Rice pies gain popularity as Finnish bakeries produce hundreds of millions

Rice pies are becoming a popular snack in Finland, with bakeries producing hundreds of millions a year as eating habits shift towards more frequent snacking, Yle reports.

More shoppers are picking up the pies from supermarket snack counters. They are an inexpensive warm snack, generally costing a few dozen cents to just over one euro, and are increasingly replacing lunch for some people.

Sirpa Vammas, a home economics adviser at the South Karelia Martha Association, says the growing popularity of snacks is giving the traditional food a new role. She says rice pies also pass Finnish food heritage from one generation to the next, whether bought ready-made or prepared at home.

Fazer Bakeries’ supply chain director, Jarno Hämäläinen, says demand has been rising for a couple of years. The increase has led to investment and higher production volumes, with production moving to larger bakeries. At the company’s bakery in Lappeenranta, the porridge filling can be made in batches of 1,250 kilograms.

Fazer’s Lappeenranta bakery produced 152 million pies in 2025. Pielispakari, a bakery in Nurmes in North Karelia, can make about 100 million pies a year. Hämäläinen says lining up the pies made in Lappeenranta in one year would create a queue more than 15,000 kilometres long, reaching Sydney and continuing another 850 kilometres.

Handmade Karelian pies are a more expensive premium product, often made by smaller bakeries and sold frozen. Industrially produced pies are generally called rice pies. Karelian pies have an EU-protected name and must follow specified ingredient and preparation requirements, while rice pies do not.

Vammas says a traditional Karelian pie’s crust is made with rye flour, wheat flour, milk, water and salt, and its filling can be rice, potato or barley. The crust should be as thin as possible and evenly crimped.

Rice pies are also being served with new toppings, including avocado, cold-smoked salmon and seasoned egg butter mixed with ingredients such as cottage cheese. Vegan versions are available too, using vegetable fats instead of butter and milk.

The roots of the modern Karelian pie lie in eastern Finland in the 17th and 18th centuries. The first written mention dates to 1686. Once a festive food because making the pies by hand was labour-intensive, they spread elsewhere in Finland and abroad, particularly with displaced Karelians.