'The East Side needs food': Pueblo Farmers Market launches new location

A popular Pueblo farmers market plans to launch a new location to bring fresh fruits and vegetables to the East Side this summer, increasing access to healthy foods in an area that's severely lacked it in recent years.

The Pueblo Farmers Market, a food access program of the Eastside Action Support Team, will launch its new market on the East Side starting July 13, with the market remaining open through Oct. 12. It will be located at 2300 E. 10th St., will be held on Saturdays, and will feature multiple vendors that sell produce and other goods.

The target, however, is East Side residents, many of whom lost their only nearby access to a grocery store when the East Side Safeway closed its doors in 2016. Another grocery store hasn’t surfaced in the area since.

There’s been at least some effort in the past several years to improve food access on the East Side. The East Side Community Market offers fresh produce and the Sunny Side Market, a food pantry run by Care and Share Food Bank, has operated there since 2021.

This new East Side farmers market, though, is intended to serve as a launching pad for the Rocky Mountain SER Empowerment Center’s long-term effort to increase food access in the area through its renovation of Spann Elementary.

“We’ve been waiting for the right time for us to start in that location,” said Marci Cochran, market director of the Pueblo Farmers Market and president of the Eastside Action Support Team. “It starts to build awareness that there’s food there and starts to connect people to food and draws them in.

“If we spend a couple seasons drawing traffic and getting the East Side familiar with the fact that there is a food access point there, by the time a grocery store opens, there will be an expectation. We want to spend some time building that expectation and helping the community understand that this is for real. This is a long-term direction.”

What to know about the upcoming season

The Pueblo Farmers Market’s current plan is to operate a farmers market on the East Side this summer and the next two seasons after that, Cochran said. It will continue to operate a market on Fridays at Mineral Palace Park, which is slated to start June 28 and last until Oct. 11.

This season, there won’t be any Saturday markets at the Pueblo Mall, which served as a market location in recent years.

The organization's original plan was to operate all three markets, but Cochran said the mall didn’t meet specific deadlines, making it all the more complicated to put together a lease to operate there.

That partially led to the decision to move the market over to the East Side, but Cochran and other stakeholders had discussed launching a market there for three years, she said. Also, the East Side location presents a better place to “present the type of market we want for our community,” Cochran said.

“We want the East Side to take ownership of this market, this is for them,” Cochran said. “This market is not about people making a lot of money. The vendors who commit to being there are there because they believe in what’s going on. The East Side needs food.”

What to expect at the East Side Farmers Market

Perdita Butler, owner of the local Quarter Acre and a Mule urban farm, will serve as the “anchor farm” of the market, meaning a vendor who has committed to and wants to build up the market. She will be joined by Allison Rea of Colorado Yardbirds, another local Pueblo farm.

The Pueblo Farmers Market is conducting outreach to bring in other small-volume growers to the market. The hope is to offer products ranging from dehydrated produce to jams, jellies, breads and freeze-dried produce, among many others.

Prices are expected to be as low as reasonably possible, Cochran said, to ensure farmers, who perform considerable work to deliver the produce, are still compensated and East Side market attendees can access the products they want.

Cochran said she suspects the market’s immediate impact could be “enormous.”

“Anyway that we can get more food in this community, particularly to the sites of our town that maybe don’t have as much access, that’s progress,” said Megan Moore, program manager of the Pueblo Food Project. “That’s exactly what all of us in the food scene are looking to do. It’s very exciting.”

Chieftain reporter Josué Perez can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, at @josuepwrites. Support local news, subscribe to The Pueblo Chieftain at subscribe.chieftain.com.

This article originally appeared on The Pueblo Chieftain: Where to get fresh, healthy foods on East Side of Pueblo this summer