Finland’s most significant cluster of grain business competence

In the autumn of 2020, Viking Malt Group announced that they are building a new malthouse in Lahti. The value of the investment in the Pippo-Kujala industrial area is about EUR 90 million. The malthouse is the second-largest industrial investment in the Lahti region after the construction of the Hartwall production facility, and one of the largest investments in the Finnish food industry in the 21st century. Work will begin in the spring of 2021, and the first operations will be moved to the new area in late 2022.

Fazer’s factory area in Lahti has three construction projects currently in progress. The largest project, involving a factory that produces xylitol, uses oat hulls as raw material. The xylitol factory is being built next to Fazer’s oat mill in Lahti, which is also being expanded. When the xylitol factory is completed, it will be world’s first fully backwards integrated xylitol factory, using state-of-the-art technology for the production. The xylitol factory’s side streams include cakes of oat hulls, which will be delivered to the new bio- heating plant to be burnt. This provides the entire Fazer factory area with heat and steam.

In 2020, Fazer Fazer took over the bakery and mill operations of Vuohelan Herkku, a company specialized in gluten-free products. The modern gluten-free Vuohelan bakery is located in the Jokimaa business area.

Viipurilainen Kotileipomo made an investment valued at about EUR 1.5 million in Vääksy, Asikkala, in 2019 and 2020. The rapid growth has already generated 25 new jobs. The company has quintupled its turnover after moving from Lahti to its current premises in Vääksy in 2014.

Hartwall made a significant investment in Lahti in 2017 by setting up a special beer brewery in its factory. According to Hartwall, the significant investment was based on the shift in the Finnish beer culture. The investment allows for Hartwall to meet the demands of consumers better and provides the company with a new type of agility in brewing beers: the brewery’s development efforts are innovative and batches of different sizes including a wide variety of beers are brewed, also in co-operation with international brew masters.

Teerenpeli made an investment worth EUR 2 million in 2015 by constructing a new whisky distillery that quadrupled the capacity for distilling barrel-aged whisky distillate. Teerenpeli Distillery is the largest and one of the oldest whisky distilleries in Finland and the only distillery to use traditional methods of distillation. Without exaggeration, its whisky production is the best in the world: in 2020, Teerenpeli Brewery & Distillery won the Worldwide Whisky Producer series in the largest alcohol competition in the world, the International Wine and Spirit Competition (IWSC).