A storm sparks a creative outburst
That day the hail rattled against the windows of the liquorice factory Voornveld & Co at Lindengracht 119 in the Jordaan. The factory's director, Herman Dieperink, was working on a new kind of sandwich topping: aniseed sprinkles. All that was needed was a name, and then it could go to market. The fierce sound of this hailstorm gave him an idea: hagelslag, which literally means hailstorm. It's raining aniseed on your sandwich. A brilliant idea, wouldn't you say?
Not chocolate, but liquorice
Voornveld & Co will probably not mean anything to you straight away, but the current name certainly will: Venco, to this day still a brand of liquorice. The company sold hagelslag until at least 1951, after which the later Venco restricted itself to liquorice only, as the magazine Quest discovered by searching the online newspaper archive Delpher. Whether Venco is really the inventor of hagelslag remains to be seen; in the end it was Venz that made the delicious sandwich topping big in the Netherlands.
Out of the city
Venco eventually left Amsterdam in 1959. That year the company moved production to Naarden and the buildings on the Lindengracht were sold off. Not long after the liquorice maker's departure the former factory was demolished. In the mid-1970s it made way for new housing.
