Zuurtjes — literally "sour ones" — are the traditional Dutch hard-candy category: small boiled-sugar drops, typically pear-shaped or round, in the classical flavours of citroen (lemon), framboos (raspberry), anijs (anise), and a small set of others (zwarte bessen, blackcurrant; mango, in modern lines; perzik, peach). The candy descends directly from the broader European boiled-sweet tradition that produced English humbugs, French berlingots, and Italian caramelle dure, and shares with those traditions a manufacturing technique essentially unchanged since the early nineteenth century: sugar and glucose syrup boiled to the hard-crack stage at approximately 150°C, flavouring and acid added, the mass poured onto a cooling table, manipulated by hand until pliable, and cut into individual drops with a small mechanical cutter.
What distinguishes the Dutch zuurtjes tradition from its European cousins is principally institutional: the substantial majority of Dutch zuurtjes have, for two centuries, been produced by a single firm — Fortuin, of Dordrecht — whose continuous operation since 1820 makes it the oldest confectioner in the Netherlands and one of the older confectionery firms anywhere in Europe. The Fortuin product is the de facto reference for the category, and a Dutch consumer who buys zuurtjes is, in most cases, buying Fortuin's, even when the supermarket label suggests otherwise.
Fortuin in Dordrecht
The Fortuin confectionery firm was founded in Dordrecht in 1820 by Pieter Fortuin, a sugar refiner who had moved into confectionery as the early-nineteenth-century Dutch sugar trade began to specialise. The firm's founding overlaps with the broader transition of European confectionery from apothecary practice to industrial production: by 1820, sugar prices had fallen sufficiently for boiled sweets to be produced at scale, and the technical infrastructure (cast-iron cooking vessels, mechanical cutters, glass-rolled drying surfaces) had become widely available. Fortuin's contribution was less the invention of any specific product than the early industrial organisation of a category that had previously been worked by individual sugar-bakers.
The firm has remained in continuous family ownership for the substantial majority of its 200-year existence, with brief interruptions during the Napoleonic-era political turmoil in the early years and during the Second World War. The Dordrecht factory has been at its current site since 1859, with substantial reconstruction in 1922 (after a fire) and modernisation in the 1960s and 2000s. The firm's product range has expanded considerably over the centuries — Fortuin produces, in addition to zuurtjes, the Wilhelmina pepermunt (a major Dutch mint), several lines of muntdrop, and a range of fruit-flavoured boiled candies — but zuurtjes remain the firm's core identification.
The classical flavours
The classical zuurtjes range comprises four flavours, in the conventional Dutch sequence:
| Flavour | Dutch | Colour | Acid level |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lemon | citroen | Pale yellow | High (citric) |
| Raspberry | framboos | Bright red | Medium |
| Anise | anijs | Clear/pale green | Low |
| Blackcurrant | zwarte bes | Dark purple | Medium-high |
Of these, the citroen is the most assertively sour and sets the category's character — the term zuurtjes ("sour ones") derives from the lemon-acid-forward flavour of the original line. The framboos is a softer fruit-acid impression. The anijs is the only sweet member of the classical four, with low acid and a strong anise-essential-oil flavour; it is conventionally produced as a clear or pale-green pear-shaped drop and is, of the four, the most distinctively Dutch in flavour profile. The blackcurrant is a more recent addition, having entered the standard range in the 1950s, and has displaced some older flavours (notably lavender and violet) that were standard in the early twentieth century.
The pear shape
The conventional Dutch zuurtje is pear-shaped: a small drop approximately 18mm tall and 12mm at its widest point, narrowing to a small flat top where the candy was cut from its stem during production. The shape is distinctively Dutch — French berlingots are typically rectangular, English humbugs are conventionally rolled cylinders, Italian caramelle dure are spherical — and is recognisable as a national form. The pear shape is functional rather than purely aesthetic: it allows the candy to be cut from a continuous extruded rope using a single rotating cutter, with the cut producing a flat top on each piece, and the remaining body being shaped by the gravity of the falling cooling drop.
The shape has remained substantially unchanged for at least 150 years. Older Fortuin zuurtjes from the late nineteenth century, occasionally surfacing in vintage tins at Dutch antique shops, are essentially identical in form to the modern product. The packaging — small cellophane-wrapped twists, sold either individually or in larger paper bags — has changed more than the candy itself, with the modern supermarket trade favouring resealable plastic pouches over the older cellophane convention.
Modern variants
The modern zuurtjes market has, since approximately 1990, expanded beyond the classical four flavours to include a wider range of fruit and confectionery flavours. Mango, peach, watermelon, pineapple, and several "tropical" combinations now appear in mixed bags. The Fortuin firm produces the wider range, but several smaller producers — including Dutch artisanal confectioners reviving older recipes — have entered the market with more historically authentic ranges that include violet, lavender, rose, and similar flavours that have largely fallen out of the mainstream.
The category has also been substantially affected by the rise of the "extra sour" candy market that originated in the United States in the late 1990s and reached the Netherlands in the early 2000s. Several Dutch producers (Klene's Sour Power line, Fortuin's own Extra Zuur range) now produce zuurtjes-format candies at acid levels substantially higher than the classical product — sometimes with a sour-sugar coating that produces an almost shocking initial impression. These products are essentially Anglo-American in flavour profile and are marketed primarily to children; they have not displaced the classical zuurtjes but coexist with them.
As a Dutch hard-candy reference
Zuurtjes occupy, in the Dutch confectionery memory, the slot that would be occupied in another European country by the regional artisan boiled-sweet tradition. They are the category that an older Dutch consumer will instinctively reach for when asked about "real" Dutch hard candy: not a marketing position but a genuine cultural one, sustained by the continuous Fortuin presence and by the candy's quiet ubiquity in Dutch sweet shops, supermarket aisles, and grandmother's tins for two centuries. The category has not been the subject of any of the marketing reinventions that have transformed the wider Dutch sweet shop in recent decades; zuurtjes in 2026 are recognisably the same product they have been for as long as anyone alive can remember.
This stability is, paradoxically, both Fortuin's competitive strength and its limitation. The firm dominates a category that has not grown materially in decades, and the broader Dutch confectionery industry has not chosen to compete vigorously in the space. Zuurtjes will, in all probability, continue to be produced by Fortuin in Dordrecht for the foreseeable future, in roughly the same form as they have always taken — and the Dutch consumer will continue to reach for them as the defining everyday hard candy of the country, without much remarking on the fact.