A new welcome center coming to Clary-Shy Community Park will offer more resources to the community and elevate the Columbia Farmers Market experience.
The Community Welcome Center may break ground as early as this summer and could open sometime in 2025. It will be managed by Columbia Parks and Recreation and the Columbia Center for Urban Agriculture (CCUA).
“This building is really going to help round out the way this park can serve the community," CCUA Development Director Adam Saunder said. "With a big commercial kitchen, it will help the vendors who do value-added production or produce samples, or food ready-to-eat during the market."
In addition to the commercial kitchen, the building will house an event hall, office spaces, and an agricultural resource library.
The commercial kitchen is a rentable space that culinary entrepreneurs can use to enhance their production abilities. Farmers market vendors can use this kitchen to make new recipes to share, like Susie Mahnken with Missouri Legacy Beef.
“A certified kitchen would be great for someone who has a product that they have maybe always wanted to make, like my grandmother and my aunt’s famous chocolate syrup,” Mahnken said.
This creates more opportunity for vendors to launch new products.
Mahnken said the farmers market community is what keeps her coming back. She said the new kitchen can take those relationships even further.
“We have such a sense of community here at the market, we’ve just built relationships, and I think having a new product that could be made in the certified kitchen would build even more relationships," Mahnken said.
The new building will provide services including meal kit distribution and home and garden tool checkout.
Flyover video of the park shows the renderings for the new community center:
