As a part of the Mediterranean Development Project of the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization in the 1960s, the State Planning Institute in Turkey devised the agricultural development scheme of the Antalya region at the epicenter of Turkey’s Mediterranean coast. Prior to this planned transition to tomato production from the 1960s on, Antalya had been a major cotton producing region with large tracts of cotton fields in its coastal valleys similar to its neighboring Mersin-Adana region. This paper focuses on this period of transition to a new industrial crop in Antalya, as the region has become fashioned with Mediterranean identity in Turkey. Based on the findings from ethnographic and archival research, I discuss the meanings attributed to the cotton and the labor regime associated with it in contrast to liberal values the introduction of industrial tomato production has claimed to have created. Since the tomato is introduced to Antalya as a quintessential commodity of the agribusiness in the nation-state paradigm, the way it re-shaped the relations of the landed property, the market and the labor provides a way to understand the entanglements of region-making, development, and the fashioning of Mediterranean liberalism in the late 20th century. In view of the debates on plantation-like ciftlik system emerging on the Mediterranean littoral of the Asia Minor during the 19th century, this paper puts a magnifying glass on a set of local institutions embedded in the social and that constituted the region of Antalya in the late 20th century. Thus, I propose to put the rise of the tomato as an iconic national commodity squarely in the region-making trajectory of Antalya with its local dynamics of social power embedded in the new property/market relations and the cultural meanings the tomato has created.