Our Team

We are curious people. We are not bound by any borders. We worked and lived in Europe, Asia and North America. We served top food companies across the globe, celebrated hard-fought successes of many start-ups, built processing and packaging operations and trained talent in multiple geographies. Nejat and Suleyman formed Çınar to serve packaging businesses in Turkey and carefully building a service portfolio and expert network.

We invite you to learn more about our growing network, offerings and experiences.

Süleyman Muratoğlu

Founding Partner

Nejat Çalışkan

Founding Partner

Our Purpose​

We care deeply seeing potentials fulfilled; in business, in personal relationships or in our communities. We believe packaging advances quality of human life across the planet, but information needed to make better packaging decisions are disconnected and inefficient.


At Çınar, we love identifying waste in business operations, solving problems in packaging system design supply chain and in procurement. 

We seek know-how and expertise, connect them to our network, develop technologies to make it easy and available for businesses in Turkey.


Responsibility

Any business interaction we take, our view is always  through a lens of responsible leadership. The context is continuous improvement; for our team, our customers, our investors and communities we live in.


For example, we do not refer to any packaging format as fully sustainable. A widely available packaging choice is solving a problem and addressing consumer a need. What matters is the on-going progress a company makes in reducing societal and environmental impact while producing that particular package.


We are custodians of our investors resources, our customers, employees and communities trust on us. We work hard to deliver on this promise.

SÜLEYMAN MURATOĞLU

Süleyman Muratoğlu is co-founder of Çınar. His professional experience is in building commercial capabilities, business turnarounds, operations, and opening new markets in manufacturing / consumer products industries. He served private, Fortune 500 public and private equity companies in packaging and food processing industries for over 25 years internationally.

He joined Tetra Pak in 1994 in Turkey, established market operating entities and help set up food and beverage plants with local or global brand ownerships in Central Asia. In North America, managed Tetra Pak contract manufacturing business, a network of 20+ companies in aseptic food processing and packaging, sales and product marketing.

Süleyman joined Owens Illinois, a global leader in glass packaging, in 2015 as Chief Commercial Officer to lead organization’s evolution to become market driven and customer-centric. The team were able to rapidly stabilize the base business and return to growth through concerted effort across supply chain, procurement, manufacturing and sales and marketing.

Most recently as its CEO, he led a private equity backed a North American dry food contract manufacturing business in Chicago.

Süleyman holds a BS degree in Engineering from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and MBA from Northwestern University Kellogg Graduate School of Business in Chicago.

NEJAT ÇALIŞKAN

Nejat Çalışkan, Co-Founder of Çınar, has over 25 years of professional experience in food & beverage processing and packaging industry in various markets in Europe and Asia. Prior to co-founding Çınar in 2021, he served as Managing Director of Tetra Pak in Vietnam, following his service as Managing Director in Turkey & Caucasus between 2014-2019.
 
Nejat joined Tetra Pak in 1995 and held various commercial leadership roles in new market entry, customer management, business development and innovation deployment in Turkey, Pakistan and South-East Asia. He has senior management experience in setting up systems, structures, processes in new markets. He devised the global marketing plan for core segment of the company’s business, working with seven proxy markets from around the globe.

Nejat started his career as a foreign trading executive in 1987, trading construction commodities across Europe, Middle & Far East.

He served in the Boards of Swedish Chambers of Commerce (SCCT) and Packaging Recovery Organizations (PROV) in Turkey and Vietnam.
 
Nejat holds B.S degree in Engineering from Boğaziçi University in Istanbul and MBA from Radford University in Virginia.