A delicatessen in Sweden wrote to us with a shopping list: dried mango without sugar, pineapple, apricots, figs, Medjool dates, cranberries, prunes, papaya, mulberries, raisins and assorted nuts, in retail bags of two hundred to five hundred grams, ready for the shelf. It is a typical list for a specialty shop, and it is a useful one to answer in public, because roughly half of it is something a Turkish producer can honestly supply and half of it is not.
Two groups of dried fruit, one origin
Türkiye is one of the world's largest dried-fruit origins, but for a specific set of fruits. The classics are apricot, fig, sultana and their relatives, dried in the sun or in driers in the regions where they grow. Alongside them sits a newer category: fruit crisps — thin slices dried at low temperature until they are crunchy, with nothing added.
The crisps are our own production. We slice and dry them at our geothermal facility in Sındırgı; the range runs apple, banana, dragon fruit, fig, mandarin, orange, peach, strawberry, watermelon, tomato and aronia, plus mixed packs, all one hundred percent fruit, with no added sugar, preservative, colour or sulphur. The classic dried fruits we source: which fruit, in which form and grade, is confirmed against the current harvest before an order, not promised from a fixed list.
What is not Turkish, and why we say so
Mango, pineapple, papaya, Medjool dates and cranberries do not grow in Türkiye at commercial scale. A Turkish supplier who quotes them is re-trading imported product — sometimes competently, but the origin on the label will not say Türkiye, and a delicatessen buyer who chose a Turkish source for its provenance deserves to know that before the artwork is designed.
We would rather answer a list line by line — ours, sourced, or not ours — than fill it. A shop that wants the tropical items can source them from their own origins; what it gets from us is what Türkiye actually produces, documented as such.
