Artificial mineral waters on Senate Square.

Hartwall dates itself to 2 February 1836, the day the Senate in Helsinki granted a licence, or privilege, to make and sell “all kinds” of artificial mineral waters, warm and cold, under the supervision of the medical board, according to the company’s own history. The man behind it was Victor Hartwall, whom the company describes as an assistant in chemistry and a mining official. Five years earlier, it says, an advertisement in Helsingfors Tidningar of June 1831 had already offered artificial mineral waters made by Hartwall with the chemistry professor P. A. von Bonsdorff, though his name did not appear in it.

The first works were in the Sederholm house on Senate Square, Finnish Wikipedia says, citing Helsingin Sanomat in 2012; the company adds that the building is the oldest in the city centre. When a spa opened in Kaivopuisto park in 1838, Hartwall supplied the waters served at its pump room, the Kaivohuone, according to Finnish Wikipedia and the company. Hartwall calls the business the first mineral-water factory in the Nordic countries.

From there the company tells a story of steady growth. In the 1860s it opened ornate kiosks on the Market Square, the Esplanadi and in Kaivopuisto, selling mineral waters and lemonade, and a shop on Katariinankatu. It says it was the first in its trade to install a steam engine, in 1874; that nine permanent staff posed around the director, August Ludvig Hartwall, for its 50th anniversary in 1886; and that a new factory opened on Vladimirinkatu, today’s Kalevankatu, in 1889. By the end of the century, it says, its price list ran to more than 40 artificial and 40 natural mineral waters and a dozen soft drinks.

In the 1920s lorries replaced horses for deliveries, the company says. Finnish Wikipedia records a factory building of 1928 on Malminkatu, at the edge of Kamppi square, used until the 1960s, and a factory in Konala, in Helsinki, from 1962 to 2003.

Jaffa, the Long Drink and their posters and stripes.

Two drinks made the name. Jaffa, an orange soft drink, went on sale in 1949, according to Finnish Wikipedia, which cites the business-biography series Talousvaikuttajat, and the company. Hartwall says it named the drink after the port city of Jaffa, that it was Finland’s first cloudy carbonated orange drink, and that its developers looked for oranges as far as Florida before settling on Sicily. It also says that because the name comes from a city, it could not be protected as a trademark. A red, blood-orange Jaffa followed in 1955 and a lemon one in 1956, according to the company’s timeline, and in the 1970s, it says, Jaffa became Finland’s best-selling soft drink. Its slogan, “aito oikea” — roughly “the genuine, real one” — still frames the brand.

Jaffa’s look was set by posters. The company says it hired a young graphic artist, Erik Bruun, who made the first Jaffa poster in 1956 and drew the campaign through the 1950s and 1960s, hunting for oranges at market stalls and sketching at matchbox size so that the image would speak without clutter; it shows one of his posters dated 1966. English Wikipedia calls his Jaffa designs famous and credits him with the reverse sides of the last series of Finnish markka banknotes, of 1986. The company says his posters are still reproduced as prints and textiles, and that in 2014 a band of singing fruit characters arrived in its television advertising.

The second drink was the Gin Long Drink, made for the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. The company says the state alcohol company Alko asked Hartwall for an apple-brandy drink to speed up service for Olympic visitors; Hartwall made that, and on its own initiative a gin-based drink as well. Alko produced and marketed both, and the gin and grapefruit mix proved the more popular, so it stayed after the Games. Finnish Wikipedia, citing the Finnish brewers’ association, calls it Hartwall’s first alcoholic drink. Because it was long made to Alko’s order, the company says, its makers changed over the decades; from 1995 any drinks company could make a long drink.

Its pack is one of the few documented design stories here. Hartwall says the classic stripes on the Original Long Drink can stand for the lanes of the running track at the Helsinki Olympic Stadium, and in 2022 it sold three posters for the drink’s 70th anniversary that reworked the pattern. The company says the drink is nicknamed “the grey one,” and that since 2018 the brand has marked a “greyest day of the year,” a campaign it began after a study with the weather service Foreca.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and they come from Finland and Norway: Hartwall, Koff, Mills, Solo, Olvi, Lapin Kulta and Atria. Food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner kiosk to a supermarket aisle.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or drink it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From family firm to Royal Unibrew.

Hartwall grew into a brewer by buying others. It took on the Karjala beer in 1966 with the Lappeenranta–Lauritsala brewery, a majority of Oy Bock Bryggeri Ab of Vaasa in 1968 and the Aura brewery of Turku in 1971, according to the company; Finnish Wikipedia adds Lapin Kulta in 1980. In 1988 it bought Mallasjuoma of Lahti, the brewery founded in 1912 by the merchant Henrik Mattsson and his sons, and with it the Lahden Erikois beers. It made Coca-Cola under licence from 1957 until the turn of 1998 and 1999, Finnish Wikipedia says, citing Talousvaikuttajat and Hartwall’s 1998 annual report; its cooperation with PepsiCo began in 1999, the company says. It launched Novelle water in 1990, according to Finnish Wikipedia and the company, and the Upcider cider in 1999, Finnish Wikipedia says; the company dates its ED energy drink to 2003 and its purchase of the Finnish rights to the soft drink Pommac to the end of 2001.

Ownership left the family in stages. Hartwall was listed on the Helsinki stock exchange in 1994, Finnish Wikipedia says. In 2002 the British brewer Scottish & Newcastle took full ownership; when Heineken and Carlsberg divided Scottish & Newcastle in 2008, Hartwall went to Heineken; and in July 2013 Heineken sold it to the Danish brewer Royal Unibrew, Finnish Wikipedia reports, citing Ilta-Sanomat. English Wikipedia gives the same sequence. Under Royal Unibrew it bought the business of Bryggeri Helsinki and built a craft brewery at Nokia Arena in Tampere in 2021, and in 2025 bought Pernod Ricard’s Finnish brands, including Minttu, and their production in Turku, the company says.

On where its drinks are made, the company says its factories are in Lahti and Turku, with a spring-water bottling plant at Karijoki in South Ostrobothnia and its head office in Helsinki. The highly automated Lahti plant at Kujala opened in 2003, according to Finnish Wikipedia and the company, and English Wikipedia records a special brewery there, named Mattsson, completed in 2017. Hartwall says Novelle spring water is bottled at the Solina spring at Karijoki, and that its Novelle mineral waters and Vichy are made in Lahti from groundwater filtered through the Salpausselkä ridges. It describes itself as the partner for the Heineken and Pepsi brands in Finland.

Names need care. Hartwall Capital is a separate investment company, and the arena long called Hartwall Arena in Helsinki is now Helsinki-halli. The Finnish drink Jaffa is unrelated to the British Jaffa Cakes.

For a design guide, Hartwall shows how a drinks company’s identity can live in its products’ graphics — Erik Bruun’s orange posters and the Olympic-track stripes — rather than in the company name. Compare Fazer, another Helsinki name with a long history, and Lapin Kulta, a beer in Hartwall’s portfolio. For this guide we use a mineral blue, a Jaffa orange and a long-drink grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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