Olive Auction built this page from public records so buyers can find the estate. Its own people can claim it at no cost — complete the story, list lots, answer buyers.
After a claim, we confirm by emailEverything here comes from public sources — award lists, certification registers, the territory inventories. The rest of the story — the family, the grove, the real age of the trees, this year's lab sheet — only the mill can tell, and it is the part buyers bid on.
Heraclea Food Co is the label of Berk and Sena Bahçeci, whose groves the company places at the foot of Mount Latmos, near Milas on the Aegean coast of Turkey. The producer's story page dates the beginning to 2016, when a spontaneous trip to Çeşme "set everything in motion", and puts the founding at 2022, the year Berk left a legal career to work what the page calls his family's century-old olive grove; Sena joined him. The entry filed under the producer's name in the NYIOOC World Olive Oil Competition's official guide places the same groves at the foot of Mount Latmos, east of Lake Bafa.
Grove size is given differently in different places on the company's own site. The story page and the FAQ both put it at 100 acres of family-owned groves; a Fair Trade post on the company's own blog states "We own a 200-acre grove on Mount Latmos" and adds that Heraclea works directly with more than twenty partner farmers around it. The FAQ records that the founder leads the harvest in person every October and that the oil is pressed at the company's own mill the same day the olives are picked. The Groves and Mills page names Memecik as the variety and records cold pressing, storage in stainless tanks, and no added stabilisers, chemicals or additives; the FAQ gives 550 mg/kg as the polyphenol content of the Early Harvest oil.
The company lists four certifications — PDO, USDA Organic, Fair Trade Certified and Non-GMO Verified — and names the Fair Trade certification as the milestone it is proudest of. Its pages do not say which designation of origin the oil carries. The designation registered for the district those pages name is Milas Zeytinyağı, entered on the Turkish register as a menşe adı under number 201 on 6 December 2016 at the application of the Milas Chamber of Commerce and Industry, and entered in the European Union register by Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2020/2194 of 16 December 2020, for oil pressed from Memecik olives grown in the Milas district. The NYIOOC guide lists Gold awards to the Heraclea brand, a monovarietal Memecik of medium intensity, in 2023 and again in 2026.
From the public record: heraclea.co · bestoliveoils.org · ci.turkpatent.gov.tr · eur-lex.europa.eu
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