Manhattan Beach Certified Farmers Market turns 20 

Imagine downtown Manhattan Beach on a Tuesday if there was no farmer’s market. 

Nary a stone fruit in sight. No homemade pupusas. No smiling parents pulling a toddler sharing a wagon with a bunch of fresh produce, no cyclists balancing a backpack full of goodies, a bouquet of flowers in their handlebar basket. No joyous shrieks of children playing. No songs drifting through the air. 

It would be like Christmas minus Santa Claus, or Paris without wine and baguettes. It wouldn’t quite make sense. 

That absence is nearly impossible to picture now, but it was the reality until 2006, when the Manhattan Beach Certified Farmers Market opened its first Tuesday downtown. On Tuesday, July 21, it turns 20, keeping its standing hours of 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in the Civic Center Parking Lot and Plaza off 15th Street. 

Kelly Stroman, executive director of the Downtown Manhattan Beach Business & Professional Association, announced the milestone at the July 7 City Council meeting.

“It’s really been an incubator for so many small businesses, so many nonprofit groups that have exhibited at the farmers market, and just really bringing the community together in so many different ways,” Stroman said.

Maureen McBride was president of the downtown business association when it brought the market to life, and she has watched it from the beginning. McBride, who owns the downtown shop Tabula Rasa and has been in town 25 years, said the board had been circling the idea for a while before it committed.

“In retrospect, it’s probably one of the things I’m most proud of, because we were able to create something that brought together the community,” McBride said. “It supported local farmers, small businesses, and it added a layer of connection and camaraderie and family to our community.”

It started small, with a little more than two dozen stalls, adding one hand-curated vendor at a time. Six of the original vendors are still there every week: Arnett Farms, JR Organics, Deisy’s Pupusas, Dry Dock Fish, Aliki Greek, and Dave’s Korean Foods. 

“Those six have been with the market since day one,” Stroman said. She called JR Organics and Arnett the market’s two farmer anchors, and Deisy’s — the pupusa stand — a quintessential part of the market. “Deisy is a legend,” she said. 

A seventh constant, guitar player Richie Lecca, has performed at the market all 20 years. 

The certification in the name is not decoration. A certified farmers market carries a county certification distinct from an ordinary market, and it must be sponsored by a nonprofit that receives the proceeds; here, that sponsor is the Downtown Business Association. It is an utterly reliable operation, closing only for torrential rain forecasts, or wind strong enough to threaten the vendors’ canopies. Vendors commit to being there every week.

“We are a rain or shine market,” Stroman said.

That weekly reliability is what market manager Cynthia Rogers has cultivated for more than a dozen years. The market has grown on her watch, from roughly 30 vendors to about 60.

 “It’s been steady, steady growth,” Rogers said. 

Her focus, she said, is community experience and the caliber of the vendors: “Quality of vendors is a really key piece.” She pointed to JR Organics, which she said was named top small farmer of the year in California about three years ago. She noted that Smith Farms and its grower, McKay Smith, is one of the early figures in the certified-organic farmers market movement, and cited Re:Broth, which sources from regenerative farmers, “the next level beyond certified organic,” she said. There are crowd favorites like Creamy Boys ice cream and the hard-to-find offerings, such as two vegan-pastry vendors. 

The market is in a very real sense a congregation of outright goodness. Produce from a small farm is often picked a day or so before it reaches the market, and the science is on its side: many of the nutrients in fruits and vegetables, particularly water-soluble vitamins like vitamin C and folate, begin breaking down soon after harvest, so the less time between field and table, the more of that nourishment survives. A peach bought Tuesday morning may have been on the tree Monday afternoon; the same peach routed through a national supply chain can spend days or weeks in transit and cold storage. 

Freshness is only part of it. Buying direct keeps small, sustainable family farms financially viable, and it builds the kind of weekly connection between grower and neighbor that a grocery aisle cannot. “It’s intrinsically and inherently a good thing at every level,” Rogers said.

The market is also about something beyond food. It builds community, not only in the gathering itself but as a forum for good causes.  Over two decades it has hosted community groups and nonprofits and funneled its proceeds back into the city — more than $250,000 in all, according to Stroman. Beneficiaries include the Manhattan Beach Education Foundation, the Roundhouse Aquarium, Grades of Green — the sustainability nonprofit that started locally and now operates globally, and that partners with the market on recycling — and Growing Great, the nutrition-education nonprofit that Peggy Curry helped launch and that was part of the market from the start. Stroman also cited Manhattan Beach Little League, Mira Costa Grad Night, and others.

“It’s more than a farmers market,” Stroman said. “It’s definitely an integral piece of the fabric of Manhattan Beach.”

One of the things that has always set the MB Farmer’s Market apart from other nearby farmer’s markets is how kid friendly it is, first with the choo choo train that ran through its former location behind Metlox Plaza, and in its ongoing  programming. The market has run cooking demonstrations with kids and scavenger hunts with schools and preschools, sending students out to track down a nectarine or a gourd and, along the way, learn where fresh food comes from. Stroman recalls kids “wolfing down strawberries,” much to the delight of the farmers themselves. 

The market almost didn’t survive its 20th year in one piece. For most of its run it was held on 13th Street, between Morningside Drive and Valley Drive. When the Lot 3 parking structure was slated for emergency demolition and the surrounding block turned into a construction zone in 2024, the market had to move on short notice. Stroman credited Rogers and the vendors with reacting almost overnight, decamping to the Civic Center Plaza.

“Cynthia and the vendors did an amazing job of reacting literally within a week as that parking lot three was torn down,” Stroman said.

What began as a forced move has, by every account, improved the market. The vendor count and footprint are roughly the same, but the new configuration invites people to linger — a grove of trees, easy access off 15th Street for the hot-food vendors, the library next door drawing families to and from the market, City Hall and the fire station steps away. The market and City Hall run a wellness program together, with $1 and $5 “carrot coins” the city hands employees for walking or biking to work. The market is at the Civic Center to stay.

“It’s been a home run,” Stroman said.

“I wish we would have done that years ago, because it just makes so much sense,” McBride said, calling the plaza more protected and safe than the street. 

It’s likewise given the Civic Center a jolt of life, populated once a week with the gleeful circus-comes-to-town feeling of farmers, artisans, neighbors, cooks, musicians, and kids, all at play. 

“We brought energy. That’s for sure,” Stroman said.

“It just has really filled that space in and given it a life that I don’t think it had before.” 

Mayor Joe Franklin said the market has become “an essential part of downtown.” He described the summer swim-program kids who stream up afterward, the babies in carriages, the families spread across the grass. It has become a community within the community. 

“The vendors, they become a part of your family,” Franklin said. “You see them every week.”

“Where’d the 20 years go?” he said.

A weekday market during working hours, Rogers said, draws a cross-section that would rarely otherwise stand shoulder to shoulder — a police officer stopping for a tamale, a firefighter grabbing a lemonade, seniors walking over from the senior center, small children with their nannies. The market’s volunteers, she said, are in their 50s and 60s, people who knew one another raising their kids and now have a weekly reason to see each other again.

“Let’s all slow our lives down just a touch, especially when we live in an urban environment like we do, and be more connected not only to food but to each other,” Rogers said.

The Manhattan Beach Certified Farmers Market is “truly a community event,” she said. “That is what its sole purpose is.”

The market’s 20th anniversary celebration runs Tuesday, July 21, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Civic Center Plaza, with special activities planned.