Raisio spent 2025 preparing to grow: it sold off a loss-making plant-protein unit, set hard 2027 targets and built a standing M&A function. Then it handed the company to Elli Siltala, a food-industry veteran of around 25 years at Valio, who has said her first priority is to listen and learn before setting a direction. The plan is already built. The open question is how Raisio's new chief executive chooses to take it forward.
Raisio is a Finnish brand house. It’s worth sits in names: Benecol, brand sold on cholesterol lowering products, and Elovena, the oats brand, both marketed well beyond Finland, alongside home-market staples such as Sunnuntai baking goods, Torino pasta and Nalle cereals.
Growing a brand house means one of two things: build the brands harder, or buy new ones. Raisio's board has said, in writing, that it intends to do both, and it has spent the past eighteen months building the capacity to do the buying.
On Wednesday, 12 August 2026, the company publishes its half-year report. Elli Siltala, appointed CEO on 7 August, does not start until 1 September; until then the outgoing Pasi Flinkman holds the seat.
The board chose the tool. The CEO chose to listen
Chairman Arto Tiitinen said in the appointment release that "under Elli Siltala's leadership our ambition is to grow the company through both organic growth and acquisitions." Read against the run of Nordic CEO-change releases, that is a pointed line. Boards usually credential the incoming chief executive and gesture at a "next phase." Tiitinen named the instrument, acquisitions, and set the direction before Siltala set foot in the building.
Siltala's own words went the other way. After the standard opening, she closed on this: "My first priority will be to listen, learn and build a shared understanding of how we can create long-term value for our shareholders, customers and employees."
Across the incoming-CEO releases on Listeds Executive Intelligence database, that is unusual. Most new chief executives arrive with at least a directional theme on day one: a capability to strengthen, a strategy to keep executing, a model to scale. Siltala, in this set, is the only one to make listening itself the priority and to leave the agenda more open.
The growth plan was built a year before its CEO
Here is what makes the contrast matter. The growth Tiitinen named is not merely an intention waiting on a new leader. It is a plan already in operation, and Flinkman built it.
Raisio narrowed before it aimed to grow. On 13 February 2025 it agreed to sell its entire plant-protein business, including the Härkis and Beanit brands, the Kauhava production assets and 16 employees, to Valio for EUR 7 million in cash: a unit that had booked EUR 4.5 million in net sales but a EUR 2.6 million loss in 2024.
A month later, on 13 March 2025, it published a 2025 to 2027 strategy built on three growth areas: breakfast and snacking, heart health, and new business. The sequence is the point: sell the loss-maker, then concentrate on the brands that pay.
The strategy set targets for the end of 2027: net sales of EUR 250 million and EBIT of over EUR 30 million, up from 2025 comparable figures of EUR 224.2 million and EUR 28.5 million. Acquisitions were written into the plan from the start.
Raisio then built the capacity to act on them. It created a dedicated M&A Director role, hiring Anni Palmio, a strategy-and-M&A lead from Paulig with earlier brand roles at Findus and Haribo, with effect from 1 September 2025, and set up a committee to steer the board's M&A work. A mid-cap food company of around 350 people does not stand up a permanent acquisition function by accident.
Two dates belong side by side. Palmio's M&A seat took effect on 1 September 2025. Siltala's CEO seat takes effect on 1 September 2026. The acquisition machinery is exactly one year older, and it was assembled under the CEO now leaving to other opportunities.
A brand builder, handed a buyer's mandate
Siltala's career has largely followed the commercial side of the business, with a strong focus on sales and marketing. She was at Valio from 2001 to 2025, progressing from various business, sales and marketing roles to executive positions including EVP Domestic Sales and Marketing, EVP Markets, EVP Core Businesses and Brands, and finally EVP Core Businesses, Home Markets and Primary Production.
She left Valio in November 2025. From May 2026 she was Chief Loyalty and Media Officer at SOK, a seat spanning marketing, loyalty, retail media, communications and public affairs, which she held for roughly three months before Raisio named her.
There is a Nordic small-world footnote here. The plant-protein business Raisio sold in early 2025 went to Valio, the company where Siltala spent her career and sat on the executive team at the time. She now leads the company that sold it.
That profile also runs against the Nordic grain. Marketing and brand titles rarely reach the top table of Finnish listed companies at all, based on ongoing preliminary Listeds analysis, only a handful carry a standalone chief marketing officer, and large caps are notably absent from that list
A sales-and-marketing leader moving up to run a listed company is rarer again. At a brand house, though, the fit is a natural one: when a company's value lives in names like Benecol and Elovena, a chief executive who has spent a career close to sales, brands and customers is on home ground.
The open question is how she chooses to balance the two: carry the acquisition programme forward as set out, or lean toward the organic, category-led growth she seems to know well.
