From a few products in 1992 to a national pantry brand.

Spilva is one of the names most Latvian shoppers will find in the sauce aisle, and it is made just outside the capital. According to its owner, Orkla Latvija, the Spilva plant has stood in Spilve, in Babīte, since 1992, when it began as a small food-canning workshop. The brand’s own website gives the same year in the line “together since 1992,” and says that at first there were only a few products.

Orkla’s Latvian history page says that Spilva was already one of the market leaders by the time it changed hands, with a range that took in tomato sauces, ketchup, horseradish, mustard, mayonnaise, salad dressings, canned vegetables and jams.

That breadth is still the brand’s defining feature. The Spilva website today groups its products into tomato sauces, ketchups, preserves, sauces and dressings, mayonnaises, ready meals, horseradish and mustard, jams and purées, dessert sauces, syrups and spices, with a separate line for hotels, restaurants and cafés. In press releases from 2025 Orkla Latvija described the range as several hundred products across seven categories of food and food accompaniments, from tomato sauces and ketchups to soups and main courses.

The company describes Spilva as the leading maker of food and food accompaniments in Latvia and as a reliable everyday “meal helper.” Its consumer-facing line is “Labi iet kopā!” — roughly “goes well together” — a phrase that runs across its website, recipes and social channels, where the brand also publishes cooking videos and recipes under the name Spilva gatavo (“Spilva cooks”). The recipes lean on Latvian home cooking, such as bean soup and grey peas, alongside burgers and grill marinades.

Orkla, Latplanta and a new company name.

Spilva’s ownership changed in 2004, when the Norwegian consumer-goods group Orkla bought it. Orkla Latvija’s history page says this was Orkla’s first step into Latvia; Latvian Wikipedia also dates Orkla’s ownership of Spilva to 2004. Orkla, which traces its own roots in Norway to 1654, went on in 2005 to buy Latfood, the potato-snack maker behind Ādažu Čipsi.

Under Orkla the Spilva business grew by acquisition as well as by building. In 2008, according to Orkla Latvija, a new production building opened at the plant. In 2009 Spilva bought Latplanta, a brand of spices and food additives, which thereby also joined the Orkla group, the company’s history says.

The company’s name changed as Orkla consolidated its Latvian businesses. In 2014 Orkla added the NP Foods group, which brought in the confectioner Laima, the biscuit maker Selga, Staburadze, Gutta juices and Everest water. Latvian Wikipedia records that SIA Spilva was renamed Orkla Foods Latvija on 30 December 2015, and Orkla Latvija says that in 2016 the group was reorganised into two companies: Orkla Confectionery & Snacks Latvija, and Orkla Foods Latvija, which developed the Spilva, Latplanta and Gutta brands. In 2019 the two were merged into a single organisation, Orkla Latvija, which today presents Spilva alongside Laima, Selga, Staburadze, Ādažu Čipsi and Gutta.

Orkla Latvija continues to present Spilva as a brand in its own right, with a separate website, recipe pages and social channels; its group website lists it among the local brands it says it combines and develops while keeping each brand’s values.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Latvia and Estonia: Laima, Selga, Spilva, Riga Black Balsam, Aldaris, Saku and A. Le Coq. Food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from firms that still carry a founder’s name to names that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the taste it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory 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.

A bigger plant, a new spice pack and an award.

Spilva is still made where it started. Orkla Latvija lists the Spilva plant in Spilve among its production sites in Latvia, and in September 2025 it announced the largest growth project at the plant since 2008. The plan, the company said, was to extend the production building and modernise the main production lines, after mayonnaise and sauce production had reached about 90% of line capacity on the back of rising exports. In November 2025 Orkla Latvija said the extension would add about 1,500 square metres, a quarter more production space, bringing the plant to about 6,020 square metres and raising capacity by about 30%; a topping-out ceremony followed in December 2025, and the whole project is planned to finish in mid-2027.

The same releases give a sense of scale. Orkla Latvija said Spilva produces more than 17,000 tonnes of products a year, and that about half of its output is exported. The company calls the plant one of the most modern in the Baltic states and says it has become strategically important within the Orkla network as the group’s main sauce producer.

Packaging has been updated alongside the factory. In August 2025 Spilva introduced a new spice sachet with a zip-lock closure, so that the pack can be opened and closed again, and said the sachets would appear in a new design. New flavours keep arriving in the tomato-sauce range, which the brand says now runs to more than fifteen varieties. One of them, a sweet-and-sour sauce called “Medus cālis” (“honey chicken”), was named the best new product in Latvia for 2025 in the ambient-food category in a study by the market-research firm NielsenIQ, Spilva reported.

For a design guide, Spilva shows how a national pantry brand can stretch across ketchup, mayonnaise, pickles and spices while keeping one name and one friendly tone of voice. Compare it with Orkla’s Estonian confectioner Kalev and its Latvian stablemate Laima. For this guide we use tomato red, mayonnaise cream and dill green with a sturdy rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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