Who Is
Sunrise Foods International?

Sunrise Foods International is a Canadian food production company that boasts a 25% market share of all organic produce sold in North America. Sunrise is a direct subsidiary of Tiryaki Agro, a $1.5B Turkish conglomerate deemed “the force to be reckoned with in organic grain imports,” whose production operations stretch as far as Russia, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates.

 

Tiryaki presides over an international web of agricultural import companies, many of which have surrendered their organic licensing after being caught smuggling non-organic products into the EU and US. It is one of a few Turkish companies that have collectively shaped the international trade of certified-organic produce – numerous exposés have been released implicating these companies in “a multi-million dollar fraud targeting [the] US organic food market.”

Shortly after it was acquired by Tiryaki in 2018, Sunrise was caught attempting to fraudulently import 55-million pounds of non-organic corn from Russia, Moldova, and Kazakhstan. Using an obscure technicality as their defense – the corn was “cracked,” not “raw” – Sunrise attempted to pressure a federal judge to immediately allow the unloading of the shipment. The judge denied the request, and the ship remained docked on the California coast for weeks.


The international shipment of fraudulently certified grain from countries like Russia and the United Arab Emirates has had a
disproportionate impact on US-based farmer-owned cooperatives, which have lost millions of dollars in revenue as they struggle to compete with companies like Sunrise, which import produce of dubious origin and re-sell it below market value.


Sunrise and Tiryaki are able to sustain these operations by enlisting the services of
Florida Organic Growers (FOG), an international nonprofit that lobbies the US federal government for looser oversight of organic certification while providing those very certificates to multibillion-dollar agribusinesses around the world. Despite regulations that are intended to prevent such flagrant conflicts-of-interest, FOG and its subsidiary, Quality Certification Services, continue to receive both certification fees and “in-kind” contributions from companies like Tiryaki.