Saturday morning at City Center Bishop Ranch starts the same way it has for years: canopy tents going up before 9 a.m., a line already forming at the coffee stand, someone's dog straining toward the direction of the barbecue smoke. This week that routine gets interrupted. At 10 a.m. on September 26, the San Ramon Chamber of Commerce joins the market for a ribbon-cutting to mark its 20th season, right there at Bollinger Canyon Road.
Twenty years is a real number for a farmers market, but the more interesting fact isn't the age. It's the geography. This market has operated at three different addresses in San Ramon, and every move tracked something happening to the city around it rather than anything wrong with the market itself. Read the addresses in order and you're reading a rough history of San Ramon building an actual downtown where, twenty years ago, there wasn't one yet.
It started at the one place in town with any history
The market's own account traces its start to 2006, founded by Harvindar Singh. A market newsletter written years later pins the first Saturday to May 5, 2007, with vendors gathering at the historic Forest Home Farms and a ribbon cutting attended by then-mayor H. Abram Wilson. Either way, the choice of location wasn't an accident. Forest Home Farms was the one site in San Ramon that already read as a gathering place, a working ranch property with roots that predated the subdivisions around it. A new market with no reputation yet needed to borrow someone else's.
That arrangement lasted four years. In May 2011, the market relocated to what its organizers described at the time as "a more central location" at Bishop Ranch. San Ramon's commercial gravity was shifting toward the office parks along Bollinger Canyon Road, and the market followed the foot traffic rather than waiting for it to arrive.
The market got pushed out by the very development it now calls home
The second move is where the story gets interesting. By 2015, the market had spent four years at Bishop Ranch 2, on the corner of Bollinger Road and Sunset Drive. That June, it relocated down the street to Bishop Ranch 3 at 2641 Camino Ramon. The reason wasn't foot traffic or vendor demand. It was construction. The site the market had occupied was being cleared to build the San Ramon City Center development.
"We wanted to find a suitable place for the market and stay in the same vicinity," Singh said at the time. "The easiest solution was to join the Thursday market site."
Four years after that, in 2019, the market relaunched again, this time inside City Center Bishop Ranch itself, the finished version of the very project that had displaced it. The market didn't just find a new home near the construction site. It eventually moved into the building the construction site became. That's not a coincidence worth glossing over. It's the clearest evidence available that the market and the city's downtown ambitions have been chasing the same real estate for two decades, sometimes literally trading places with each other.
The market used to run three days a week. Now it runs one, and it's bigger
Before the current single Saturday session, San Ramon actually supported three separate weekly markets: Saturdays at Bishop Ranch, a Thursday session, and for a stretch, a Wednesday evening market at the San Ramon Sports Park on Sherwood Way aimed at shoppers who couldn't make the weekend sessions. That version of the market, spread across three days, drew around 20 vendors on the smallest day and roughly 40 on the largest.
Today there's one weekly session, Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., year round, and it draws more than 70 local growers, artisan food producers, and small businesses to City Center Bishop Ranch each week. The market didn't just survive the consolidation from three days to one. It came out the other side larger than all three combined ever were.
The operating structure changed too. Early years of the market ran under a local nonprofit called Local Roots. Today it operates under Foragers Market, the company Singh built after a run at Whole Foods Market, where he spent 2006 to 2016 developing the chain's local sourcing program. After leaving Whole Foods, Singh started Forager Ventures, whose first project was creating Alexandre Family Farm, the organic A2/A2 milk brand. In 2019, the same year the San Ramon market landed at City Center, Singh returned to running farmers markets directly, and Foragers Market now also operates certified markets in Livermore, West Oakland, and Fremont.
There's a small detail in that history worth sitting with. Alexandre Family Farm, the dairy company Singh's venture created after he left the market business, is now one of the vendors selling at the market he founded. The person who built the market, left to build a national dairy brand, and came back now sees his own product on a folding table a few stalls down from where he started.
What to look for this Saturday
The anniversary market runs on the market's normal Saturday schedule, with the Chamber's ribbon cutting at 10 a.m. Beyond the ceremony, the vendor list is the same one that's made the market a weekly habit for regulars. A few worth building a route around:
- Smit Family Farms, known for the Aztec Fuji, a late-harvest apple cross between Red Delicious and Ralls Janet, grown on 100 certified organic acres in Linden
- Starter Bakery, whose seasonal Kouign-Amann has been a market fixture for years
- Alexandre Family Farm, the pasture-raised A2/A2 dairy brand with a direct line back to the market's own founder
- Walid Bees and Gerard'Z Honeybees, local beekeepers selling honey and propolis
- Neve Farms, fourth-generation Sonoma County flower growers with roses, hydrangeas, and calla lilies
- The Prominent Roast, for a cappuccino or cold brew before the loop starts
None of this requires advance planning. The market runs every Saturday of the year at City Center Bishop Ranch, 6000 Bollinger Canyon Road, and this week's version is simply the regular one with a ribbon and a few more people who came specifically for the anniversary.
Julie Whitmer keeps track of these kinds of local milestones because they're part of what makes a town legible to the people already living in it. If you're at City Center this Saturday and want to talk about what else has changed around Bishop Ranch lately, or anywhere else in San Ramon, Julie Whitmer is easy to find and always glad to compare notes.