Vehbi Koç bets on the tomato.

Tat — the Turkish word for taste — was founded in 1967 as Tat Konserve, a canning company set up by the group of the Turkish industrialist Vehbi Koç in Bursa province, in north-western Turkey. The company says the venture realised an idea Koç had pursued since the early 1950s, and Turkish Wikipedia, citing the company’s 50th-anniversary book and the Vehbi Koç Foundation, says the decision to build a factory came in 1965, once an American company and the Swiss retailer Migros had agreed to give technical support, and after two years of trials with tomato seed brought from Portugal.

The founding shareholders, according to the same source, were the Koç Group with 65.8 percent, the state sugar company Türkiye Şeker Fabrikaları with 25 percent, Şeker Sigorta with 4.2 percent and Migros with 5 percent. The company was registered as Tat Konserve ve Sanayii A.Ş., Turkish Wikipedia says. The first factory was at Mustafakemalpaşa, a farming town in Bursa province. Sources differ on its start: Turkish Wikipedia says Vehbi Koç opened it and production began on 27 August 1967, while the company’s history says its foundation stone was laid in February 1968 and production began that year.

Exports came early. The company says that in 1970 the factory processed 41,500 tonnes of tomatoes into more than 8,000 tonnes of paste, of which 6,100 tonnes were exported. That same year, it says, Tat brought out Turkey’s first concentrated soup and its first tomato paste in a tube.

Aseptic lines, Kagome and a stock listing.

The 1980s and 1990s turned Tat into a large processor. The company says it installed an aseptic line in 1981 and a second in 1985, and that in 1983 it began working with Kagome, the Japanese tomato company founded in 1899, on what it calls the Kagome–Tat Project. In March 1998 the newspaper Hürriyet reported that Kagome held 10 percent of Tat Konserve’s shares and was also a customer, and that Tat was developing products for Japanese tastes for export to Japan. The company says that by the 1990s it was Europe’s largest tomato-paste producer.

Tat Konserve shares began trading on the Istanbul Stock Exchange on 9 August 1993, Turkish Wikipedia says. In 1997 the company added production lines for ketchup, mustard and mayonnaise, the company says, and Hürriyet reported the following year that new lines for ketchup filling, glass jars, vegetable preserves and mayonnaise had been completed in 1997.

The group also grew by consolidation. On 25 June 2003, Turkish Wikipedia says, citing Milliyet, the Koç food companies Maret, SEK Süt and Pastavilla were merged into Tat Konserve, which kept their names as brands. The company says it refreshed its logo in 2004, without naming a designer. On 15 November 2013 Tat Konserve took the name Tat Gıda, and its stock code changed from TATKS to TATGD in December, Turkish Wikipedia says, citing a stock-exchange disclosure. The dairy brand SEK was sold to Çallı Gıda in January 2021, according to the same source, and the pasta brands went to Durum Gıda.

For its 50th anniversary in 2017, the company says, it set a Guinness World Record for the most people spreading tomato paste on bread.

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.

Out of Koç, into Memişoğlu.

Tat left the Koç group in 2024. On 8 January that year Koç Holding announced the sale of its 49.04 percent stake in Tat Gıda, together with founder certificates, to Memişoğlu Tarım Ürünleri Ticaret, subject to approval by Turkey’s competition authority, Bloomberg HT reported. The company says the shares were transferred in February 2024. Turkish Wikipedia, citing the company’s shareholder page, gives Memişoğlu 51.54 percent, with 41.25 percent traded publicly, and names Veysel Memiş as chairman. Tat Gıda remains listed on Borsa Istanbul.

On where its products are made, Turkish Wikipedia says Tat Gıda has three production sites: Mustafakemalpaşa and Karacabey in Bursa province, and Torbalı in İzmir province. Karacabey joined through a stake in a local food company in 1977 and full ownership in 1983; Torbalı replaced a plant at Yenişehir, in Bursa, bought in 1989 and moved in 2007, the same source says, while the company dates its Torbalı investment to 2006. The company also reports a solar power plant in Manisa.

Tat Gıda describes itself as working with more than 1,000 farmers, selling more than 190 products and exporting to over 50 countries, and calls itself Europe’s fifth-largest and the world’s 12th-largest tomato processor. Its 2016 “Domatesin Önderleri” project, the company says, trains farmers in growing tomatoes for industry. Its range, sold under the Tat name, covers tomato paste, tomato products, ketchup, mayonnaise and canned vegetables, the company says.

For a design guide, Tat shows how an export processor became a household name through the formats it put on shop shelves, from paste in a tube to ketchup in a bottle. Compare Kagome, its long-time Japanese partner, and Mutti, the tomato maker from Parma. For this guide we use tomato red, leaf green and tin silver with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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