`Turkey's Bilici Group, Italian Partner to Produce Olive Oil - Olive Oil Times
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Turkey's Bilici Group, Italian Partner to Produce Olive Oil

By Tom Baker
Jan. 24, 2011 20:43 UTC

By Tom Baker
Olive Oil Times Contributor | Reporting from Buenos Aires

The Bilici Group, a tex­tile com­pany based in the south­ern Turkish city of Adana, has announced plans to expand busi­ness into the olive oil sec­tor.

The group announced their inten­sion this week to estab­lish an olive oil facil­ity in the south­ern Ceyhan dis­trict in coop­er­a­tion with an Italian firm. Although the iden­tity of the firm is yet to be dis­closed, Tamer Bilici, head of the group’s finan­cial oper­a­tions, told the Turkish Anatolia news agency, ​“We have gone to Italy and com­pleted our talks with Italian offi­cials,” adding, ​“We plan to put the facil­ity into oper­a­tion using high tech­nol­ogy.”

In 2006 the com­pany planted one of Turkey’s largest olive groves in Ceyhan, com­pris­ing 80,000 olive trees and cov­er­ing roughly 1,000 kilo­me­ters of ground. Bilici noted that in recent years con­tin­ual work on the grove has meant that this fig­ure has grown to reach 100,000 and that they now aim to increase num­bers to 250,000.

The com­pany ini­tially brought olive saplings from nine coun­tries in order to begin its grove. ​“We tried ten dif­fer­ent olives,” Bilici said, ​“the Italian picual type matured in a short period of time, and we used spe­cial tech­niques to obtain early yields.” He also noted that the rea­son for fur­ther increas­ing the size of the grove was due to the deci­sion for all prod­ucts to be made from their own crop, going on to say, ​“We will col­lect olives from trees and pack them with­out touch­ing them. Then we will sell the olive oil pro­duced in our mod­ern facil­i­ties to the global mar­ket.”

This isn’t the first time that a major Turkish tex­tile pro­ducer has crossed over into the olive oil indus­try. In 2009 the Izmir based com­pany Kuloğlu announced that they had invested five mil­lion Euros in launch­ing an olive oil pro­duc­tion divi­sion, stat­ing that com­pe­ti­tion within the tex­tile indus­try from Asia had led them to con­sider this new ven­ture.

Olive oil con­sump­tion in Turkey has been climb­ing steadily since 2006/07 with annual sea­son-on-sea­son exports fluc­tu­at­ing sharply. According to the export pro­mo­tion cen­ter of Turkey, olive pro­duc­tion in 2010 increased to 300,000 tons, up from 150,000 ton in 1999. In 2009/2010 Turkey exported around 8,000 tons of olive oil to the US with sales worth nearly $24 mil­lion, and sold 5,351 tons, worth around $14 mil­lion to Italy. In November of 2009 the Turkish gov­ern­ment chose to rejoin the International Olive Council.
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Sources:

Hurriyet Daily News
IOC

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