MIRACLE MARGARINE LEAVES FINNISH FIRM FLUMMOXED.

Byline: Youssef M. Ibrahim The New York Times

There are few visible signs of the good fortune hovering over this little company town by the Baltic Sea. Yet, if the 57-year-old farmer-owned company here, Raisio Group, a maker of french fries, wheat flour and pet food, plays its margarine right, it may turn into one of those Cinderella success stories usually associated with California software companies or, say, the maker of Nutrasweet.

The reason is that Raisio's new margarine, Benecol, contains a plant extract from the pine trees of Finland that medical testing has shown not only blocks but actually lowers levels of cholesterol in the bloodstream. It sounds almost too good to be true: Simply dab some Benecol on morning toast and within months your cholesterol count may be down 10 to 15 percent and the risk of a heart attack may be cut by a third. So far, a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine has supported the claims, and no negative side effects have been reported.

Ever since Raisio, whose 2,300 employees and their families make up the heart of this village, began to produce and sell the new margarine late last year, the conservative company managers have been struggling to keep their Nordic cool in the face of a frenzy by investors and the media.

In the last several months, Raisio stock has more than quadrupled to about $68 a share on the Helsinki Stock Exchange. While Benecol is sold only in Finland for now, the demand has been so overwhelming that the company is hurriedly building a factory to raise production to 5.1 million pounds in 1997 from 880,000 this year.

Even though the cost of Benecol is about five times that of ordinary margarine - about $10 a pound compared with $1.90 - Helsinki's big Stockmann department store and supermarkets around the country regularly put up signs apologizing to customers for running out of it.

Global food processing giants are courting Raisio's patented invention. Foreign investors, who owned just 9 percent of the stock last year, now own 44 percent and swoop into town weekly to check the place out. And, analysts wax lyrical over its prospects, with some predicting confidently that it will become a major international brand by decade's end, even though sales in the rest of Europe and the United States are probably far off.

``It is like an atomic bomb we didn't mean to invent,'' said Jukka Maki, 61, the company's deputy chief executive. ``We were just looking for a better margarine. We never thought it would be that big.''

Big as it is, Raisio is responding to all the hoopla with typical Nordic stolidity. Its public-relations staff comprises just an information director and two assistants, and neither they nor senior management make any effort to hype the new health food. If asked to comment on Benecol, executives often launch first into a description of the company's other product lines, like animal feed and chemicals, and expound on plans for expanding those businesses.

When Maki, the deputy chief executive, went to London last month to make the company's first presentation to stock analysts, he began his speech by saying: ``Excuse me, but this is all new to us. We are not prepared for all the attention.'' Then, as the mostly young audience waited impatiently to hear more about Benecol, he went on to talk about Raisio's conservative business practices and desire to maintain a reputation for quality.

``It is not in the Finnish nature to hop up and down about such things,'' said Tim Youngman, an analyst with the Swiss Banking Corp. who was one of the first people to recognize the importance of Benecol.

Research was driven by the need to do something about Finland's cholesterol crisis. The Finns' fatty diet - Stan Von Helles, Raisio's information director, jokes that his compatriots ``think sausages are vegetables'' - has given them the dubious distinction of tying with Scotland for the highest cholesterol levels in the world.

Raisio does not plan to stop with Benecol. Its scientists are already looking into ways of putting sitostanol into everything from chocolate candy, ice cream and energy bars to mayonnaise, cereals and hamburgers.