Nearly 20 new food vendors will be featured at this summer’s Downtown Farmers Market, which kicks off Saturday at Salt Lake City’s Pioneer Park.
They’ll be selling everything from cheese and sourdough to kimchi and hot sauce on Saturdays through Oct. 25, from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
[Read more: Finally, a solution for Pioneer Park? SLC, Downtown Alliance to make it a year-round home for the farmers market.]
Here is information on five of those new vendors, who will be selling local honey, smash burgers, strombolis, bread and a treat called “honey slush” that was invented in Hawaii.
That’s not all that’s new. Downtown Farmers Market director Carly Gillespie said there will be several firsts at this year’s market, including its first raw-milk vendor (Springbrook Dairy) and its first stroopwafel vendor (AmsterDam Delicious will be making them onsite). Gillespie said this will also be the first time in a decade that a vendor will just be selling kimchi (Do Young Kimchi).
And it won’t be offering anything edible, but Best Edge Sharpening is new this year, too. Gillespie said there was a knife sharpener at the market for years that was “super popular,” but it moved to southern Utah. “We are excited to have a new mobile knife- and tool-sharpening option for our patrons,” she said.
To discover all of the new vendors, visit the Downtown Farmers Market, held at 350 S. 300 West.
Beehive Freeze Honey Slush
If you’re never tasted honey slush, it starts with a sorbet made with fruit juice and honey. Then that “slush” is topped with raw honey and other ingredients, like locally sourced fruit, cacao nibs and coconut cream.
Beehive Freeze Honey Slush owner Ellie Magleby and her partner, Branden McQueen-Bryers, first encountered honey slush in Hawaii, where they worked at the Oahu cafe whose owners invented it as a healthier alternative to shaved ice, Magleby said.
After selling honey slush on the island for above five years, the couple moved back to Utah — where Magleby is from — and brought the recipe for honey slush with them. They started Beehive Freeze, and have been making and selling honey slush for about two years, she said.
At the Downtown Farmers Market, Magleby and McQueen-Bryers will be selling four flavors of honey slush — pina colada, passion fruit, strawberry and coffee — plus a seasonal flavor that will rotate depending on the fresh produce they can get. Look for Beehive Freeze in the northwest corner of the park, on the inside edge of the sidewalk.
Marcato Kitchen
The centerpiece of Marcato Kitchen‘s menu is the stromboli, an Italian-American creation that’s something like a baked pizza sandwich, or a “rolled-up pizza,” said chef and Marcato Kitchen founder Kyle Williams.
However you describe them, they’re delicious, a bread pocket filled with Italian meats, cheeses and sometimes veggies.
Williams — who’s been a chef for seven years — was first introduced to the stromboli by a Sicilian chef he used to work with. When Williams started Marcato Kitchen about a year and a half ago, he wanted to shine “a new light” on the stromboli, which pizzerias often treat as an afterthought, he said.
Not so at Marcato Kitchen, where fillings like giardiniera, meatballs and goat cheese shine — along with classics like pepperoni and salami.
For the Downtown Farmers Market, Williams will be selling pre-packaged strombolis that you can reheat at home, as well as his popular brown-butter chocolate chip cookies. Look for the Marcato Kitchen booth along 300 West, on the street side of the sidewalk.
Girls Who Smash
(Negley Stockman) Girls Who Smash will be selling smash burgers at the 2025 Downtown Farmers Market.
As hinted by their tongue-in-cheek business name, Girls Who Smash co-founders Cami Aglaure and Carly Porter make smash burgers, inspired by Porter’s time in New York City.
If you’re unfamiliar with this burger, Aglaure said you make a smash burger by taking a ball of ground beef and smashing it as flat as you can get it, so the edges char and get crispy while the interior stays juicy. Girls Who Smash boast that they use fresh, never-frozen certified Angus beef.
While the burgers are cooking, the married couple add thinly sliced onions that “almost melt into the patty,” Aglaure said, then they flip the patties over and add American cheese. Once the cheese is melted, they stack the grilled patties two deep, add banana peppers and their secret sauce (which Porter describes as a white “slightly spicy aioli”) and call it good.
At the Downtown Farmers Market, Girls Who Smash also will sell fries cooked in beef tallow, which Aglaure said gives them more flavor. Look for their food truck on the north end of the park, by the other food vendors.
The Grey Rabbit Artisan Bakery
David Lichty was a hobby baker for years before he started baking professionally, he said, and he would give his bread and other baked goods to his neighbors. When his day job as a compliance officer for a New York City bank ended, he said he had already been thinking about launching a bakery.
Lichty trained at the Park City Culinary Institute, then started baking in a commissary kitchen in Salt Lake City and launched The Grey Rabbit Artisan Bakery. He’s been selling his bread mostly at pop-ups in Bountiful, and said he’s feeling “very lucky” that he was accepted as a first-time vendor at the Downtown Farmers Market.
Lichty is going to have a variety of bread for sale at the market, including country wheat, gruyere, candied jalapeño & gruyere, olive, porridge bread, nine grain, country rye, chocolate rye and buckwheat buttermilk. He’ll also have French apple turnovers and lemon cream pastries, as well as cinnamon rolls, cardamom buns and other baked items.
Look for The Grey Rabbit Artisan Bakery booth at the north end of the park, across from Caputo’s Market & Deli.
Higbee Honey
Mike Higbee, owner and founder of Higbee Honey, said he first became interested in beekeeping when he was working for the Utah Air National Guard. He had been talking with a colleague at work who got into beekeeping, and Higbee said he was fascinated by explanations of the way honeybee colonies operate.
He was also interested in self-sufficiency, and the idea of producing his own honey was “very appealing to me,” Higbee said.
So he started with one hive of bees in the Morgan Valley, “to learn and make sure I could keep them alive,” Higbee said. When that experiment went well, he expanded to 10 hives, then 30, always selling out of the honey his bees made. And in his travels for the military, he would meet other beekeepers, and soon realized “there’s a whole world of honey out there.”
Higbee became what he calls a “honey connoisseur,” curating unique honeys from around the world.
At the Downtown Farmers Market, Higbee will be selling Wasatch wildflower honey, as well as light and dark varieties also produced in the Wasatch Mountains. And he plans to have black sage honey and orange blossom honey, made by his overwintering bees in southern California. Look for Higbee Honey along 300 West, on the park side of the sidewalk.
