Picta offers the variety of colors in food inspiring from nature, and aims to rise its share of exports up to 70% by the year 2020.
Having a young and dynamic staff profile, Picta was founded in 2018 to produce and sell value added agricultural products and natural food dyes. We interviewed with Serhan Sen, one of the founders of the company, about his company, products, brand name and targets for the future.
Let us know about you?
After my undergraduate, I studied Biochemistry at Gebze Technical University for a master’s degree where I had been involved in many projects such as cosmetics, food, medicine, paints and wastes, but it was the agricultural projects that impressed me the most and helped me choose my future field. I worked on obtaining high value-added products from agricultural products and their wastes. My first vegetable extraction and colorant production of colorants was done during my graduate studies. In 2014, I started to work in the R&D department of Endemix firm for coloring extracts and I made this job for 5 years. As I always said, Endemix has been the second most important
school for me. The most important school for me is Gebze Institute of Technology (GYTE) with which we have been continuing and we always support university-industry cooperation.
Can you tell us about Picta’s founding story? What are the factors that led you to produce in this field?
Picta was established in 2018 for the production and marketing of high value-added products from agricultural materials and especially natural food colorants. Turkey has a great potential in the agricultural field but we decided to enter the market because we observed that this potential is not assessed sufficiently. At this point, when we examine how companies abroad are, such as in the Netherlands and the USA follow the path in the production of high value-added materials, we actually established the mission and vision in our minds by getting inspired from their experiences.
What does Picta mean and what does your logo represent?
The name Picta means colorant in Latin. The colors of the leaves that go from red to purple in our logo symbolizes the colors of black carrot and beetroot, coming from umbelliferae family, which Turkey is the leader of the material.
Can you give information about the usage of your products?
Our products are mainly used in the food industry, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, fat, sports foods and in many other areas. Particularly in our country and in the world, the end consumers’ inclination towards natural products fuels a growing potential in this field. Of course, the legal regulations of the states are also effective in this process. In the food industry, both powder and liquid forms are used in many areas such as ice cream, confectionery, soup, meat and dairy products.
What are your product varieties? Can you give us info about your monthly production capacity?
In food colorants, we serve our customers with approximately 300 products in liquid and powder forms by using nearly 20 colorant sources. Our production in liquid form is around 250 tons per month and 30 tons in powder form. We are making investment and improvement works to increase this capacity by 20% in 2020.
What makes your company stand out? What are your basic principles in production?
We follow global quality policies from raw material selection to finished product delivery. In this context, we are progressing by developing quality and product systems like FSSC 22000, Halal and Kosher standards. In addition, we promise to employ our competent and experienced staff to achieve this because we know that the color factor is the first sensible feature of our customers’ products on the shelves. That’s why we don’t have the luxury of making a mistake here. We always keep the parameters of our products within narrow ranges and monitor and control them from seed to final product to ensure their sustainability. We are also constantly monitoring legislation, regulations and document developments to assist our customers.
Could you tell us about your R&D studies?
Picta is an R&D based company and for us R&D is a human based function. In other words, we develop all of our products through R&D and meet the demands of our customers best. We design a separate project for every request of our customers and offer our new products considering their demands. Of course, this helps both our company to turn our efforts to new products and gain many experiences on sectorial basis.
Our studies and investments on natural colorant extracts are continuing. We follow the legal regulations and progress by incorporating all the developments into the company. In this process, we started to offer heat stable products to the meat and dairy sectors.
In addition, we work with universities on the purification of the active substances contained in the products we produce and their use in the pharmaceutical sector. In particular, we would like to take our place in this sector by conducting experiments on cancer disease in cell culture.
Which fairs do you plan to attend in the last quarter of 2019 and in 2020 in Turkey and abroad? How do you prepare for these fairs?
We always bring our company’s innovative side to the forefront while planning activities for the fairs. We already registered our booths for Fi-Europe 2019. Among our target markets, EMEA, Asia and America are of great importance to us. That is why we plan to participate in many fairs in 2020 such as FI-Asia, Gulfood 2020 and Hi-Europe-Ni.
What are the short, medium and long-term goals of Picta?
As you know, Picta is a new company but in a short time the reputation we established in the country is quite good. In the short term, we aim to achieve this performance abroad and to increase the export scale of our turnover to 70%.
In addition, we are adapting the developing and dynamic structure of our sector to the DNA of our company. We want to prove the awareness and potential of both our country and our company in the world market by contributing to the development of conventional products with different technologies in the short and medium term. Because, if you don’t produce technology and innovation, they will take your earnings and sell them back to you. In this context, as Picta, we will proceed by using all investment tools in the most efficient way to increase the added value of agricultural products and to take its place in the market, highlighting R&D products and technologies.
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