and partly to be honest about scope. Snoep is not:

  • A recipe collection. Several recipes are sketched in entries where they illustrate something about a product, but the encyclopedia is not a cookery book and does not attempt to be one.
  • A historical archive. Entries are dated and revised, but the underlying primary historical sources are not reproduced; readers seeking the original archives should consult the references in each entry.
  • A buying guide for the Netherlands. The buying guide entry covers the diaspora trade abroad; for purchases within the Netherlands, the standard supermarket and specialist retailers carry essentially everything covered in the encyclopedia, and no separate guide is needed.
  • A nutritional or medical reference. Where a candy has nutritional or medical relevance — most prominently in the case of glycyrrhizin and ammonium chloride consumption — this is noted in the relevant entries, but readers with specific medical concerns should consult their physician rather than the encyclopedia.
  • A complete catalogue of every Dutch and Belgian sweet. The encyclopedia covers the principal categories and the major makers; smaller specialist products and regional variants are noted within the broader entries but are not given dedicated coverage. Readers with particular regional interests are invited to suggest additions.

The encyclopedia's scope is, in short, deliberately bounded. The project aims to be the canonical English-language reference on the principal subjects within its scope; it does not aim to be exhaustive across all subjects that could conceivably be related.

A note on AI and the editorial process

It is worth being explicit about a question that current readers may ask: AI tools have been used in the editorial process for Snoep, principally for drafting initial entries and for cross-reference checking. The use of these tools does not, in the editors' view, alter the accountability for the published material: every entry is reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the human editorial team before publication, and the editorial standards described in §01 apply uniformly regardless of the drafting method. Errors that survive into publication are the editors' responsibility and are corrected on identification through the procedure described in §04.

The encyclopedia does not currently identify AI-drafted entries separately from human-drafted ones, on the grounds that the editorial process renders the distinction substantially moot for the reader. This may change if the editorial consensus on AI attribution shifts; readers with strong views on the matter are invited to share them.