About Kantara Gıda
HISTORY OUR COMPANY
Our Founder Mustafa Balcı
Our grandfather Mustafa Balcı who was born in 1900; his father Mehmet Balcı, continued his beekeeping profession with primitive techniques and hives at a young age and with primitive techniques. Donkeys were the means of transportation of the time. Honey which was packed in tins and carried on donkey backs was sold in markets and fairs. Mustafa Balcı; thanks to his great efforts and self sacrificing works he further developed the beekeeping profession and became the largest bee producer of the island in the 1940s. This successful beekeeping adventure with the surname law enacted after 1974, it brings the family the surname BALCI. Kudret Balcı, our current Chairman of the Board of Directors who was only 12 years old at that time continued to pursue the family beekeeping profession while continuing his education.
Kudret Balcı who graduated from the university won the right to semiretirement after 16 years of civil service. While he was continuing his civil service life, he was also planning the beekeeping business. As a matter of fact, he invested all of his bonus which he received after his retirement into this business. It gave him the courage to invest his entire bonus in this business, the confidence that came with the family business.
Kudret Balcı who decided to move this company to a corporate structure in 1996 and to do this job professionally; he decided to investigate where we are in this business in the world and saw 1996 not as the beginning but as the beginning of the reemerging corporate structure.He went to many countries in the world such as Bulgaria, Turkey, Israel, Italy, Spain, Portugal closely followed beekeeping in the world and conducted research for this. At the end of his research, he returned to his country and combined these researches with his own ideas and made the beginning of a new era and it succeeded. Currently the leader and doyen of this sector in Cyprus including the Greek side is Kantara Gıda.
Our company which had 70 hives in 1996 became a brand with 1500 colonies in 2019. Our company is not only limited to honey production but also started to produce all products of beekeeping. For example, propolis, royal jelly, pollen. In other words we don’t only produce honey but we have come to the position of buying all the products produced by the bee except bee venom.
In addition we started to produce queen bees for our own bees by entering the production of queen bees.
Kudret Balcı states that they have also entered additional beekeeping products with the knowledge they have gained during international conferences, fairs and country trips but this awareness has not yet been formed in our country.
While Kantara Gıda is producing and marketing honey it also decided to include local products specific to Cyprus into its production and marketing network considering that there should be other local products of our country in these markets.
The molasses, paste, jam and marmalade which we produce has started to see a serious demand in the market. The reason we receive such a serious demand is that we produce completely natural products in our hygienic facilities and without using any additives.
While preserving traditional methods in production we continued to develop these techniques and started to apply new techniques in production by switching to the steam system. In this way we never gave up on the traditional homemade quality and continued to produce high quality products. When production enters the fabrication, quality decreases. According to our understanding of quality, natural products should be processed with the most natural methods and presented to the consumer.
We have reached this production quality in about 20 years. We have started to produce many other products; especially paste, jam, marmalade and molasses since 1998.
Kantara’s goal is to produce its products with traditional cutting edge technologies and to deliver them to more consumers and to open up to the world by establishing a market network for tourism with this knowledge, experience and experience of 131 years. Our wild thyme honey native to Cyprus was selected as the world’s 1st at the World Beekeeping Fair held in Ukraine. As Kantara aim to bring wild thyme honey to the world market.
As the Balcı Family are now in the 4th and 5th generations together. This accumulation and quality which has been going on for generations will continue in the next generations without compromising on quality and naturalness.
Our Founders
Kudret Balcı
Founder