Royal Verkade (Dutch: Koninklijke Verkade) is a Dutch manufacturing company, owned by a Turkish conglomerate. 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 Pladis, a global biscuit, chocolate and confectionery company owned by 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.
Royal Verkade (Dutch: Koninklijke Verkade) is a Dutch manufacturing company, owned by a Turkish conglomerate. 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 Pladis, a global biscuit, chocolate and confectionery company owned by 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.
==History== The company was first named "De Ruyter" for a mill in Zaandam which milled flour—the original "ruiter" ("horse rider") 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.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).