Garden City Market Day gains traction
Organisers of Garden City Market Day in Suva, are planning an expansion. Kameel and Hemand Chand unveiled plans to extend the market to include a fresh produce sale event. “As the name suggests, Garden City was established to sell fresh produce from the garden,” Mrs Chand said.
The proposed expansion to the market day is expected to host road side vendors from around Suva, who sell homegrown food items. “We’re thinking of setting up once a month here for those who sell vegetables, fruits and root crops by the road side,” she said.
“This will have to be hosted when the dates don’t coincide with other market days.”
The Garden City Market Day was established as a one-off in June last year by Mrs Chand.
“It was aimed at helping people who were unemployed following COVID-19,” she said.
Mrs Chand’s experience in event management prompted her to approach the owners of Garden City with the idea.
“Without Wah Sing’s permission, none of this would have been enabled,” Mrs Chand said.
The market day was an attempt to provide a platform for people to sell
their farm produce, and homemade goods.
“After the success of the one-off event, the market day has built itself to near-full capacity for its vendors,” Mrs Chand said.
“We’ve since reeled in corporate organisations such as Digicel to help draw in the crowd - which in turn helps the small vendors.”
The Garden City Market Day vendor capacity is at 90 per cent.
“There is room to increase the number of vendors, but we’d like to leave the place a little more open for people to move around,” Mrs Chand said.
Hundreds of people turned up yesterday.
Co-owner of Inferno Smokehouse and Grill, Leilani Burness, said the Garden City Market Day was a geat avenue to showcase Suva’s variety of enterprising efforts.
“It makes no difference whether it rains or shine - Garden City Market Day is held indoors with lots of room to move around,” Mrs Chand said.