A small grocery store in a tiny town in mountainous eastern Turkey has become an instant success and is now on its way of becoming a nationwide chain. The store, which opened last year in Ovacik in the province of Tunceli, was so overwhelmed with demand from all across the country that four other stores were inaugurated this year in Turkey’s three biggest cities.

The story of Ovacik’s locally produced and natural foodstuffs is about more than healthy nutrition: It's also about politics.

In the 2014 local elections, the voters of Ovacik, which including its surrounding villages has a population of some 8,500 people, elected Fatih Mehmet Macoglu as mayor, making him the first and only Turkish Communist Party member to head a local administration. In line with his party’s ideology, Macoglu focused on developing cooperative farming, launching organic agriculture on 65 hectares of public land with an eye toward producing natural products without any intermediaries and a low profit margin.

Soon, the town’s cooperative was selling haricots, chickpeas and potatoes cultivated naturally without any chemical intervention as well as honey produced by bees feeding on the area’s mountain flora. After a while, it launched online sales, reaching out to the whole country. The products generated such a high demand that the local administration decided to expand to other provinces. Earlier this year, it opened two stores in Istanbul, and recently two more stores in Ankara and Izmir. Preparations are now underway for stores in Adana, Mersin and Bursa.