Turkish bakery is a wheat story before it is an export story. The country mills a very large volume of wheat, much of it under inward processing for re-export, and the biscuit and wafer plants grew up next to the mills rather than next to the ports. That is why the industry is competitive on the two things that decide a bakery tender: the flour price landed at the plant, and the cost of running a long line for a long time. A Turkish plant with a modern rotary moulder or wire-cut line will quote a private label biscuit at a price a Western European co-manufacturer cannot reach, and will do it at minimum order quantities measured in a few tonnes rather than a full production week.
The second reason is range. The same factories that run sweet biscuits also run crackers, breadsticks, wafers, rusks, cakes and, increasingly, frozen and par-baked dough. For a retailer or distributor building a private label bakery range, that means one supplier, one audit, one set of artwork approvals and one consolidated container instead of four. It also means the supplier already understands ambient distribution to hot markets, because the domestic market and the Middle East and Africa export trade demand shelf lives that Northern European producers rarely design for.
What separates a clean bakery purchase from an expensive one is that most of the risk sits in chemistry and labelling, not in the recipe. Baked goods are the product category the EU singled out for acrylamide mitigation. They are the category where the industrial trans fat limit bites, because shortening and margarine are the cheap fats. They are the category most exposed to the sesame and ethylene oxide controls, which is awkward when sesame is on half the Turkish savoury bakery range. And they carry more mandatory label content than almost any other food. A buyer who writes those four things into the enquiry gets a very different quotation from one who asks for a price per carton.