The hopje is a small, hard Dutch sweet with a coffee-and-caramel flavour, made from coffee, sugar, cream and butter and wrapped individually in paper. Its full name, Haagsche hopje, ties it to The Hague, where it was first made in the late eighteenth century. A notable feature is that a good hopje neither sticks nor goes soft over time.
Baron Hop and the legend
The sweet is named after Baron Hendrik Hop (1723–1808), a diplomat who lived on the Lange Voorhout in The Hague, near — and later above — the confectioners Van Haaren & Nieuwerkerk. The well-known story says Hop, a great coffee lover, left a cup of coffee with sugar and cream on a warmer overnight, found it had set into a hard lump, liked the taste, and asked the confectioner downstairs to make sweets from it. This is a legend rather than documented fact, but the baron was real, and the firm is recorded as making the coffee sweets from 1794. They were first sold as Baron Hop's bonbons; the name Haagsche Hopjes was used from 1880.
Rademaker
In 1869 Johannes Petrus Rademaker began making hopjes in The Hague, and his firm was the first to wrap each sweet in printed paper. Rival makers argued for decades over who sold the "real" Haagsche hopjes; in 1989 the Dutch advertising standards body ruled that Rademaker could no longer claim to make the only genuine ones. The Rademaker brand later passed to CSM's confectionery arm and then, in 2012, to the Swedish confectioner Cloetta, after which production moved out of the Netherlands.
The end of production — and alternatives
In early 2025 Dutch trade media reported that Cloetta had stopped producing Rademaker's Haagsche Hopjes because demand had fallen too low, while keeping the brand in its portfolio. Remaining stock lingered on shelves for a while. Coffee hopjes from other makers remain available, notably the Holland Hopje from Confiserie Napoleon, and the flavour lives on in hopjesvla, a coffee-caramel custard. A small Museum voor het Haagsche Hopje operated in The Hague from 1990 to 1998.