A steam bakery on the Zaan.

Verkade began on 2 May 1886 in Zaandam, when Ericus Gerhardus Verkade (1835–1907) opened a steam bread and rusk factory on the river Zaan. He called it De Ruyter, after the first flour mill of West Zaandam, the company says. Its first products were bread, rusks, honey breakfast cake and long rusks known as langetjes; later the firm also made tealights, which Dutch Wikipedia says it was the first in the Netherlands to produce, in 1898, before selling that business to the candle maker Bolsius in 1991.

Verkade had no baking experience, Dutch Wikipedia says, and local bakers fought the factory bread by undercutting it. Packaging helped: in 1889 Verkade introduced a returnable De Ruyter tin for its rusks, which Dutch Wikipedia calls the birth of the branded article in the Netherlands, followed in 1890 by packaged breakfast cake. When the Labour Act of 1919 regulated bakers’ night work, the family stopped making bread; biscuits, and during the First World War sugar confectionery, had already joined the range. In 1929 Verkade bought a wafer factory in ’s-Hertogenbosch, and in 1950 it received the Royal predicate, becoming Koninklijke Verkade.

Chocolate became the second pillar beside biscuits. The company now describes itself as a maker of biscuits and chocolate, and Levensmiddelenkrant reported in 2026 that it also produces millions of chocolate letters for the Sinterklaas season, alongside biscuit brands such as Nizza, Maria and San Francisco.

Albums, tins and posters.

Verkade’s best-known marketing idea was the picture album. From 1903 — English Wikipedia gives 1906 — the firm packed collectable cards with its products, to be pasted into albums. Dutch Wikipedia says it began with three fairy-tale albums using cards bought in Germany, following the Cologne chocolate maker Stollwerck, then turned to Dutch nature and landscape. The naturalist Jac. P. Thijsse, approached in 1904, wrote the texts for 18 of the 30 albums issued up to 1940, starting with the four seasons in 1906; the illustrators included the teenage Jan Voerman jr., Jan van Oort, Willem Wenckebach and Cornelis and Henricus Rol. Figures for the run differ: Dutch Wikipedia gives about 3.2 million albums and 30 million cards, while English Wikipedia cites 27 albums and 3.2 million copies from one source and 28 albums with 362 million cards from another.

Design was handled in-house early. Cees Dekker joined in 1923 as the company’s first designer and spent 30 years in its advertising department, most of them as its head, producing packaging, biscuit tins, rusk drums and posters, Dutch Wikipedia says. The De Ruyter horseman stayed on the logo until 1994, when it was replaced by a design meant to look more contemporary, English Wikipedia says, citing Trouw; the company says De Ruyter is still recognisable in the Verkade logo today.

The workforce became part of the brand too. The “Meisjes van Verkade” — young women, many travelling in from Amsterdam, who worked in the Zaandam factory — gave the company a lasting slogan, and in 1961 Verkade opened a crèche for employees’ children, one of the first Dutch employers to do so. A Verkade pavilion at the Zaans Museum has told the company’s story since 2009.

Dutch chocolate, old and new.

The seven brands in this group all make or sell chocolate, and they come from three countries with distinct chocolate habits: Perugina and Baratti & Milano from Italy, Valor and Blanxart from Spain, and Droste, Verkade and Van Houten from the Netherlands. Each country is known for a different way of using cocoa, and those habits shape how the brands present themselves.

In the Netherlands the story is cocoa powder: the pressed, alkalised “Dutch” cocoa that made a drink of chocolate easy to mix, sold in tins and boxes whose graphics became part of the brand. In Italy it is gianduja, chocolate blended with hazelnut paste and associated above all with Piedmont, alongside pralines and boxed gifts. In Spain it is chocolate a la taza, a thick drinking chocolate served in cafés, often with churros, alongside bars made for melting into it. The names here range from century-old firms now owned by large groups to family companies, and some survive mainly as brands.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who founded it, who owns it now, where its cocoa comes from and where its chocolate is made — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From family firm to pladis.

The family era ended in 1990, when Koninklijke Verkade became part of the British biscuit group United Biscuits, the company says; English Wikipedia adds that the last family members in the business left in 1992. United Biscuits itself changed hands several times — to Finalrealm in May 2000 and, in December 2006, to a consortium of the Blackstone Group and PAI, according to Verkade’s own history — and in November 2014 the Turkish group Yıldız Holding announced that it would buy United Biscuits. In 2016 Yıldız combined United Biscuits, Ülker, Godiva and DeMet’s in a new global company, pladis, to which Verkade belongs today. Verkade’s website lists Verkade, Sultana and Godiva as Koninklijke Verkade’s main brands and says it has about 280 staff, with its office and factory on the Westzijde in Zaandam; Levensmiddelenkrant reported in February 2026 that it still bakes its biscuits in the town where it was founded.

On cocoa, Verkade says that in 2008 it became the first Dutch A-brand with Fairtrade chocolate bars and letters, and that its bars and the chocolate layers on its biscuits use Fairtrade-certified cocoa; the pages we checked do not name the countries the beans come from. In June 2025 it relaunched its bars in new packaging with a triangular break pattern and an unchanged recipe, Levensmiddelenkrant reported; the company says its own research found that people rated the chocolate higher in the new shape. A redesign of the biscuit range is planned for 2027, and a “Geboren in Zaandam” (Born in Zaandam) emblem now ties the packs to their history, the same title reported.

For a design guide, Verkade shows how a mass-market brand built loyalty through printed matter — tins, posters and collectors’ albums — long before anyone called it branding. Compare Godiva, another chocolate name in the Yıldız group, and Droste, the Haarlem cocoa name of the same era. For this guide we use a Zaan red, cream and a deep green with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Verkade’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.