San Francisco's Ferry Plaza Farmers Market pulls more than 50,000 people through its gates most Saturdays. Last fall, when the American Farmland Trust tallied the public vote for its 2025 America's Farmers Market Celebration, Ferry Plaza brought in 180 votes.
The market at Waterside Place, open four hours a week, brought in 3,936. That was more than any of the other 1,262 markets entered nationwide, and it was enough to make Lakewood Ranch's Sunday tradition the number one farmers market in the United States for 2025.
Ferry Plaza has the crowd. Waterside Place had the turnout, and turnout is what the contest actually measures.
From Fourth Place to First in the Country
The market didn't arrive at Waterside Place fully formed, and it didn't win nationally on its first try. It started in 2017 at the Sarasota Polo Club with booths spread far enough apart to make a thin lineup look bigger, one produce stand doing most of the heavy lifting. It moved briefly to the Lakewood Ranch Medical Center before landing at Waterside Place for good in November 2021, when opening day drew more than 15,000 visitors even though Waterside Place itself still had storefronts sitting empty from pandemic supply delays.
The national title took four more years to arrive, and the climb is worth laying out because it explains what actually happened:
- In the summer of 2022, the market finished fourth in Florida and 42nd nationally.
- In the 15th annual celebration, which ran June 19 through September 18, 2023, it took first in Florida and climbed to 22nd nationally.
- In the 16th annual celebration, which ran June 1 through July 31, 2024, it held first in Florida for a second straight year and ranked third in the Southeast region.
- In the 17th annual celebration, which ran August 1 through September 30, 2025, it won the whole thing, with 3,936 votes and a $2,500 prize from a field of 1,263 markets nationwide.
That's not a market that got lucky once. That's four consecutive years of a neighborhood showing up for the same online vote and closing the gap a little more each time, until there was no gap left.
What the Vote Actually Measures
America's Farmers Market Celebration doesn't rank markets by attendance, vendor count, or square footage. It's an open online vote, and the winner is whoever gets the most people to click through and cast one. That structure rewards something specific: not how many people wander past a market on a given Saturday, but how many people care enough about their own Sunday routine to go online and vote for it.
That's why Ferry Plaza's 50,000 weekly visitors translated into only 180 votes while Waterside Place's much smaller Sunday crowd translated into thousands. Ferry Plaza is a destination people pass through. Waterside Place is one families claim as theirs, and claiming something is exactly what a public vote asks you to prove.
Nicole Hackel, Lakewood Ranch's events and resident experience manager, said in Sarasota Magazine's account of the national win:
"They bring their kids and bring them to do activities in the kids' zone."
That's the difference between a market people visit and a market people build a week around.
What Sunday Actually Includes
Walk into Waterside Place on a Sunday and the market itself is only part of the picture. Along Kingfisher Lake, more than 100 vendors set up between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., but the full morning stretches further than the produce stands:
- Free yoga at 9 a.m. at Waterside Park, before the market officially opens
- Weekly live music running the length of the market
- Kids' Corner crafts and activities near the lakefront
- A community-supported agriculture program with Honeyside Farms each fall and winter, letting residents pick up a weekly farm share alongside their usual shopping
- A partnership with Community Harvest SRQ's Suncoast Gleaning Project, where volunteers collect vendors' unsold produce at the end of the day and route it to local food banks
- Occasional pop-in programming from local groups, like the July 12, 2026 visit from BotTanks, a local FIRST Tech Challenge robotics team, who ran STEM activities for kids alongside other student organizations
None of that is required to win a national vote. It's what happens when a market builds enough of a routine that voting for it feels less like filling out a survey and more like defending something that's already yours.
The Town Center Doesn't Rest on Sundays
The market win says something about Waterside Place specifically, not just Lakewood Ranch in general, because the town center runs on this same rhythm the other six days of the week. The first weekend of September 2026 put Mylon Shamble on the waterfront stage for a free set overlooking Kingfisher Lake, with Mike Williams playing acoustic covers on the Plaza the same weekend, no cover charge either night.
The dining lineup that's grown up around those evenings gives the district its own identity apart from the market. Deep Lagoon Seafood and Oyster House anchors one end with Gulf-caught grouper and snapper. Osteria 500, Korê, and Bella Vita cover Italian and Asian menus a few doors down. Allswell runs weekend brunch and a late kitchen on the gastropub side. None of these are seasonal pop-ups. They're the businesses that decided a town center built around a Sunday market and weeknight concerts was worth staking a storefront on.
That's the part easy to miss if you only think of Waterside Place as "where the farmers market is." The market didn't happen to land in a lively spot. The spot became lively partly because the market proved, four years running, that people would actually come.
The Number That Matters More Than the Trophy
Plenty of places can point to a plaque. Fewer can point to a documented four-year climb from fourth in the state to first in the country, decided entirely by people choosing to click a link on their own time. That's a harder thing to fake than a crowd photo, and it's the reason the 2025 win reads less like a fluke and more like the confirmation of something residents already knew about their own Sundays.
Whether Waterside Place defends the title in the next cycle is a story for another season. What's already settled is that being the biggest wasn't the requirement. Being the one people actually stood up for was.
If Sundays at Waterside Place are already part of your week, this is the kind of thing Annie Jordan covers regularly, the small, specific details that make Lakewood Ranch feel like a place instead of a listing. Sign up for the newsletter to catch the next one, or reach out if you ever want to talk about anything happening around the Ranch, real estate included.
