Living in Denizli, electrical technician Cagdas Piyancı (38) began producing mussel cultivation nets in the city known for textile factories after selling textile machine parts. Piyancı, who was curious about how mussels, a popular street food which he enjoys himself, are produced, learned that these nets are only produced in New Zealand and Spain, then imported to Turkey from Spain. Discovering unofficial figures suggesting Turkey consumes 100,000 tons of mussels annually, Piyancı visited Spain to research mussel net production facilities and farms, taking samples from nets. Returning to Turkey, after a 2-year R&D effort, Piyancı designed a machine that combines 96 cotton threads to produce mussel nets successfully.
Establishing a facility and producing nets on 10 different machines, Piyancı began exporting the nets. Claiming to be the only person in Turkey producing mussel nets from cotton threads and boasting a production capacity of 60 tons of nets, Piyancı said, “While Turkey used to import nets from Spain, now we export nets to Spain, becoming the third country in the world to produce mussel nets after New Zealand and Spain.” Piyancı noted that Turkish mussel producers source their nets from Spain and shared, “I was always curious about the production of mussels, a street favorite. They are cultivated inside nets placed in the sea. I learned that even the nets where mussels are cultivated come to our country from New Zealand and Spain. After visiting Spain and studying how this was done and taking samples, I returned to Denizli, researched for two years, built the machines, and started production. We have been producing for three years. We are the biggest producer in Turkey and the third-largest mussel net producer globally. We export 50% of our production to Spain, Italy, and Morocco. We started thinking about how to sell nets to Spain, and now we are proud to export.”