Venco is one of the best-known brand names in Dutch licorice. The company was started in 1878 by Gerrit van Voornveld, who made licorice, peppermint and jujubes (soft gum pastilles, sold partly as cough sweets) in a steam-powered factory in the Spuistraat in Amsterdam. The brand name is a contraction of the company name: Voornveld en Compagnie.
Venco no longer exists as an independent firm. Since 2012 it has been one of the Dutch brands of Cloetta, the Swedish confectionery group, and its drop is made alongside Red Band products in Roosendaal (Noord-Brabant).
Origins in Amsterdam
According to the company history published by Cloetta and the Dutch Wikipedia article on the firm, the business was taken over by the Dieperink brothers in 1899. In 1904 it adopted the Venco name and moved to the Lindengracht in the Jordaan. For the first half of the twentieth century Venco remained an Amsterdam manufacturer of licorice and sugar confectionery.
Naarden, Red Band and the mergers
After the Second World War production moved out of the city to Naarden. The firm's later history is a sequence of mergers typical of the post-war Dutch confectionery industry:
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1878 | Gerrit van Voornveld starts production in the Spuistraat, Amsterdam |
| 1899 | Taken over by the Dieperink brothers |
| 1904 | Renamed Venco; move to the Lindengracht |
| 1959 | Move to Naarden (date as given by Dutch Wikipedia) |
| 1965 | Shares acquired by Red Band (sources differ on the exact timing of the tie-up) |
| 1977 | Venco and Red Band combined in the Verenigde Dropfabrieken (VDF) |
| 1986 | VDF acquired by CSM (Centrale Suiker Maatschappij) |
| 1995 | Naarden factory closed; production moved to Red Band in Roosendaal |
| 1990s–2012 | Part of the confectionery business that became Leaf |
| 2012 | Leaf merges with Cloetta; Venco becomes a Cloetta brand |
Products
Venco's range covers most of the Dutch drop spectrum, from sweet to salty and double-salt. Cloetta singles out Schoolkrijt ("school chalk": white, chalk-like sticks of licorice) as the brand's best-known product. Other familiar formats include rolls of drop sold at checkouts and mixed bags. Product ranges change; for current varieties and ingredients, the packaging and the manufacturer's site are the authoritative sources.
Venco in context
The Dutch licorice shelf is shared by a few large brands: Venco and Red Band (both Cloetta), Klene (Perfetti Van Melle), Katja, and Autodrop (Concorp), plus supermarket own-label drop and many smaller makers. An overview of these and other names is given in Dutch candy brands. For the categories themselves, see zoute drop, zoete drop and dubbelzoute.