SPOKANE VALLEY, Wash. — Construction is still in-progress for Spokane’s first year-round farmer’s market.
The Scale House Market hopes to open in May and expects to create over 150 new jobs once it opens.
“For the farmers and growers, I think this is really important to be able to have a steady revenue source for them,” said Vicki Carter, the director of Spokane Conservation District.
The market will be on East 8th Avenue in Spokane Valley, just off I-90.
The Spokane Conservation District has been working on this market since 2022, though the idea came about during the pandemic when supermarket shelves were empty and fresh or local food was hard to find.
“We looked at cities all over Washington and this region and we were the only one of our size that didn’t have some sort of permanent facility,” said Carter.
The district hopes once its open, around 250,000 people will come visit the market each year.
“Our consumers really needed to know more about where their food came from, about how to access fresh food,” Carter said.
The district already raised most of the $4.4 million needed to complete the Scale House Market. It is still looking to raise another $500,000 before the official opening in May.
The Conservation District hopes to have around 65 different local vendors with both permanent and temporary spaces inside and outside the market.
The market will also have a commercial kitchen which aims to cut down on food waste.
“If they didn’t sell all of their strawberries at a market, which we know would never happen because no one is going to let those go, they could bring them into the kitchen and they could process them and make jam or fruit leather,” said Carter. “This is going to eliminate some of that (food waste) and that’s part of what we see as the value for those producers.”
Carter says the kitchen will also host cooking classes and hopes the market will have other kinds of entertainment when it opens. There will also be a walk-in refrigerator and freezer for vendors to store leftover produce.
“It’s going to give people a place to come not only to access fresh food, but also just the sharing,” said Carter. “There’s a cultural element around food but the sharing in a kitchen, being able to bring kids here and have classes.”
The market already opened vendor applications in November and received around 70 applications from interested applicants.
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