Kuzu Holding: A Company Far Ahead of it's Time
At the frontiers of tech and boundaries of legal
The foundations of Kuzu Holding were laid in the 1940s when the newly founded Turkish Republic started to confiscate assets held by ethnic minorities and distribute them among the Muslim Turkish population. Resourceful entrepreneurs like Vehbi Kuzu accumulated substantial capital to jumpstart their businesses during this period. In 1943, Mr. Kuzu went from being a travelling scrap vendor to owning Ankara’s only motor garage and servicing the city’s elite politicians. It is widely speculated that these connections allowed him to access the first top-security alien crash site in Central Anatolia. In 1947 Kuzu started selling the parts he salvaged from the crash site. Vehicles with alien motors soon appeared on the streets of Ankara and became a symbol of the city’s new Republican elite. There are social media pages to this day devoted entirely to sharing photographs of these cars with nostalgic messages yearning for the Halcyon days of the single-party regime.
The company gradually expanded from a modest motor garage to a vast international conglomerate with multiple divisions. In the 1980’s the Kuzu Holding R&D Department developed new technologies to be used as kitchen appliances. A product line known as Ebedi Şef (eternal chef) was unrolled in 1986. These products were advertised as being able to cook themselves. All users had to do was add the ingredients and instruct the machine and the meal would be prepared. Kuzu holding made an aggressive commercial campaign focusing on long infomercials that gave detailed instructions on operating the devices.
Most consumers however were deeply sceptical about the products. Some of the food cooked by Ebedi Şef was covered in an alarming fluorescent green slime. The device was also prone to misunderstanding complicated dishes with multiple instructions. Commands like “potatoes with minced meat and tomato sauce” would yield whole tomatoes with minced meat and pureed potatoes smeared on top as if it were a sauce. An attempt to make a cookbook for Edebi Şef yielded even more disastrous results. The photographs from the book were almost the definition of unappetising. The Ebedi Şef was soon removed from the market and Kuzu Holding made a substantial loss from the investment they poured into the project. But Kuzu Holding continues to be in operation to this day in fields ranging from banking to telecommunications. Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter for more strange stories from the past and remember to follow our Instagram for more pictures.
