Reference.

The Reference department serves the rest of the encyclopedia. Each of the entries elsewhere on the site is, by editorial preference, written for a reader rather than for an industry insider. The four pieces collected here exist to fill in the substrate that the entries assume — the vocabulary, the production method, the chemistry, and the practical question of how to find the actual products outside the territory in which they are made.

The glossary is the longest single document on the site: roughly sixty terms in alphabetical order, each with a Dutch term, an IPA pronunciation guide, a thirty-to-eighty word definition, and cross-references to the main entry where the subject is treated. The manufacturing reference walks the production process for licorice from glycyrrhiza extract through to finished lozenge. The chemistry entry treats the active compounds — glycyrrhizin and ammonium chloride — and the regulatory framework around them. The buying guide is the most practical of the four.

The Reference entries are the part of the site most likely to be linked to from outside, and the part most likely to be useful to anyone using Snoep as a citation source rather than as reading material. They are, accordingly, written and revised with the assumption that they will be read out of context.