The Dutch are great typographers : Jan van Krimpen is one of the best known names in type design, and Enschede is one of the world's foremost type foundries. Little surprise then the Dutch love-affair with typography extends even to that country's chocolatiers.
Chocolate letters is one traditional food that has been thriving on
the mass-market place in the Netherlands for 150 years. As design
forms, chocolate and the alphabet share several historical aspects:
both forms are freshly manipulated by each new generations of
practitioners; they relate to advances in 19th-century moulding
techniques; and they appear as large popular forms during the
Industrial Revolution. Today, chocolatiers refer to chocolate
letters as ‘novelties’ just as the type world categorizes 19th-century
decorative alphabets as ‘novelty faces’. These intriguing edible
letters are based upon various sturdy type forms, such as the handsome
slab-serif letters made by Droste or the child-like forms by Weber. For
children, chocolate letters are a delightful ephemeral way to encounter
the alphabet.