A paint family turns to milk.

Pınar — the Turkish word for a spring, or water source — began as a dairy company in İzmir, on Turkey’s Aegean coast, in 1973. It belongs to Yaşar Holding, an İzmir group whose own history starts with paint: the company says Durmuş Yaşar sold boat and marine supplies in Rhodes from 1927 before opening a shop in İzmir, and Turkish Wikipedia says his son Selçuk Yaşar founded the paint maker DYO with his father and brother in 1954. The holding company itself was incorporated in 1968, according to Turkish Wikipedia.

Turkish Wikipedia says Selçuk Yaşar had seen that the state dairy, SEK, could not collect and process all the milk the region’s farmers produced, and that some of it went to waste. The Yaşar group laid the foundations of Pınar Süt in 1973, and the plant opened in 1975; the company calls it the largest dairy in Turkey and the Middle East at the time.

The company says that in 1975 Pınar produced Turkey’s first long-life milk, and Turkish Wikipedia adds that it was UHT milk packed in Tetra Pak cartons. Yaşar’s own pages also describe Pınar Süt as the first company in Turkey to sell packaged milk. Processed cheese and cocoa milk followed in 1976, which the company also lists as firsts for Turkey, and from 1978 it published a newspaper for the farmers who supplied its milk.

Selçuk Yaşar remained honorary chairman of Yaşar Holding; he died in İzmir in February 2023, aged 98, Habertürk reported.

Cheese, water, meat and children’s brands.

Through the 1980s the Pınar name moved well beyond milk. The company dates a cooperation with Kraft to 1980, under which it began making cheeses including Pınar Deram and Cheddar, and its first exports to 1982. A water company, Pınar Su, opened a bottling plant at Menderes, near İzmir — dated 1984 by the company and 1982 by Turkish Wikipedia — and the company describes it as the first to bottle packaged water in Turkey. A meat company, Pınar Et, followed in 1985, which the company calls the country’s first integrated modern meat plant; it says Pınar Et produced Turkey’s first hamburger patties with McDonald’s in 1987, and began supplying the chain with dairy products, sauces and syrups.

Packaging has brought the brand a run of awards. The company says Pınar won the Turkish Standards Institution’s Golden Packaging award several times: in 1992 for the foil lid on its yoghurt, in 1994 for a 10-litre milk pack, in 1996 for roll butter, around 2000 for a UHT milk cap and Kido mini cheese, and in 2004 for Yoplait and Kafela products. It also says the Kido mini cheese won a world packaging award. In 1999, the company says, the Pınar logo and values were reviewed and a new logo was launched; the designer is not named in its history.

The company also lists long-running activities for children. It says a painting competition for primary-school pupils began in 1981 — its 33rd edition received a Felis award in 2014 — and that a Pınar children’s theatre opened in İzmir in 1987 and in Istanbul in 1997. The children’s milk brand Kido dates from 1997. In 2015 the theatre and the painting competition won Stevie awards, the company says, silver and bronze respectively.

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.

Three dairies and a family holding.

Pınar is still part of Yaşar Holding, which lists three Pınar companies — Pınar Süt for dairy, Pınar Et for meat and Pınar Su for water — alongside a German arm, Pınar Foods GmbH, and a Gulf trading company. Pınar Süt and Pınar Et ve Un appear on English Wikipedia’s list of companies listed on Borsa Istanbul.

On where it makes its dairy products, Yaşar says Pınar Süt runs three plants, in İzmir, Eskişehir and Şanlıurfa. The company dates the Eskişehir dairy to 1997, with new facilities there opened in October 2010, and says the Şanlıurfa plant, in south-eastern Turkey, opened in 2015 and raised its raw-milk processing capacity by 18 percent. Pınar Su’s second spring-water plant, at Nazilli in Aydın province, opened in 1996, the company says.

Later firsts the company claims include licensed Yoplait fruit yoghurts, launched in 2003 through an agreement with the French dairy group Sodiaal, and Turkey’s first organic milk in 2005. The range today runs from milk, yoghurt, ayran and cheese to juices, sauces, desserts and meat products, and Pınar’s website groups sub-brands including Kido, Açbitir, Gurme and the plant-based Planty Power under the Pınar name. The company also runs the Pınar Enstitüsü, which it describes as a non-profit set up to raise public awareness of food and nutrition.

For a design guide, Pınar shows how one name can stretch from a single dairy to water, meat and children’s brands while packaging carries the identity. Compare Almarai, the Saudi dairy founded in 1977, and Ülker, another Turkish food name built by a family group. For this guide we use an Aegean blue, milk white and meadow green with a rounded sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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