Chocolate in Turkey: History, Industry and What People Eat
On this page
Chocolate reached Ottoman lands in the late 1600s as a foreign drink, and it took until the middle of the 19th century to spread beyond a small circle. Today Turkey imports all of its cocoa and exports far more chocolate than it buys: about 253,000 metric tons of chocolate and cocoa preparations went out in 2025, against roughly 33,000 metric tons coming in. The country also grows most of the world’s hazelnuts, which goes a long way toward explaining what you find on a Turkish candy shelf. Other origin and tasting guides are in the taste section.
How chocolate reached the Ottoman world
The earliest known record of chocolate in Ottoman lands comes from an Italian traveler, Gemelli Careri, who was given chocolate at a church in Jerusalem during his journey of 1693 to 1699. That is the finding of a 2019 paper by F. Ünyay Açıkgöz in the social sciences journal of Ahi Evran University, which also notes how little academic work exists on chocolate’s history in Turkey. Most of this section rests on it. In Careri’s day, chocolate was something the empire’s Catholics drank. Turks didn’t know the taste yet.
Careri tried to change that. In Izmir in 1699 he offered chocolate to a local agha, who disliked it and, in the paper’s account, was furious with him for it.
Eighty-odd years later it arrived as a diplomatic gift. In 1783, King Carlos III of Spain sent Sultan Abdülhamid I a shipment of presents to strengthen the peace between the two states. Among the gold and silver were four chests of chocolate and six packets of cocoa. The Ottoman clerks who recorded the gift spelled the new word two different ways and described it as “baharlı kahve makulesi”, which translates roughly as “a kind of spiced coffee”. The paper’s conclusion dates the arrival at court to 1784; the ships left in August 1783.
Chocolate entered wider Ottoman life from the mid-19th century, as part of the empire’s turn toward Western habits. After the Crimean War, demand from foreigners and Istanbul’s Levantine families brought patisseries and cafés that served cocoa drinks, creams and fruit confections.
Local sweets absorbed it too. By the late 19th century the hard candy called akide came in tea, coffee and chocolate flavors next to the traditional ones, according to the same paper.
The first factories, as the companies tell it
The early dates for chocolate making in Turkey come from the companies themselves. Nestlé says it opened a sales office in Karaköy, Istanbul, in 1909 and a chocolate factory in Feriköy, Istanbul, in 1927, according to its Turkish company history. The government’s investment promotion site tells the same story, but its page is built from the company’s account and says only that Feriköy was the first of Nestlé’s own chocolate plants there, which is a much narrower claim than a national first.
Açıkgöz, citing earlier Turkish sources, adds that Nestlé’s Istanbul branches from 1909 onward were how Turkish consumers first met milk chocolate.
Yıldız Holding, Ülker’s parent company, gives the second set of dates. According to the holding’s company history, Ülker began making chocolate products on one line of its biscuit factory in 1972 and set up a separate chocolate factory in 1974. The same page says the group bought Godiva in 2007.
What Turkish law calls chocolate
Turkey defines chocolate with the same compositional minimums as the European Union. The rules sit in the Turkish Food Codex Communiqué on Cocoa and Chocolate Products, No. 2017/29, published in the Official Gazette on November 3, 2017 as issue 30229. The communiqué states that it took EU Directive 2000/36/EC into account, and as of October 13, 2026 the consolidated text on the government’s legislation portal shows no amendments.
Because the numbers match, they aren’t repeated here. The EU, US and Codex minimums are compared side by side in real vs compound chocolate, along with the 5% cap on vegetable fats other than cocoa butter, which Turkey also applies. Three Turkish rules matter at the shelf.
“Bitter” is a name with no threshold of its own
On a Turkish wrapper, “bitter” is a permitted name, and it doesn’t promise any particular darkness. Article 14 of the communiqué lets any product that meets the plain “chocolate” definition, at least 35% total cocoa solids, use “bitter” in its name, with the cocoa percentage shown next to it. The EU directive contains no such term, so this naming rule is Turkey’s own. A Turkish bitter bar can legally sit anywhere from 35% up, and the percentage on the front tells you more than the word does. How “dark”, “bittersweet” and “semisweet” work in other markets is covered in types of chocolate.
Gianduja has a hazelnut range
The communiqué writes hazelnuts into the definition. Gianduja chocolate, “fındık ezmeli çikolata” in the Turkish text, is chocolate with at least 32% total cocoa solids, including at least 8% non-fat cocoa solids, plus finely ground hazelnuts at no less than 20 g and no more than 40 g per 100 g of product. The milk version needs at least 10% milk solids and 15 to 40 g of hazelnut per 100 g. These figures match the EU directive. Whole or broken almonds, pistachios, hazelnuts and other nuts may be added on top, as long as all the nuts together, ground hazelnut included, make up no more than 60% of the product’s weight. Gianduja also works as a filling, and how to make bonbons shows where it fits in a shell.
The vegetable fat sentence
If a chocolate contains vegetable fats besides cocoa butter, its label must say “Kakao yağına ek olarak bitkisel yağ da içermektedir”, which means “Contains vegetable fat in addition to cocoa butter.” The communiqué requires that sentence in bold and in the same type size as the product name. The EU has an equivalent statement; in Turkey, this exact wording is what to look for.
Anyone producing chocolate for sale in Turkey also has to register or get approval for the business, and those steps are in chocolate factory regulations.
Cocoa in, chocolate out: the trade numbers
Turkey sells far more chocolate abroad than it buys. In 2025 it exported 253,000 metric tons of chocolate and cocoa preparations worth $1.41 billion and imported about 33,000 metric tons, according to UN Comtrade data reported by Turkey. The same TÜİK figures appear in a 2026 Ministry of Trade sector report: identical for 2023 and 2024, within a few tons for 2025, which may still be revised.
The customs heading behind these numbers, HS 1806, covers more than bars. It includes cocoa mixes, fillings and coatings, while chocolate-coated biscuits are counted under a different heading (1905).
| Year | Exports (metric tons) | Exports ($ million) | Imports (metric tons) | Imports ($ million) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 251,857 | 841.8 | 35,721 | 164.1 |
| 2023 | 241,569 | 879.8 | 31,839 | 182.5 |
| 2024 | 240,624 | 945.9 | 33,130 | 242.7 |
| 2025 | 253,101 | 1,408.9 | 32,917 | 335.1 |
Source: UN Comtrade, Turkey as reporter, HS 1806. 2025 figures may be revised.
Export volume barely moved across the four years. The value rose because prices did: the average export value went from about $3.34 per kg in 2022 to $5.57 in 2025. Iraq was the largest market in 2024, with about 18% of export value, followed by Saudi Arabia, the US and Germany, out of 193 trading partners that year.
All of the cocoa comes from abroad, and the bill has grown fast. Turkey imported 86,606 metric tons of cocoa beans in 2022 and 135,277 metric tons in 2025, while the average price paid rose from about $2.42 to $7.61 per kg.
| Year | Cocoa bean imports (metric tons) | Value ($ million) | Average $ per kg |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | 86,606 | 209.5 | 2.42 |
| 2023 | 120,517 | 315.1 | 2.61 |
| 2024 | 114,471 | 497.1 | 4.34 |
| 2025 | 135,277 | 1,029.9 | 7.61 |
Source: UN Comtrade, Turkey as reporter, HS 1801. Per-kg values are value divided by weight.
That jump in 2024 and 2025 is the world cocoa price shock showing up in Turkey’s own customs records, and cocoa price risk explains what caused it.
In 2024, about 60% of Turkey’s bean imports by value came from Côte d’Ivoire, with Cameroon, Ghana and Nigeria next. How those origins differ in flavor is the subject of cocoa origins compared.
Beans aren’t the only cocoa that crosses the border. In 2025 Turkey also imported 40,319 metric tons of cocoa powder, 18,321 metric tons of cocoa butter and 17,700 metric tons of cocoa paste. How much the country grinds itself is harder to say, because the grinding tables published by the ICCO in its quarterly bulletin don’t list Turkey as a separate row.
Hazelnuts and pistachios
In each of the last three years FAO reports, Turkey grew more hazelnuts than the rest of the world combined. FAO production statistics give 717,000 metric tons of in-shell hazelnuts for 2024, about 59% of world output, and about 64% in 2022. The next producer, Italy, grew 120,520 metric tons in 2024.
Its share of pistachios is smaller. Turkey grew 383,000 metric tons in shell in 2024, about 28% of the world crop, behind the United States. The harvest swings a lot from year to year: FAO’s figure for 2023 is 176,000 metric tons.
Most of the hazelnut trade goes to Europe. Turkey exported 183,093 metric tons of shelled hazelnuts worth $1.50 billion in 2024, and Italy and Germany together took about half of that value. Customs data record the buying country and say nothing about the buying industry, so there’s no figure for how much of this ends up in chocolate.
The Ministry of Trade report names hazelnut as one of the basic ingredients of Turkish confectionery and says hazelnut paste is used in chocolate making, while pistachios go into halva, chocolate and lokum. It’s the same hazelnut the gianduja definition above measures in grams.
What people eat, and when
The best official data on chocolate eating in Turkey measure how often people eat it, and they lump chocolate together with other sweets. The Ministry of Health’s Turkey Nutrition and Health Survey 2017 asked 12,986 people aged 15 and over how frequently they ate each of a list of food groups. One of those groups was “sweets, Turkish delight, chocolate”.
About one adult in ten (9.7%) said they ate something from that group every day. One in five (20.0%) said never. Women reported a daily habit more often than men, 11.9% against 7.5%. Since chocolate shares the group with lokum and other sweets, these figures can’t tell you how many people eat chocolate itself every day.
Chocolate also travels as a gift. The Ministry of Trade report says confectionery is commonly given at religious holidays, weddings and celebrations, and is a usual present when visiting family or friends. It names tablets and boxed chocolates as the most popular kinds of chocolate confectionery, though it gives no figures for that.
Sources and open questions
The history here relies on Açıkgöz 2019. Özen’s 2014 book Çukulata: Çikolatanın Yerli Tarihi is cited in that paper but was not read; a November 2014 press release from Nestlé’s Turkish company says the book was published with Nestlé’s support.
Some Turkish press reports name an Istanbul chocolate maker earlier than 1927. They were seen only as search snippets and need a historian’s check before the factory section can say more.
Chocolate production tonnage from TÜİK’s industrial production statistics (PRODTR 10.82.2x) couldn’t be pulled from the statistics office’s data portal, so there is no production figure here.
Further sources:
- Communiqué No. 2017/29, consolidated text (checked October 13, 2026).
- UN Comtrade, HS 1806 exports, Turkey, 2025; the other years, flows and codes (1801, 1803, 1804, 1805, 080222) come from the same database.
- FAOSTAT, crops and livestock production, bulk file (Turkey’s hazelnut and pistachio figures are flagged as official).
- Invest in Türkiye, Nestlé success story.