Verkade
Verkade logo, pre-1994
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| Founded | Zaandam, Netherlands (May 2, 1886) |
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| Founder | Ericus Verkade |
| Headquarters | Zaandam, Netherlands |
| Products | Chocolate, rusk, cookies |
| Owner | Yıldız Holding |
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Number of employees
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550 |
| Website | www.verkade.nl/ |
Verkade (Dutch: Koninklijke Verkade) is a Dutch manufacturing company. The company is headquartered in Zaandam and was one of the oldest existing family companies in the Netherlands. In November 2014 the company was acquired by Turkish Yıldız Holding. It was founded in 1886 by Ericus Verkade to make mostly bread and rusk, and expanded to produce cookies, sweets, and, especially, chocolates.
The company was first named "De Ruyter" for a mill in Zaandam which milled flour—the original "ruiter" ("knight") was on the company logo until 1994, when it was removed to make way for a newly designed logo, intended to give the company and its products a more contemporary look. The horseman is still found on Verkade rusk, which currently is made by the competitor, the Bolletje factory in Almelo, using the Verkade recipe. The company acquired the right to bear the "royal" mark in their name in 1950, and employs some 450 people in Zaandam. The last members of the Verkade family, Ericus's great-grandsons Erik and Arnold, left the company in 1992.
Commercial success came about also through marketing, starting in 1906, when the company began issuing picture cards with its products, which could be collected in albums.Co Verkade, a grandson of Ericus, was instrumental in this strategy, and the albums, most of them written by Jac. P. Thijsse were especially popular. The albums generated a kind of collection mania among the Dutch population before World War II: 27 albums were made, a total of 3.2 million copies; another source lists 28 albums and 362 million cards distributed over 30 years.
In the company's early days, the main part of the workforce consisted of young women who walked in their company uniform to work; these "Verkade girls" (De meisjes van Verkade or Verkadevrouwen, also Ruytermeisjes, for the company's earlier name) are occasionally revived for ceremonial purposes, such as when Queen Beatrix opened the Verkade pavilion (which houses corporate art owned by the Verkade family) in the Zaans Museum. The Zaanstreek (roughly, the area on the river the Zaan) was a regional center of industry, and women workers were employed at many of the factories in the area, including Honig, Hille, and Albert Heijn.
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