¹Istanbul Aydin Univeristy, Faculty of Engineering, Department of Food Engineering, TR-34295 Istanbul - TURKEY DOI : 10.9775/kvfd.2016.17273 Probiotics are used as natural supplements for good health and treatment of various diseases. Probiotics affect health in a positive way due to their activities in the gastrointestinal tract. There is a growing interest in using probiotic bacteria for their protective effects against diseases and an emerging trend towards consuming healthy foods. The aim of the present study was to reveal species with alternative probiotic properties from some food products, which are already known to have probiotic properties and whose natural properties are preserved. Probiotic characteristics of isolated bacteria strains from 130 food samples which include 10 boza, 40 cheese, 20 kefir and 60 raw milk samples were microbiologically analyzed in the present study.A total 144 strains including 127 Enterococcus faecium, 7 Lactobacillus plantarum, 5 Lactobacillus para-plantarum and 5 Lactobacillus brevis were typed with characterizing by mass spectroscopy (MALDI-TOF MS) to have probiotic effects.Then, all the tests required to comply with the probiotic properties of these bacteria were applied sequentially. Of the 144 bacterial strains identified, only 35 were resistant to gastric pH. In the next step, only 8 isolates from 35 isolates were able to survive under bile salt conditions. It has been determined that only 6 of bile salt-resistant isolates have the hydrophobicity ability. The remaining 6 isolates were examined for antimicrobial resistance and the presence of extended-spectrum beta-lactamases (ESBL) resistance and ESBL were not detected. At the end of analysis, only 6 (4.1%) bacteria of 144 isolates were found to have probiotic properties. Three of them were Lactobacillus brevis isolated from boza and 3 of them were Lactobacillus plantarum species isolated from kefir. However, no probiotics could be isolated from other food samples such as milk and cheese. Therefore, the present study demonstrated that probiotic bacteria could be produced as an alternative to industrial probiotics through non-transgenic microorganisms isolated from natural food products such as kefir and boza. Keywords : Probiotic Bacteria, Boza, Milk, Cheese, Kefir, Probiotic properties