IFC lends €100 million to Turkish food group Doğuş Çay over eight years
The loan, with a two-year grace period, funds chips and tomato paste capacity and storage as the company plans a potato chip plant in Hungary for 2027.
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The International Finance Corporation is lending €100 million to Doğuş Çay, the Turkish tea, sugar and snacks producer, for eight years including a two-year grace period, the World Bank Group's private-sector arm said on 30 September.
The borrower is Doğuş Çay ve Gıda Maddeleri Üretim Pazarlama İthalat İhracat A.Ş., and the long-term loan will support its multi-year investment programme. The money will fund an expansion of chips and tomato paste production capacity, investment in seed cultivation and storage infrastructure, and improvements to distribution and logistics across Türkiye, the IFC release said. The IFC expects the investment to support about 3,400 direct and indirect jobs in food processing, logistics and farming.
A family of brands built partly by acquisition
The IFC describes Doğuş Çay as Türkiye's largest private-sector tea producer, with 41 years of production experience and 15 production facilities in categories including sugar, tomato paste, iced tea, lemonade and potato chips. The company entered the chips business through its 2013 acquisition of Kraft Gıda, which the release says remains an important part of its global vision.
The company's own history, published in Turkish on its corporate website, shows a group assembled through a string of purchases. It was founded in 1985 as a family business by the Karakan family and began in tea, where it runs five processing plants in Rize and a packaging plant in Ordu with annual capacity of 50,000 tonnes. It moved into sugar in 1994 and tomato paste in 2008. It entered chips in 2013 through an international acquisition and built a plant in Aksaray, took over the Afyon sugar factory in 2018, and in 2024 bought a tomato and pepper paste factory in Karacabey, Bursa, now run under the Demko brand. In 2023 it also set up a solar panel factory in Afyonkarahisar under a project named Karakan Energy, the site says.
It works with more than 50,000 farmers across the country and sources potatoes, tea, sugar beet, corn and tomatoes, largely through contract farming arrangements that give farmers market access, technical support, inputs and more predictable income (IFC). The lender said the loan is expected to strengthen those links as production expands.
Next step: Europe
The most specific forward-looking detail in the release came from the borrower. "We plan to commence operations at our potato chip production facility in Hungary in 2027, further extending our growth journey into Europe," Bilge Kaan Karakan, a board member at Doğuş Çay, said in the statement. He said the financing would primarily support capacity expansion and efficiency investments at the company's potato chip facilities, as well as its tomato paste infrastructure, distribution and innovation.
The release does not say whether the IFC loan itself will fund any part of the Hungarian plant. The uses it lists are all in Türkiye.
Wagner Albuquerque de Almeida, the IFC's regional industry director for manufacturing, agribusiness and services in the Middle East and Central Asia, said: "This investment will help strengthen connections between farmers, manufacturers, and markets while supporting the long-term growth and competitiveness of Türkiye's agribusiness sector."
What the release leaves out
The IFC framed the deal as part of the World Bank Group's priorities in Türkiye, which it lists in the release as private sector growth, job creation and more competitive agricultural value chains. It does not disclose the interest rate, the security package or whether other lenders are taking part.
Nor does the release give the total size of the multi-year investment programme the loan supports, so the share being financed by the IFC cannot be worked out from the published figures. It also does not say how the expected 3,400 jobs divide between direct posts at the company and indirect work among suppliers and farmers.
The IFC said it committed a record $71.7 billion to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries in its 2025 fiscal year (release).