Dutch supermarkets are not like ours!

[Katharine]

I was sent this link to a Dutch supermarket online shopping:

http://producten.hema.nl/

Enjoy! (It may take a few moments before anything happens - don't give up!)

[englishangel]

Fantastic, that has gone to all my friends

[J.R.]

Very imaginative.

[midget]

Not a bit like Tesco.com!

[Wuppertal]

Mmm the best thing about Dutch supermarkets (especially Albert Heijn (http://www.ah.nl)) is a wonderful product called vla. Sadly it is unique to the Netherlands so difficult to describe, but anyone who knows it knows what I mean (though that's obvious, oopsy). It is simply my favourite food/drink in the world. I spent a good year writing to embassies in London and the Hague, and to British and Dutch import and export and trade companies (and once was rung by the representative of the EU trade commissioner in the Netherlands and made to feel very important ) trying to persuade them to export vla from Holland, but to no avail. Though it now appears in limited quantities in Aldi Süd in southern Germany (funnily enough not Aldi Nord, in north Germany, nearer to Holland).

[jhopgood]

I always thought vla was a custard, so I looked it up

Vla custard

This dairy product made from fresh milk first appeared in the 1950s. Traditional vla is made of cooked milk with custard, or with a combination of eggs, maizena, vanilla and sugar. Vla has the viscosity of yoghurt and is served cold, but is sweet rather than sour.
Vla available in many different flavours. Plain vanilla vla is frequently served with apple sauce, or as a vlaflip, with yoghurt and fruit syrup. In comes in several flavours like: chocolate, caramel, vanilla, banana, etc. Sometimes the vla contains small pieces of chocolate.

Pretty good and we used to buy it every week when we lived in Amsterdam.

It's curious that there are quite a few similar products that have a flavour unique to the originating country, and vla is one.

My favourite is Natilla from Costa Rica, which translates as a sour cream, but somehow tastes slightly different.
I liked it so much that on my return to the UK I found a recipe for Natilla, only to discover that in Spain, it is a custard. Not at all what I wanted.

[michael scuffil]

Though it now appears in limited quantities in Aldi Süd in southern Germany (funnily enough not Aldi Nord, in north Germany, nearer to Holland).

Aldi Süd takes in Cologne and Aachen, which are very close to Holland.