Farm & Coast Market to expand to new production facility
Farm & Coast Market’s retail location at 7 Bridge St. Photos by: Morgan Beard.
The current kitchen facility at the Bridge Street retail location.
The site of the expanded production facility, once a Friendly’s, sits at 631 Dartmouth St. 
The interior of the new facility where construction has been underway for about a month.
The sandwich bar in the current kitchen facility.
In the current kitchen, the space is shared for many different uses.
Some of the ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook offerings available at Farm & Coast.
Ready-to-cook meals like marinated chicken, shepherd’s pie, and pot roast.
Farm & Coast Market’s retail location at 7 Bridge St. Photos by: Morgan Beard.
The current kitchen facility at the Bridge Street retail location.
The site of the expanded production facility, once a Friendly’s, sits at 631 Dartmouth St.
The interior of the new facility where construction has been underway for about a month.
The sandwich bar in the current kitchen facility.
In the current kitchen, the space is shared for many different uses.
Some of the ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook offerings available at Farm & Coast.
Ready-to-cook meals like marinated chicken, shepherd’s pie, and pot roast.
Dartmouth’s Friendly neighborhood market is making a local expansion.
Farm & Coast Market, a Padanaram mainstay for the last five years, has outgrown its modest kitchen and is expanding to a new location in the old Friendly’s building at 631 Dartmouth St.
“We’re busy enough that we needed a larger kitchen,” said General Manager Jodi Cote. “We knew after a couple of years we were going to outgrow our production space.”
She explained that while the new facility won’t be a retail space, customers will notice the difference in the increased variety — and better availability — of items at their Bridge Street location.
“It will give us an opportunity to do some new items,” said Cote, noting they were considering adding homemade ice cream, seafood and more ready-to-cook meals to their offerings, as well as a few other things “that we’re keeping a secret for now.”
Apart from more stock and new products, Cote said Farm & Coast will also look to grow its catering business — where they believe they’ll have the capacity to cover larger events like weddings — and other initiatives like cooking classes, private dinners and full-course takeaway meals.
“We’re very in tune with what the customers are saying and then we react to it,” she said, explaining that they will surely find new ways to use the space that they haven’t considered yet.
The new production facility is currently being extensively remodeled after sitting vacant for about 10 years, according to Cote.
“We had to basically gut it,” said Cote. “But we hope to be moved in by May.”
When finished, the facility will double the current kitchen space, triple the cooler space and house the company’s offices and storage, she said.
The renovation is being managed by Dartmouth-based contractor R.P. Valois, which Cote said is in line with Farm & Coast’s commitment to keeping its business as local as possible.
“We want to be the community place so we try to hire as locally as we can,” she said. “That was our mission since we started and that’s just going to continue.”
Cote said that while the company’s owner, Per Lofberg, lives in Dartmouth, he is originally from Sweden and started the business on the old-world philosophy of a face-to-face, community grocery.
“The idea of the market — and why we called it Farm & Coast — is because we wanted it to go back to the times where you used to go to the butcher shop to get your meat and to the bake shop to get your bakery goods,” said Cote. “We wanted to tie that all together, almost like a little farmers’ market under one roof.”
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