Food and Drink Industry in Turkey: Facts and figures

IndustrySouth-East European INDUSTRIAL Мarket - issue 6/2006

Strengths of Turkish food industry are essential. They consist free of difficulties in finding raw materials, like agricultural produces, packaging material, etc.; variety and quantity of agricultural production; relatively cheap workforce; large domestic market and young population; presence of widespread local communication networks and infrastructure; sufficient educated and specialized workforce; developing markets close to Turkey; increasing volume of foreign trade; perspective for EU accession.

Based on official data for 2004 of Prime Ministry of Republic of Turkey concerning sector profiles Turkish food industry contributes around 5 per cent of the GNP. Food industry has a 20 per cent share in total production of manufacturing sector by 2002. Food sector employs more than 100 thousand registered workers and technical staff in more than 28 thousand enterprises which are mostly SMEs. Two thousand of these enterprises are relatively modern and bigger in the sector. In 1990, the number of enterprises producing foodstuffs were around 25 thousand.

In most of the sub-sectors of food industry capacity utilization is approximately at a level of 50 per cent. This fact is generally caused by changing domestic and foreign consumption trends and consumer preferences, the weak financial structure of SMEs in the sector, wrong investment decisions, instability in export markets, seasonality of agricultural production and insufficient integration or coordination between agriculture and industry.

Few facts and figures based on data of Federation of food & drink industry associations of Turkey presents Turkish food and drink industry.




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