Brands & Makers.

The Dutch confectionery industry is, by international standards, exceptionally consolidated. A small number of firms — Venco, Klene, Red Band, Droste — account for the substantial majority of the country's branded sweets, and have done so, in some cases, for more than a century. The supermarket aisle is dense with their packaging, and the foreign visitor who tries to learn the Dutch sweet vocabulary will inevitably be learning the catalogues of these four houses.

This consolidation is not the result of recent mergers. It reflects a much older pattern in which Dutch confectionery, like Dutch beer and Dutch dairy, organised itself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries around regional industrial firms that built large factories, took out loyal market positions, and have since ridden out four economic cycles, two world wars, and the steady consolidation of European confectionery under the major multinational holdings.

Each of the four entries below treats one of the principal houses: Venco, the Hoogeveen licorice institution founded in 1870; Klene, the Oosterhout firm of 1925 best known for its salt and salmiak ranges; Red Band, the Roosendaal wine-gum specialist with the famous drum packaging; and Droste, the Haarlem chocolate house whose nurse-and-cocoa-tin imagery generated a recursive design term.