Tomato Paste Is Made in Ten Weeks. Your Contract Has to Land Before Them.

Most industrial ingredients are made all year. Tomato paste is not. It is made in a campaign of roughly ten weeks that begins when the fresh fruit ripens and ends when the last of it has been processed, and everything a buyer receives for the following twelve months comes from that window. Buyers who plan to the campaign get the product they specified. Buyers who plan to their own calendar get what is left.

The campaign, and where it runs

In Türkiye the season opens in the south. Around İzmir, harvest and processing begin from about mid-July. Growers in the belt between Manisa and İzmir, along the northern Aegean, pick early-season fruit from mid-July and supply not only their local factories but also plants further north whose own crop is not yet ready.

The Marmara region follows. Around Karacabey, west of Bursa on the southern coast of the Marmara Sea — where a large share of the factories are located — production usually starts at the end of July and finishes in the middle of October.

That is the whole year's production. When the last plant stops in October, the volume of Turkish paste for the coming twelve months is fixed.

Why the factories plan before the buyers do

A processing plant built to handle harvest peaks does not improvise its raw material. Paste producers sign contracts with growers before the season that fix the quantity, the quality and the price of the fruit they will receive — a practice widespread in the Marmara region since the 1970s. By the time the first tomato reaches a factory, that factory has known for months how much it will process and roughly what it will make.

The scale explains why. The country runs more than fifty factories with a combined capacity above 80,000 tonnes of fresh tomatoes per day, enough to absorb the surge when everything ripens at once, and a total annual paste capacity of roughly 600,000 tonnes. In 2024 exports of tomato products reached about 353 million dollars, roughly 234 million of it paste, with around 166,000 tonnes of concentrate in the 2024/25 season.

An industry planned that far ahead does not have much room for a buyer who arrives after it has started.

What early commitment actually buys

The obvious gain is allocation. A buyer who is in the plan before the campaign has volume; a buyer who calls in November is buying from stock, which may or may not exist in the specification they need.

The less obvious gain is the specification itself. The decisions that determine what a paste is — hot break or cold break, the Brix band, the colour target — are made on the line during the campaign. A buyer who is in the plan can have those set to their brief. A buyer who is not is matching their requirement against whatever the factory happened to produce, and the closest available match is not the same as the right product.

Working backwards from October

The calendar that works is the reverse of the one most buyers use. Brief and specification in the spring. Producer verification and sampling before the line starts. Batch analysis and export documentation built into the campaign rather than requested after the drums are stacked. Delivery then follows from a plan rather than from a search.

None of this is complicated. It is simply earlier than the buyer's own product calendar suggests, because the product calendar is annual and the supply calendar is not.

Where we sit

TeraVella works in tomato products as a sourcing partner — we do not claim to own a processing plant or an aseptic line. Our role is to work backwards from the campaign on your behalf: verify a producer against your brief before the season, put the break type, Brix band and colour parameters in writing so they are built into production, collect batch analyses during the campaign, and manage documented shipment in aseptic drums for industry or tins and jars for retail. Where a request arrives too late for the current season we say so plainly and plan for the next one, because in this category an honest no in spring is worth more than a substitute in winter. We hold ISO 9001, ISO 22000 and ISO 27001 and make no organic claim. Volumes and prices are confirmed at quotation.