A wholesaler’s name, shortened.

Venz began in Amsterdam in 1890, when Hendrik de Vries started a wholesale business in chocolate and sugar confectionery, according to both Dutch Wikipedia and the brand’s own history page. The name is an abbreviation: “de Vries EN Zonen” — de Vries and Sons. The company says the name arose after the birth of Hendrik’s second son, Gerard, in 1894.

Gerard joined his father at fifteen, the company says, and turned the business towards making chocolate and confectionery rather than only selling it. By 1928 it needed four buildings for its production, and in 1930 it opened a single, larger factory at Vaassen, a village in Gelderland. At first, the company says, the Vaassen plant made sugar confectionery such as lollipops and borstplaat, the Dutch fondant sweet; chocolate bars, tablets and bonbons followed a few years later.

The product that defined the brand came in 1936, when Venz began making chocolate hagelslag, the sprinkles the Dutch scatter on buttered bread. The company says nobody now remembers exactly how the idea arose. Its own account credits Gerard — “meneer Ger” — with working out a recipe for glossy grains of real chocolate in his kitchen, and says that because no machines for making hagelslag could be bought at the time, Venz invented its own. Those are the company’s claims.

After the Second World War, it says, demand for chocolate rose sharply and new machines were bought; because chocolate earned more than sweets, Venz stopped making confectionery in the 1960s, keeping chocolate bars, tablets and small chocolates such as kattetongen.

From Vaassen to Utrecht.

Venz did not stay a family firm. Dutch Wikipedia says it was taken over, like the cocoa maker Droste, by Van Nelle, and that in 1990 these businesses were bought by the Dutch group CSM. CSM already owned the De Ruijter sprinkles factory in Baarn and planned to move Venz’s hagelslag production there. In 1996, with their jobs no longer guaranteed, the 110 workers at Vaassen protested, backed by the FNV food workers’ union; production stayed for a while, but in 1998 it moved to Baarn, Dutch Wikipedia says. In February 2025 the regional newspaper De Stentor, looking back on Vaassen’s lost industries, dated the hagelslag makers of Venz in the village from 1930 to 1998.

In 2000 Heinz bought CSM’s food division, which included Venz. In March 2006 RTV Utrecht reported that the De Ruijter hagelslag and muisjes factory would move from Baarn to Utrecht, where Heinz already ran a syrup factory on the Lage Weide industrial estate; Dutch Wikipedia says Venz production moved to Utrecht in 2006. Heinz itself was bought in 2013 by Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital, and in 2015 it merged with Kraft to form Kraft Heinz.

Since then Venz has been made by another company under contract. Dutch Wikipedia says Heinz sold the Utrecht factory to Coflace, part of the Livia Group, in 2016, while keeping the Venz brand. A Livia Group statement of March 2017 says Coflace had acquired the Utrecht factory “along with a co-pack arrangement for The Kraft Heinz Company,” and that its production included De Ruijter and Venz chocolate sprinkles; in that month Livia sold Coflace to its management. Dutch Wikipedia adds that the business continued as Cobrand and that Kraft Heinz rescued it from bankruptcy in 2019, citing trade press. Today the address venz.nl leads to a Venz section of the Kraft Heinz website, which describes Venz as the largest maker of chocolate hagelslag in the Netherlands — a company claim.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food, and all of them come from Denmark, Sweden or the Netherlands: Toms, Kelsen, Göteborgs Kex, Polarbröd, HAK, De Ruijter and Venz. Food brands from these countries sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger food groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or treat it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its food is actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its food is made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

Two children under an umbrella.

Venz’s identity has been built largely through advertising and packaging aimed at children. Before supermarkets, the company says, grocers weighed out hagelslag into paper bags; in the early 1950s Venz began selling its own consumer packs. Dutch Wikipedia says that in the 1950s and 1960s the brand used Ibbeltje, a character created by the writer Annie M.G. Schmidt, to sell hagelslag.

Its best-known advertisement was a television spot with the jingle “Het hagelt, het hagelt, grote korrels Venz” — “It’s hailing, it’s hailing, big grains of Venz” — sung to the tune of the children’s song “Het regent, het regent.” The company says the spot showed two children playing under a large umbrella, that the same two children appeared on the hagelslag pack, and that the spot ran on Dutch television until 1992. The lyrics were written by Marijke Philips. When Heinz revived the jingle in a 2010 commercial, Philips asked to be paid for its use; a December 2012 ruling by the Amsterdam court in summary proceedings barred Heinz from using the text, and in July 2013 the law firm SOLV reported that the two sides had settled and the song could return to television.

The company also ran competitions for children, and says it founded a Venz fan club in 1983 that had about 60,000 members aged four to fourteen by 1985, and which it says entered the Guinness Book of Records as the largest fan club in the Netherlands. The club closed in 1991; in its place came “Hagelnieuws,” jokes and facts printed on the back of each pack, which the company says continues, alongside changing pack designs.

For a design guide, Venz shows how a breakfast brand can outlive its founding family, its factory and several owners through a name, a jingle and the jokes on the back of its pack. Compare De Ruijter, the hagelslag maker whose factory took over Venz production, and Droste, another Dutch chocolate name that passed through Van Nelle. For this guide we use cocoa, cream and a butter gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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