Burgers, döner, lahmacun: Most popular food orders of 2018 in Turkey

ISTANBUL

Middle Eastern specialty pizza Lahmacun or Lahmajoun.

Burgers, döner and lahmacun were the most ordered foods in Turkey in 2018 on yemeksepeti.com, data by the Turkish online food ordering company have shown.

“If you put all the hamburger orders of 2018 on top of each other, its height would exceed Mt. Everest’s height by 210 times more,” yemeksepeti.com’s 2018 almanac stated.

The number one ordered food item was hamburgers, as was the case in 2017.

Increasing its order amount by 70 percent in 2018 compared to 2017, the döner has become the second most ordered food item, which was the fifth most ordered food item last year.

Döner, also known as the turning kebab, is one of the most popular street foods in Turkey. It is generally consumed with a tortilla-like bread called “lavaş,” in the form of “dürüm,” some kind of burrito, or over a bed of rice.

Lahmacun, on the other hand, fell back to third place this year from second place in 2017. Lahmacun, also known as Turkish pizza, is a crisp oval-shaped flatbread consisting of spicy and seasoned ground meat.

Another delicacy of the Turkish cuisine, “çiğ köfte,” which means “raw meatball,” was ordered 65 percent more this year compared to last year. Although originally made of kneaded raw meat, restaurants had in recent years shifted to making it all-vegetarian following a Health Ministry ban which said it was unhealthy.

In 2018, sea foods made a breakthrough with a 70 percent increase in its orders.

Apart from food items, this year, coffee orders increased as well, yemeksepeti.com data said.

With an 80 percent increase of coffee orders, the most preferred coffee became latte, a type of coffee made with espresso and hot steamed milk.

A user from Istanbul set this year’s record by placing 1,633 orders from the platform, the data revealed.

The university campus that placed the most orders was the Ayazağa campus of Istanbul Technical University.

As reported by yemeksepeti.com, most orders were placed in December and on Sundays.

Among 11 million users, those aged 22 placed the most orders, the statistics showed.

Yemeksepeti.com, one of the most important enterprises of Turkey, was founded in 2000 in a 40-meter-square room by Melih Ödemiş, Nevzat Aydın, Gökhan Akan and Cem Nufusi. In 2001, the platform started business with 26 restaurants. Today, it is working with approximately 27,000 restaurants.

The online platform was sold to Delivery Hero, a food delivery company based in Berlin, in 2015 for more than one billion Turkish Liras (589 million $).