Baydöner Brand Guidelines: The İzmir İskender Chain Founded in 2007 and Listed in 2023

An İskender chain that started on the Aegean coast.

Baydöner is an İskender restaurant chain from İzmir, on Turkey’s Aegean coast, rather than from Istanbul. In May 2013 the company’s deputy chairman, Feridun Tuncer, told Hürriyet that the partners set up the Baydöner brand in 2007; the same report described a business that had set out from İzmir six years earlier. Tuncer said the plan from the start was to take İskender döner, which he called one of the finest dishes of Turkish cooking, and serve it to one standard, initially across Turkey and then abroad.

The operating company today is Baydöner Restoranları A.Ş., which lists its head office in the Konak district of İzmir and its main activity as running restaurants, according to its entry on KAP, Turkey’s official public disclosure platform. The chain has kept that İzmir base as it has grown across the country.

The founding story was told at more length in January 2015, when the chairman, Levent Yılmaz, spoke to the Hürriyet columnist Ayçe Dikmen. He said the start was close to chance: while the partners were running several other businesses, an acquaintance suggested they open a restaurant concept inside a Kipa hypermarket, and they opened their opening shop there. Behind it, he said, lay about six months of work on choosing cooks, finding meat and settling how the food would be made.

He said the response surprised them. In İzmir, which he described as a Mediterranean city where people eat less kebab and döner than elsewhere, the new counter drew strong interest, and the partners took that as the signal to expand. His reasoning, as he put it to Hürriyet, was that a dish İzmir’s demanding diners accepted would travel anywhere in Turkey. Investors in Istanbul, he added, had long been wary of brands from İzmir.

A central kitchen and a cold chain.

From the start Baydöner placed itself in shopping centres. In the 2013 Hürriyet report Tuncer said the partners had designed a recipe of their own, an infrastructure and a restaurant concept so that İskender could stand as an alternative to the foreign-owned fast-food chains that filled mall food courts. The company’s website still groups its menu under “İskenderler,” with extra dishes listed beside them.

The way the food is made is the core of the model. In the January 2015 interview Yılmaz explained why döner is hard to run as a chain: unlike a burger or a meatball, it is cooked whole through the day, so a restaurant has to judge closely how much it will sell and how much will be left over. Baydöner’s answer, he said, was central production. The production team is kept at the centre, every restaurant is fitted with a cold room, and product is sent out by cold chain, so that the same dish reaches Trabzon, Edirne and Antalya. He said the partners had studied how international chains run standard quality before settling on that system.

Growth came quickly, and each count below is tied to its date. In May 2013 Hürriyet reported that Baydöner had 65 branches in Turkey, Azerbaijan and Iraq, and that it had opened its second restaurant in Erbil, in northern Iraq. The company told the paper that the Ministry of Economy had admitted it to Turquality, the state programme that supports Turkish brands abroad, after an application made in 2012, and that the Erbil opening was backed by the programme. By January 2015 the chain had 85 branches in 38 cities, Yılmaz told Hürriyet. In August 2023 Ekonomist reported that the company served customers from 159 restaurants in 42 provinces across its three brands.

The company has also tried other formats. In the 2015 interview Yılmaz described a new brand, Burgola, aimed at younger diners, with seven or eight new products and a layout that he said could fit a unit of 50 square metres or one of 500. By 2023 the group’s other brands named in the press were Bursa İshakbey and PidebyPide; the Baydöner website writes the latter as Pide by Pide in its campaign pages.

Turkish chains and their stories.

Turkish café, bakery, kebab and casual-dining chains tend to build their names around a single dish or a single place. Some carry a city in the name, as Mado does with Maraş, the older name of Kahramanmaraş; others carry the food itself, as Simit Sarayı does with the sesame-covered simit. On their own websites the companies present the dish first and the shop second, with menus organised by named dishes such as künefe, baklava, simit or döner rather than by abstract product lines.

Many of these chains grew by moving street food indoors. Hürriyet Daily News wrote in 2013 that simit, once sold from carts, had become a large business run by chain restaurants, and the companies themselves describe their shopfronts as cafés, bakeries or restaurants with seating, counters and displays that make the food the main sight.

Franchising carries the brands abroad. Turkish chains publish franchise pages and lists of foreign branches, and some work through master franchisees that run a whole region; Daily Sabah reported in 2017 that a Saudi retail group had held such a franchise for Simit Sarayı across the Middle East and North Africa since 2014. Shops abroad often sit in malls and on main shopping streets, according to the companies’ own branch lists.

Ownership is usually described plainly on corporate pages: a family company, a holding company behind several brands, or a founding partnership that later sold a minority stake. This guide sets out who founded each brand, who owns it now and where its food is made, using dated press reports where they exist and marking what rests only on the company’s own word.

From one counter to the stock exchange.

The company went public in 2023. Shares in Baydöner Restoranları A.Ş. began trading on Borsa İstanbul under the code BYDNR on 21 August 2023, after a gong ceremony at the exchange, Borsa İstanbul announced. Ekonomist reported the same day that the shares had been sold through a fixed-price book-building on the exchange on 15 and 16 August, run by a consortium led by Halk Yatırım. Chairman Levent Yılmaz and deputy chairman Feridun Tuncer both attended the ceremony, the magazine reported.

KAP lists the company on the exchange’s main market, within indices that include BIST Tourism, BIST Services and BIST İzmir, and classes it under hotels and restaurants. Its website carries an investor-relations section with financial statements and annual reports, alongside pages for franchising, careers and a press room.

The visual side of the brand is simple to read from its own pages: the website leads with the İskender menu, restaurant finder and campaigns, and uses the Baydöner name in Turkish with its dotted ö throughout.

For a design guide, Baydöner shows how a single regional dish, made in one central kitchen, can be turned into a national shopping-centre brand with a public company behind it. Compare HD İskender, another chain built around İskender, and Usta Dönerci. For this guide we use brick red, ember brown, cream and a pepper gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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