A tavern, a cellar and an agricultural-school graduate.

Dimes comes from Tokat, a city in the inland Black Sea region of northern Turkey, and from one man, Mustafa Vasfi Diren. Turkish Wikipedia, citing Hürriyet profiles of the company from 1997 and 2008, says Diren graduated from the Bursa agricultural school in 1943 and worked in Amasya and Yalova before deciding, in 1958, to return to Tokat and start production of his own. He began with wine. With money borrowed from friends, he built a wine vat in the cellar of his house and made wine with his family and a single worker. Because there was no bottling in Tokat at the time, he opened a tavern, the Dörtnal Meyhanesi, to sell his wine by the glass; in 1960, after building an underground store in his garden, he began selling it in bottles.

The turn to juice came in 1963. Diren organised a study trip to Germany, Turkish Wikipedia says, and after the technical training he received there he went back to Tokat, started serial fruit-juice production and created the Dimes brand. The company tells the story in its own words: its founder, it says, planted the first seeds of Dimes at home with the idea of making use of the fruit of a fertile land, and in 1963, with local capital, produced “Turkey’s first domestic fruit juice” at its Tokat factory. It describes Dimes as Turkey’s first fruit-juice producer.

That first plant is still in Tokat. It moved to automatic filling in 1975, according to the company’s factory history, and began making dairy products in 1994, Vatan reported in 2006. The juice business and the drinks that followed have kept the founder’s home town at the centre of the company: its registered company, Dimes Gıda Sanayi ve Ticaret A.Ş., is still based in Tokat.

Three factories, from nectar to cold coffee.

Dimes has stayed in the family. Turkish Wikipedia names its parent as Diren Holding and its chairman as Erol Diren. In May 2000 the company decided to float on the Istanbul stock exchange, Hürriyet reported; it postponed the offering in the 2001 Turkish financial crisis, and in June 2001 its application was withdrawn. It reports to investors in another way today: it publishes consolidated financial statements for Dimes Gıda Sanayi ve Ticaret A.Ş. and its subsidiaries and, the company says, completed two issues of short-term bonds in 2026.

Production moved west, toward the coast and the export ports. A factory at Kemalpaşa, near İzmir, opened in April 2000, built close to the port of Alsancak to support exports, Hürriyet reported that February. The company says the site covers 41,184 square metres, employs 256 people and makes juices, flavoured milks, lemonade and cold coffee. In September 2012 Dimes opened a third plant, run by its Semes company, at Sultanhisar in Aydın province, which processes both fruit and vegetables; the company says it handles 17 kinds of produce, from peaches and grapes to tomatoes and pomegranates, and has lines dedicated to oranges from Turkey’s western Mediterranean coast, which it uses for long-life squeezed juices. On the strength of those three factories, the company calls itself Turkey’s largest fruit-juice producer.

The range has grown well beyond the classic nectar. The company’s 2026 site groups its drinks into nectars and 100% juices, squeezed juices, lemonades and milkshakes, alongside newer lines such as Dimes Cool and Pop Charm. Dimes says it was the first Turkish fruit-juice brand to reach 52 export countries, a mark it says it passed by 2005. In 2019 it entered the cold-coffee market with a separate brand, OBSESSO, launched as a ready-to-drink coffee made with milk, according to the company’s press release.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group all make food or drink, and all of them come from Türkiye: Ülker, Torku, Pınar, Tat, Tukaş, Dimes and Uludağ. Turkish food and drink brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family firms that still carry a founder’s surname to names that now belong to much larger groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner grocer to a supermarket shelf.

A food or drink brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single product than by a pack, a name and the meal or refreshment it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its factory or grown far beyond the town where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its products are actually made and packed.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its packaging has changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

“Hayata başka bak.”

The brand speaks through its slogan, “Hayata başka bak”, roughly “look at life differently,” which runs across the company’s website and its investor pages. The company now describes Dimes as a “timeless, fluid brand” and leans on humour in its advertising. In June 2026 it relaunched its Dimes Cool Mix drinks with a campaign called “Aldığınızdan Daha Fazlası,” roughly “more than what you bought,” which the company says looks again at the advertising language and pop-culture aesthetic of the 1990s with today’s humour, overstating the product’s practical benefit in a sarcastic, deliberately twisted tone. In July 2026 it brought the vertical short-drama format, popular on social media, to its Dimes Club accounts, which it called a first for the drinks sector.

The company also reports a run of marketing recognition. It says Dimes won a gold and a bronze award at the Brandverse Awards in June 2026, and that in the MMA Smarties Business Impact Index 2025, compiled with WARC, it was placed among the ten most effective brands in Turkey and among the fifty most effective worldwide; in the index’s food ranking, the company says, it was one of Turkey’s three and the world’s ten most effective international food brands. On the industrial side, Dimes says it rose four places to 387th in the Istanbul Chamber of Industry’s 2026 list of Turkey’s 500 largest industrial companies.

For a design guide, Dimes shows how a single founder’s regional juice can become a national brand with a distinct voice: a Tokat cellar story at one end and a slogan about looking at life differently at the other. Compare Jumex, the Mexican juice brand of the little blue can, and Andros, the French fruit company. For this guide we use a nectar orange, a leaf green and a pulp cream with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Dimes’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.