As founder of Centre Markets and the Centre Kitchen Collective, and as a flower farmer, Sabine Carey is used to being busy.
But Saturdays are … something else.
“Saturdays are long days,” she says. “I leave the house at 9 and I usually get home just before 8.”
In between those hours, Carey and three or four helpers are busy in Centre Markets’ storefront at the Nittany Mall, packing grocery bags and boxes with fresh produce and other locally made products for 70 to 80 or more online orders. While some orders are picked up, Carey personally delivers the others to homes around State College, Boalsburg, and Lemont.
“Saturdays is all-hands-on-deck,” she says. “Yeah, we hustle.”
Since April 2024, the online farmers market Carey founded in the early days of the COVID pandemic has had a 1,000-square-foot retail space at the mall. This year, the market will move to a 2,500-square-foot 1850s building at 112 W. Pine Grove Road in Pine Grove Mills that will feature a small garden. A second phase of that project calls for the nonprofit Centre Kitchen Collective — which Carey founded in 2023 with Elaine Meder-Wilgus of Webster’s Bookstore Café — to open a much-needed commercial kitchen there to be shared by entrepreneurs with small community food-related businesses.
It’ll be something of a food hub, all the more so with its proximity to the Pine Grove Mills Farmers Market, as well as Pine Grove Hall and Flour & Stone restaurants.
Centre Markets LLC is served by more than 70 farmers and other producers from Centre and surrounding counties. You’ll find many of those same farmers and producers at the area’s outdoor farmers markets, which get into full swing as the warmer weather arrives.
“Our busy season for the online market is pretty much the opposite of the [outdoor] farmers market season,” Carey says.
But even if the online market slows a bit over the summer, there is plenty to keep Carey busy. Centre Markets has come a long way from the spring of 2020.
“When COVID started, we were just trying to figure out how to keep food coming to the people,” she says. “I launched this online farmers market, thinking it would just be a couple of months. That was five years ago. So here we are with our online farmers market and the store at the mall, and working on our project in Pine Grove Mills.”
Here’s more from our conversation:
Do you plan on staying in the mall when your place in Pine Grove Mills opens?
Carey: No. We’re going to move everything to Pine Grove Mills. It’s so much to maintain two facilities with freezers and coolers and staff and inventory. So, we’re just going to focus on making Pine Grove Mills this real local food hub, where people can come and shop, and we’re going to have a little backyard garden where we’re going to show people what they can do in their own backyard.
And then phase two for Pine Grove Mills is a commercial kitchen, because there’s so many food entrepreneurs in town that need a place to start their little food businesses, and it’s impossible to have your own commercial kitchen because it’s cost-prohibitive for so many people. So, we’re raising funds and writing grants to equip that kitchen, and then we’ll also be able to reduce food waste and process things in our own kitchen, help out farmers that have bumper crops. We’ll have that certified commercial kitchen that can be used to make value-added products so that farmers can deal with seasonal bounty, because everything ripens at once sometimes and they’ll have a built-in support network because we’ll be there. The goal is to hire an experienced kitchen manager that can help with a lot of those things, too.
What’s the timeline?
Carey: At this point I am saying 2025. That’s as much as I can narrow it down because the building in Pine Grove Mills, it’s from 1850; it’s an old building and we’re gutting it. I just know it’s going to be this year. That building keeps throwing us curve balls that we just deal with as they come up.
They’re working every day, every week. I go in and take pictures to remind myself, “Ah, yes, we’re moving forward.” All new windows on the ground floor. The natural light in that space is just beautiful. The retail space will be bigger, and then we’ll have additional spaces toward the back for storage; we’ll have a walk-in freezer and cooler. We’ll have much more storage and some outdoor space too.
The kitchen is going to take a little longer than the store because we have a lot of money to raise. There used to be a lot of grants available for that sort of local food infrastructure development. I’m not sure how much people are aware that a lot of those grants are now frozen or no longer available [since the new presidential administration took office in January]. So now we have to re-evaluate where our money is coming from. Putting in all professional kitchen equipment and all the code requirements for that, the fire safety hoods and all, is expensive. But since it’s a community asset, those grants were there to support it as an infrastructure that other local businesses can really count on. We’re still working with the Pennsylvania Department of Ag and trying to figure out what’s left of the USDA that can support our efforts.
So, there’s a real need for that kind of a space in this community?
Carey: There’s a huge need. Most of the farmers that I work with are from Centre County, adjoining counties, and they’re small family farms. Labor is a major stumbling block for a lot of the farms I work with. So, for them it’s just a huge benefit for us to take care of the selling of their product, rather than maybe taking on an additional farmers market, where they would be off the farm for an entire day — they’ve got to harvest, pack, stand up [at the] market, pack up, go home, unload, and then all the stuff that they didn’t sell, they have to figure out what to do with that. Whereas our market, they tell me what they have to sell, I sell it in the online market, and then Friday evening they get an email [with] everything that is sold for tomorrow. And then they go out and they pick it or pack it, or bake it, or whatever, and they bring it the next day. Saturday mornings, all the farmers come here and drop off their stuff, and then they can go home.
Who is going to use the commercial kitchen? There are entrepreneurs here who would like to have space?
Carey: Yes, there are a lot. There are cottage kitchen laws in Pennsylvania. For baked goods that are not temperature-sensitive, that don’t need to be refrigerated or spoil easily, people can get their home kitchens inspected by the Department of Ag and you can bake bread and sell it from your home kitchen if you have the proper license. But anytime that you want to make a quiche or soup or prepare something that needs to be refrigerated, you need a commercial kitchen. They are really hard to find. They’re hard to schedule.
There are a lot of people that just want to expand and they just don’t have a space to do it. So that’s our goal, is to not only have that kitchen, but then also have this built-in community where, depending on what they make, we can put it in our store coolers and sell it for them. We have our network of other markets; we can help not just in making it, but also selling it. And then, helping them with packaging and all those sorts of [things]; not every person that starts up needs to reinvent the wheel.
A couple of years ago you conducted a food insecurity survey. What did you find and how does Centre Markets help address that?
Carey: We are just about to launch our SNAP-EBT program here in the store. [She expected the program to be live by May.] Our research indicated that, yes, people have these SNAP benefits that they would like to use for fresh local food and they’re very limited on where they can use it.
And then part of the new kitchen is also to have nutrition classes, cooking classes. A lot of folks don’t know how to prepare fresh vegetables anymore, and your money goes the furthest when you buy the wholesome ingredients and prepare your own food. So, we really want to have nutrition and cooking classes to teach people how to peel or cut a winter squash without cutting their fingers off, or how to make an easy soup, things like that. I think part of food security is just showing people an economical way of eating healthy, fresh food.
Where do you draw the most satisfaction with all this?
Carey: I really, really enjoy the work. I like to just bring people together. That makes me happy.
For more information, visit centremarkets.com (including for online orders) or centrekitchencollective.org, or follow the organizations on Facebook. T&G
Mark Brackenbury is a former editor of Town&Gown.
