Why Hema Will No Longer Sell Moorkoppen
It all started with a baker from Monster in South Holland who decided to stop using the name ‘moorkop’ for his chocolate pastries. And now Hema has also decided to change the name of its moorkop to chocoladebol.
Moorkop is no longer appropriate
According to Hema, the name is no longer appropriate for our times. The product itself remains the same, by the way. It will still take a little while to implement the name change—namely, not until March 30.
Where does the name moorkop come from?
The moorkop is named after the Moors; Moor comes from the Latin maurus, ‘inhabitant of Northwest Africa’. But in Dutch, the word Moor was also used as a synonym for the word ‘negro’. And that is exactly why baker Jurgen Verwoerd from Monster no longer wanted to use this name for his chocolate pastries.
No negerzoenen but kisses
This week, he announced that he would stop using the term ‘moorkoppen’. This followed emails he received from customers who found the term discriminatory. The baker saw no problem with changing the name because nothing about the product would change. “Why keep a name if people have negative associations with it?” he told RTL Nieuws. “Customers associated the name with slavery. They referred to racism. And I don’t want to cooperate in anything that people have an unpleasant association with. So I did something about it. Negerzoenen are therefore also called kisses at our bakery.” He hoped that more bakers would follow suit.
Hema is doing so, although Hema said that plans to change the name had already existed. In any case: from now on, we’ll be eating a chocoladebol at Hema!
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