Where do grocery chains lose margin, and how is it closed

Turkey's grocery retail sector in figures (2026)

Organised grocery retail in Turkey is made up of three large discount chains, supermarket chains and fast-growing local chains. The table below is compiled from the listed companies' annual and interim reports and from the Ipsos Household Panel; the period and source of every row are given separately. Store counts change every quarter, so the table should be read with its dates.

A101 is not listed and does not publish regular annual reports; only figures read in a primary document were included. Margins are as reported: ŞOK's margins and Migros's net margin are restated under TMS 29, Turkey's inflation accounting standard (the local equivalent of IAS 29). Comparisons across periods should therefore be made within one company, on the same accounting basis.

According to Ipsos, discount stores took ₺36 of every ₺100 spent on fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) in the first eleven months of 2025; local chains were the fastest-growing channel across 2025 and in the first quarter of 2026. According to TurkStat's Trade Sales Volume Index, retail sales volume rose 10.4 per cent year on year in July 2026.

Store counts and margins are updated quarterly. This page is refreshed at the end of each quarter, when new company reports are published.

What is the difference between a chain, a local chain and a discount store?

Turkish law gives two definitions. Under Article 3 of the Regulation on Principles and Rules in Retail Trade, a large store is a business with at least 400 square metres of sales area; a chain store is a business with at least ten branches, each with less than 400 square metres of sales area. Rules on promotions, shelf allocation and payment terms apply according to these definitions.

Market research splits the channel by branch footprint instead. In Ipsos's definition, a national chain has more than 10 branches across several regions and a local chain more than 10 branches in a single region. A discount store works with a limited range and its own brands; an independent supermarket has fewer than 10 branches and at least 2 checkouts.

The operational difference shows in staffing and range. According to the 2025 Employment Report of the Turkish Retailers Federation (TPF), local chains employ an average of 13-20 people per store and national discount chains 2-3. A BİM store carries around 1,000 products, while a File store carries around 4,500 products in roughly 1,000 square metres (BİM Q1 2026). In a local chain with a large fresh department and a wide range, waste, ordering and labour productivity are managed differently from a discount store.

Which regulations directly affect grocery chain operations?

Two families of rules shape a Turkish grocery chain's daily work. The first is price marking: Article 54 of Consumer Protection Law No. 6502 and the Price Label Regulation tie the shelf to the till. The second is retail trade: Law No. 6585 on the Regulation of Retail Trade and the Regulation on Principles and Rules in Retail Trade govern supplier relationships, promotions, payment terms and shelf allocation.

A label must show the selling price including all taxes, the unit price and the place of production; for loose products only the unit price is shown. If the shelf and till prices differ, the lower price applies. Under an amendment published in the Official Gazette on 11 October 2025 (issue 33044), the pre-discount reference price in a physical store is the lowest price of the last 10 days; previously the period was 30 days. Tare must be deducted for loose products, and electronic shelf labels are permitted.

Inspection figures show how much weight the rule carries in practice. In the first half of 2023 the Ministry of Trade checked the labels of 584,953 products at 25,409 businesses and fined 15,894 non-compliant products a total of ₺14,991,883. At its meeting of 25 June 2025, the Unfair Price Assessment Board fined chain supermarkets and food retailers ₺23,845,718.50 for unfair price increases.

Article 6 of Law No. 6585 and Article 4 of the Regulation treat passing promotion costs to a party that did not want the promotion, and returning products that can perish within 30 days as unsold, as unfair trading practices. Article 7 of the Law (added by Law No. 7435 in 2023) caps payment terms for agricultural and food products. On fresh lines the waste from unsold goods stays with the retailer, which makes order accuracy a direct cost of waste.

This section is for information only and is not legal advice. Apply the rules only after checking the text in force with a lawyer. In July 2026 the Ministry of Trade opened a draft regulation covering chain supermarkets and bakeries for consultation; this table will be updated if it comes into force.

What do food waste and shrinkage figures show for grocery chains?

Large chains avoid the everyday Turkish word for shrinkage (fire) in their reports: BİM speaks of food waste, Migros of its loss/disposal rate and food disposal tonnage, ŞOK of loss prevention. On the shop floor and in search, fire and zayi are the words used. The metrics differ as much as the terms, so the chains' figures cannot be compared directly.

In its 2024 integrated annual report, BİM put food waste at 0.56 per cent of sales; this is a value-based ratio. Migros tracks food disposal tonnage against food supply tonnage and cut that ratio by 55.36 per cent against its 2018 base by 2025, beating a 2030 target of 50 per cent. Its new target is a further 8 per cent reduction against a 2025 base by the end of 2035. One is value-based, the other weight-based: cheap but heavy fruit and vegetables look very different under the two metrics.

The food waste section of Migros's 2020 sustainability report shows where waste concentrates: 80 per cent of disposals came from fruit and vegetables. After automatic ordering with a learning algorithm was introduced in 2018, fruit and vegetable disposals in the first 114 stores fell by 3.1 points. Markdowns of 25-50 per cent on near-expiry meat, poultry and dairy prevented the disposal of 5,000 tonnes of product in 2019.

For Turkey as a whole, sources disagree. The Food Retailers Association (GPD) cites around 19 million tonnes of food waste a year and, citing the UNEP 2021 report, says 13 per cent of waste occurs in retail; TİSVA's figure is 23 million tonnes. The latest known Turkish measure of total loss, including theft and recording error, is old: according to the Sensormatic index cited by TPF in 2018, loss in local chains was 1.79 per cent of sales.

Net profit effect of a loss improvement

Sales × Fall in loss rate (points ÷ 100)

Effect relative to net profit

Loss improvement ÷ Current net profit × 100

Which grocery chain decisions does Mindpera run?

Mindpera brings grocery chain data into a single data model: POS transaction records, ERP purchase and sales invoices, waste and write-off records, count readings and promotion definitions. The database calculates historical figures with defined formulas; run the same report twice and the same number comes back. The forward-looking need, meaning replenishment quantities and shelf requirements, comes from the demand forecasting model.

Agents find the deviation that crosses a threshold, open a task, assign it to its owner and follow it until it is closed: a department whose shrinkage rate breaks its threshold goes to the department manager, a product whose last purchase cost rises goes to the pricing owner, an unmatched POS row goes to the store manager. An item that stays open escalates step by step. Which source till and scale records come from, and how often, is decided at setup against the existing infrastructure.

• Mind Stock: shrinkage is recorded with a reason code and count variance is calculated separately against a frozen balance; the shrinkage rate by category and store raises an alert when it crosses a threshold.
• Mind Cost: average and last purchase cost sit side by side; the gap is split into batch, cost line and currency effect, and a price update suggestion list is produced.
• Mind Ops: the daily store scorecard, checklists, promotion performance scorecard and unmatched POS rows are brought together on one screen.
• Mind Send: replenishment suggestions by rate of sale and store-to-store transfers are produced together with the shelf capacity constraint.
• Mind Space: the category space plan is calculated together with productivity per square metre and per shelf metre.

If till, scale and ERP data sit in separate systems, installation brings them into a single model; management dashboards are fed from the same model.