How Fort Collins eats: beet fields, Saturday markets and Old Town tables

Ask a longtime resident where Fort Collins food comes from and the answer usually starts in a field rather than a kitchen. This was a farm town before it was a college town or a beer town, and the way people here shop and eat still carries that history: in a Saturday market that has run for half a century, in a café that has been pouring coffee on Walnut Street since the Depression, and in a farmstead on the east side that now holds a restaurant and a coffee roaster.

Beets, lambs and the families who worked the fields

The biggest change to Fort Collins's table came with the sugar factory. Construction began in November 1902, and the plant processed its first beets in January 1904; Great Western Sugar bought it that summer. The city's own history pages quote historian Evadene Swanson's judgment that, for about forty years afterward, local prosperity turned on two things: growing beets and feeding lambs.

Beets need many hands to plant, thin and harvest, and the sugar company recruited them from far away. Germans from Russia arrived in Larimer County in large groups from 1902 and settled in worker housing north of the Cache la Poudre, and German grocers such as Sitzman's, Hohnstein's and Shulthauer's opened to serve them. The company also recruited workers from the American Southwest and Mexico. Many of those families lived in Buckingham, Andersonville and Alta Vista, the three neighborhoods near Vine Drive and Lemay Avenue known together as Las Tres Colonias.

The beet fields are long gone, but the story is easy to find. Sugar Beet Park, a city park at Vine Drive and Ninth Street in the heart of the Tres Colonias, was built to honor those fields, and its playground is shaped around a twelve-foot wooden sugar beet. It is a good place to start if you want to understand why so much of this city's food history begins with farm work.

From field to market, every season

Farming never left the county, and the clearest place to see it is at the markets.

The Larimer County Farmers' Market began in 1976, when the Colorado Master Gardeners in Larimer County wanted a place for home gardeners to sell their extra produce to neighbors. In 2026 it marked its fiftieth season. It sets up on Saturdays from spring into fall at the county building at 200 W. Oak Street in Old Town, is managed by Colorado State University Extension in Larimer County, and leans heavily on Master Gardener volunteers. The county expected about 130 vendors this year, and it reports that more than nine in ten of them are based in Larimer or Weld County. The market began as a three-month summer affair; it now runs about six months because growers can offer food for so much more of the year. Its 2026 season is over, and the market says planning for 2027 is under way.

The Fort Collins Farmers Market, which has been going since 1984, meets on Sundays and Wednesdays in the Ace Hardware parking lot at Harmony Road and Lemay Avenue. It is done for the year and says it will reopen in May 2027.

Through the cold months, the market moves indoors. The Fort Collins Winter Farmers Market, run by Wildcraft, fills Foothills at 215 E. Foothills Parkway every Saturday from November through April. Its organizers count more than 120 Colorado farmers, ranchers and makers, selling seasonal produce, breads, jams, coffee, cheese, and Northern Colorado meat, eggs and dairy, with a Startup Alley for brand-new food businesses. The winter market accepts SNAP and Double Up Food Bucks, and the county's market saw more than $94,000 spent with local farmers through SNAP and Double Up Food Bucks in 2025.

Old Town's long-running tables

On Walnut Street, Silver Grill Cafe has been part of Old Town's mornings since October 28, 1933, when Leonidas "Flossie" Widger opened it during the Depression. The café's own telling says a hungry sign painter lettered its front window in exchange for a pork chop lunch. It has since grown across five historic storefronts, with painted brick signs from 1913 and 1922 still showing in one dining room. It is known above all for its plate-sized cinnamon rolls and a rotating Roll of the Month, and today it is run by Alan and Jackie Jantzen.

A few doors down, Happy Lucky's Teahouse, founded by George and Kari Grossman, stocks loose-leaf teas made with organic ingredients where it can, along with teaware, and hosts tea events and classes in its Old Town shop.

A short walk north, in the Downtown River District, Ginger and Baker occupies the restored Northern Colorado Feeders Supply building at 359 Linden Street, a building with more than a century of history behind it. Under one roof it holds a market and bakery known for pies, an all-day café serving American comfort food, a steakhouse called The Cache and a teaching kitchen with cooking, cocktail and crafting classes, all built around handcrafted Colorado food and goods.

A farmstead on the east side

On Timberline Road between Prospect and Drake, Jessup Farm Artisan Village has turned the farmstead of one of Fort Collins's early settlers into a cluster of shops and eateries. The Farmhouse at Jessup Farm has served rustic, modern farm fare in a 19th-century farmhouse there since 2015, and it works with many local growers, producers and brewers. Next door, Bindle Coffee, a family-owned micro-roastery and café, bakes its pastries in house; it also runs a Roastery and Bakehouse on East Harmony Road where the beans are roasted.

A good Fort Collins food day can follow the same route as the city's history: a cinnamon roll on Walnut Street, a walk through the Tres Colonias to Sugar Beet Park, and a Saturday this winter at the indoor market, where the people selling the carrots and the lamb are the people who raised them.