Antwerp’s most famous symbol is the hand.

You’ll find symbols, logo’s and signs with hands all over the city.

Antwerp even has an official cookie in the shape of a hand (the Antwerp Hand). It is cherished by all inhabitants. To celebrate Winter in Antwerp, we introduced a limited winter edition of the famous cookie.

The hand shape became a mitten, a typical winter symbol.

The Mitten cookies were available in pop-up stores, the tourist office and in bakeries all over Antwerp.

Because the hand cookie is a well-know icon of the city of Antwerp that is cherished by all inhabitants we worked closely together with the baker’s guild that invented the cookie in 1934. Of course we had to approach the re-design of the existing cookie with a lot of respect so that people would accept the limited winter edition and would not think of it as a cheap commercial stunt. The only thing that was changed was the original bakeware so that the hand-cookie would be transformed into a mitten-cookie without losing its’ unique taste and texture.

Winter in Antwerp attracted 600.000 visitors. At the end of the year, the complete stock of our special winter cookie was sold out. On top of that, the city decided to make Antwerpse Wantjes the official New Year’s gift. In total, people enjoyed 105.000 Antwerpse Wantjes, making it the sweetest Winter in Antwerp so far. And as the visitors of the event really enjoyed the Mitten cookie it will probably return next year when winter will be coming to Antwerp again.