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Episode 04

Why Does Turkey Publish a List of Fake Food Brands?

Turkey names the company, brand and batch of every food a lab proves fake. The lists began in 2012; since October 2024 they sit on a live list anyone can check.

28 October 20266 min readVideo 7:23

Turkey publishes a list of fake food with the brands on it because its law allows it: once a lab confirms a food was imitated or adulterated, the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry may print the company, the product, the brand and the batch number. It has named names since 2012. What changed is how long they stay up: the old lists came out now and then and lasted about a month, and since 2 October 2024 the names sit on a live list anyone can check.

Watch the episode: Turkey Publishes a List of Fake Food. With the Brands. 7:23

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Most of us just trust the label. I wanted to know why a government would print its own food makers' names, and whether it stops anyone.

What is Turkey's fake food list?

The list lives on the ministry's Güvenilir Gıda food safety portal. Each entry gives the company, the product, the brand and the batch or serial number, next to what the lab found. The legal basis is a regulation of 17 December 2011 and Law No. 5996, and a name goes up only after a lab confirms the fake.

The ministry calls the offence taklit veya tağşiş: imitation or adulteration. It comes in two kinds. In the first, a different substance of lower value is passed off as the real one, such as other oils mixed in and sold as olive oil. In the second, something that gives a food its character or nutrition is taken out. The ministry's own example is butter with less fat than the legal minimum. It still looks exactly like butter.

Beside the two adulteration lists, there is a separate list for food that endangers health.

What turns up on the list?

The entries are specific. One February 2025 update added 39 products. Among them were 11 olive oils with seed oils mixed in, beef sucuk (a spiced sausage) containing poultry and, in one case, offal, cheese with vegetable oil in it, and lahmacun with poultry in its mix.

The update of 30 July 2026 reads like a menu. It found gelatin in a yoghurt, food colouring in sweet pepper paste, vegetable oil in butter, starch in processed cheese, and a fresh kaşar cheese with melting salts and too little fat. Poultry turned up in İskender döner, offal in meatball and pide fillings, and skin tissue in raw Adana kebab mix. Three olive oils sold as extra virgin had seed oil blended in, and a strained flower honey was listed too.

The same list found meat from horses, donkeys or mules in 9 products sold in Adana and Mersin, tantuni and a beyran dish among them. Nobody orders tantuni hoping for donkey.

Some entries go beyond cheap fillers. That July list caught a food supplement containing a drug's active ingredient, and in 2020 one list found sildenafil in soft drinks and chocolates.

Someone counted. A study of food fraud in Turkey from 2012 to 2022 found 4,007 incidents, and 78% were dairy, meat or vegetable oils, leaving 22% for every other food. FoodNavigator's report on the study adds that three in four cases were plain substitution or dilution, and two thirds happened in just 10 cities.

Olive oil is the old classic. In 2012, producers told the Hürriyet Daily News that the fake problem in olive oil was five times bigger than in honey. The head of the Olive Friends Association said shoppers were avoiding small producers for fear of buying fake oil.

How do labs prove a food is fake?

You can't taste a percentage, so Turkey inspects a lot: more than 10 million inspections from 2012 to 2022, about 1 million a year. By October 2024, the minister told reporters that year's checks had found 16,000 nonconformities, with nearly 800 million lira in fines and 368 cases sent to prosecutors. The work falls to 7,500 ministry staff in the field, and Turkey has 724,000 food businesses that should each be inspected at least once a year. That is about 100 businesses per person, roughly 2 a week.

Samples go to 41 public and 101 private laboratories, and a result takes a little over two days on average. Until a lab confirms it, no name goes up.

Every oil has its own mix of sterols, and a lab can spot 1% sunflower oil in olive oil from them.

Honey is read through its sugar. Most plants, including most of the nectar sources bees use, make sugar one way and are called C3 plants. Maize and sugarcane are C4 plants, and the two kinds leave different carbon isotope signatures that a mass spectrometer can read. The standard test catches cane or corn sugar in honey from about 7%. Rice and beet are less helpful: they are C3 plants, like the flowers, so that test struggles with their syrups. A newer method, LC-IRMS, detects C4 syrups at 1% and C3 syrups at 10%.

Why print the names if there are already fines?

This is where I got stuck. The lab catches the fake, and the firm gets fined. Why print the name as well?

I assumed the list was new. It isn't. By February 2020 the lists had named 3,301 batches from 1,486 firms since 2012, and one list that month alone named 99 batches from 74 firms. But the ministry published only 23 lists between 2012 and 2022, and each stayed online for about a month. So a list was up roughly one month in five.

Meanwhile the fines piled up: over 166,000 for all kinds of violations in those 10 years, about 45 a day, plus 1,670 criminal complaints. In 2020 the head of a food engineers' association (Gıda Mühendisleri Derneği) said the fines didn't deter, because firms earned more than the fines they paid. He had seen the same firm on the lists two years in a row for the same violation. Owners who lost a licence, he said, opened a business in a relative's name.

Then, at 9 in the morning on 2 October 2024, a new portal went live with 519 products: 463 adulterated and 56 that endanger health, to be updated instantly and continuously. The minister said the old system announced results from time to time, while the new one publishes completed cases continuously, to leave no room for doubt.

So the names were public from the start. What changed in 2024 is that the list never comes down.

Does naming the brands work?

I hoped for a clean yes. The study of the old lists found that 40% of companies appeared more than once: 15% came back in a later year, and the other 25% were listed more than once within a single year. On the bright side, 60% never came back. Or never got caught again.

In 2012 the Olive Friends Association head said named olive oil companies resurfaced under different names, and that naming them was not a definite solution.

Those figures come from before the live list. The live list isn't short of entries: the July 2026 update still had 9 products with horse, donkey or mule meat.

Look at the batch number

So why print the names? Turkish law lets the ministry name any food a lab proves fake, and it has done so since 2012. Critics said firms earned more than the fines cost them, and since October 2024 the names sit on a list that is always online. It doesn't stop everyone.

Next time you pick up a bottle of olive oil, look for the batch number printed on it. In Turkey, that is what the list names.

Would you check a list like this before you buy olive oil or honey? Which food would you look up first?

Sources

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