The Lomita Farmers Market, launched during the peak of the pandemic, permanently closed on Sunday, Aug. 27, due to not enough community support and competition from other markets in the area.
“We’re sorry for the inconvenience,” said the Lomita Chamber of Commerce in a message on Facebook announcing the closure.“However, due to staffing issues and lack of interest in the Lomita Farmers Market, we are permanently putting the Lomita Farmers Market on hold.”
The idea of the market was formed to provide an additional source of grocery to residents of Lomita, where there are few supermarkets, said Erik Bowman, a member of the Lomita Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors.
“Basically the talk on social media was that Lomita was a food desert, so in 2019, we came up with the idea of creating a farmer’s market,” Bowman said Tuesday.
Later that year, the Chamber conducted a survey on social media, and found that most of the 2,000 people who responded preferred Sunday as the day to have the farmer’s market, he said.
Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the Chamber’s original plan to open the market in March 2020 got scrapped due to lockdown orders from the government. But it eventually received the “go ahead” from the LA County Public Health Department.
Lomita Farmers Market officially opened its doors to the community on July 5, 2020 at 24300 Narbonne Ave., on the front lawn of the Lomita City Hall building.
It was launched “with a huge turnout and a bunch of vendors,” Bowman said, because most of the farmers markets in the area were closed at the time to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
But things started to change after 18 months, when larger farmers markets with longer history in the South Bay communities re-opened.
“A lot of our vendors went back to where they came from, which was like Long Beach and Torrance and Palos Verdes and even the Village in Redondo,” Bowman said. “We couldn’t keep attracting more customers,…
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