Adelaide Showground Farmers’ Market has seen record visitation numbers during the COVID-19 restrictions as South Aussies look for safe ways to shop for fresh local food.
The market has remained open as an essential service throughout the crisis, ensuring customer safety by moving to a larger site within The Showground, allowing five times more space for stalls and shoppers to spread out.
To accommodate popular demand for an earlier opening and avoid the confusion around the previous practice of having different opening times in summer and winter, the market has announced new opening hours of 8.30am – 12.30pm all year-round from this Sunday (7th June) onwards.
The new hours were decided by a survey of over 3,000 shoppers and stallholders.
With the bustling weekly market providing a lifeline for small growers who lost all their restaurant, café and hospitality sales, there’s never been a better time to shop for ‘fresh food in the fresh air’.
But the crisis has also seen some innovative and creative responses as new businesses rushed to join the market. With their CBD outlet only offering takeaway BTS Cafe reached a new audience with their sell out weekly stall at the Farmers’ Market, similarly The Prawn Store is a new market stall run by the Tapley family, fourth generation Spencer Gulf prawn fishermen who when they saw their export and restaurant sales vanish overnight have instead discovered the joys of direct sales at The Farmers’ Market.
COVID-19 made a lot of people step back and reconsider the crowded supermarkets and imported food, they want to do something different, it has made people realise the importance of being able to feed ourselves from South Australian farms’ says Christine Robertson, Executive Officer of
Adelaide Showground Farmers’ Market.
‘We’ve seen record numbers of new shoppers and they all say the same thing: that they wish they’d discovered the market earlier! The food is so amazing, they love meeting the people who grow the produce, bake the bread and make the cheese. This is food they can trust and they like the fact the money spent at the market stays in our state. Sales of seedlings have also boomed at the market as shoppers used time in lockdown to try growing their own veggies and baked more homemade meals from scratch.’
More details at www.adelaidefarmersmarket.com.au
When: Sunday 7th June 2020 onward, 8.30am – 12.30pm every Sunday
Where: The Adelaide Showgrounds, Entry via Rose Terrace
How much: FREE Entry
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