Kotipizza Brand Guidelines: A 1987 Vaasa Pizza Chain, Franchised Across Finland, Owned by Orkla

A pizzeria owner’s second chain, 1987.

Kotipizza comes from Vaasa, on Finland’s west coast. Yle reported in November 2018 that Rabbe Grönblom of Vaasa founded the chain in 1987. It was not his first. Finnish Wikipedia, citing Suomen Kuvalehti, says he opened his first pizzeria, O Sole Mio, beside the Vaasa market square in 1976, grew it into a chain called Pizzeria no.1 and sold that chain to the Helsinki co-operative Elanto in 1987; the same year he started Kotipizza, whose first restaurant opened in the Suvilahti district of Vaasa. “Koti” is Finnish for “home,” as English Wikipedia notes.

Growth was fast. Finnish Wikipedia says the 100th Kotipizza opened in 1992 and the 200th in 1996, and that the company bought the Noutopizza chain in 1994. A deal of 1995 with the Neste petrol-station chain added a shop-in-shop model, with smaller pizza counters inside stations, which cut the cost of opening a new outlet; a similar agreement with the Teboil station chain followed in 2009, the article says. Stations remain part of the network: Kotipizza counters have since opened at St1 and Neste sites, and the station menus are shorter than in the chain’s other restaurants, according to Finnish Wikipedia.

The restaurants are almost all run by franchise entrepreneurs rather than by the company. English Wikipedia puts the franchised share in Finland at over 95 percent, and Yle counted about 270 restaurants, 300 entrepreneurs and about 1,700 employees in Finland in November 2018. The company supplies the menu and product development, the visual identity, national marketing and the till system, Finnish Wikipedia says.

Boxes, a reindeer pizza and a 2025 renewal.

The chain’s visual identity was renewed on 3 June 2025, the trade site Markkinointiuutiset reported that day, more than ten years after the previous renewal. The changes covered the online shop, the menu, the tone of advertising and the visual identity, including the logo and colour scheme. The illustration on pizza boxes and posters changed too, with work by the Finnish illustrator Antti Kalevi, whose earlier clients the article listed as including Apple, The New York Times and Marimekko. The online shop was redesigned with new product photography, and topping choices that had been shown as text gained pictures. The article added that Kotipizza had just brought its delivery service into the Wolt app on a self-delivery basis, so orders placed there are still carried by the chain’s own pizza drivers rather than by Wolt couriers.

The same renewal reshaped the menu. Markkinointiuutiset reported that a pizza made with wild-caught Finnish fish from Pielisen Kala was added, while the pepperoni-and-pineapple and the long-running Opera pizzas left the fixed menu but could still be ordered by choosing the same toppings on a build-your-own Perfetta, a pizza Finnish Wikipedia traces back to the first 12-item menu of 1987. The chain’s most widely reported product is the Poro, a pizza with smoked reindeer, chanterelles and onion. MTV Uutiset reported in June 2023 that it had been on the menu since 2008 under an earlier name and was renamed Poro in May 2023, when its recipe was changed.

Packaging has also been a test bed. Yle reported on 8 April 2023 that a Kotipizza restaurant in the Keljo district of Jyväskylä, and one in Järvenpää, had been piloting a reusable round plastic pizza box since late 2022 with the Finnish start-up Kamupak. Customers paid a deposit, which was refunded when the box was brought back, and the restaurant washed it; the entrepreneur in Jyväskylä told Yle the boxes took more space than cardboard and the separate lid and base made them slightly slower to handle.

How the category presents itself.

Europe’s bakery, sandwich, coffee and pizza chains present themselves first through the shop: the fascia over the door, the counter, the bags and cups, and the names of the products on the menu board. Chains in France, Spain, Belgium, Germany and Finland publish their menus by named ranges, such as sandwiches, salads, pastries and coffee, and their websites usually add a store finder, a loyalty app and a section for prospective franchisees.

Many of these brands sit inside larger groups, and ownership is often the clearest way to read their history. The Barcelona sandwich chain Pans & Company passed from the Catalan food group Agrolimen to the Portuguese restaurant group Ibersol in October 2016, according to Ibersol. In 2014, the agricultural trade paper Agra reported that the industrial baker Neuhauser owned two quick-service chains, Pomme de Pain in France and Crobag in Germany, as the grain group Soufflet took control of it. Pomme de Pain later went back to independence when its managers bought it from InVivo in July 2023, Réussir reported.

Shop networks are published by the companies and counted by the trade press, and the counts change. Franchising can carry a brand abroad, sometimes through a master franchise for a whole country, as Pomme de Pain did in Morocco and Tunisia, according to French Wikipedia; airport and railway-station sites can form a separate channel, such as the travel division through which Ibersol runs Café Pans counters in Spanish airports. A chain’s count of restaurants is therefore always a figure for a given date.

Identity changes are usually reported in the trade press when a refit is unveiled: a new logo, a new typeface, new uniforms and a pilot shop in a symbolic location. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand, who founded it, who owns it and how its shops and packaging have changed, and attributes claims to the company where they rest on its own word.

Founder, investors, the stock exchange, Orkla.

Ownership has changed several times. Finnish Wikipedia says the Grönblom family company sold a majority of Kotipizza in 2008 to a company set up by its employees; Grönblom returned as main owner in 2011 and in August that year sold three quarters of his shares to the Finnish private-equity firm Sentica Partners, giving up the rest in 2014. The parent company, Kotipizza Group Oyj, was listed on the Helsinki stock exchange in 2015, according to the same article. By 2018 the group also ran the Mexican-style chain Chalupa and The Social Burger Joint, Yle reported.

In November 2018 the Norwegian consumer-goods group Orkla made a tender offer for Kotipizza Group, and the Kotipizza board unanimously recommended that shareholders accept it, Yle reported on 22 November 2018. The Finnish Competition and Consumer Authority approved the acquisition on 20 December 2018, finding that it would not significantly impede competition in Finland, and Orkla announced on 17 January 2019 that it had completed the offer. Kotipizza Oyj is now part of Kotipizza Group within Orkla, and Finnish Wikipedia says the chain operated only in Finland in 2026, having earlier had restaurants in countries including Estonia, Sweden, China and South Korea. As of November 2026, the Finnish Franchising Association’s member listing gave Kotipizza 300 franchise units in Finland.

For a design guide, Kotipizza shows how a franchise brand is carried by the things every entrepreneur shares: the box, the poster, the menu board and the online shop, which the 2025 renewal changed together. Compare BackWerk, a franchised bakery chain from Germany, and Greggs, a high-street food chain from the UK. For this guide we use basil green, dough cream and a tomato red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kotipizza’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.