Produce and Fresh Food Markets

Produce and fresh food markets are built around fruit, vegetables, meat, seafood and deli goods. They work as grocery destinations rather than weekend outings, which is why they behave differently from every other category here: most trade five, six or seven days a week instead of clustering on the weekend.

These are often the oldest and most established markets in a city, and the ones locals use for an actual weekly shop. Expect specialist traders rather than general stalls, fixed shopfronts rather than trestle tables, and opening hours that look more like a supermarket's than a market's.

Behind most of them sits a wholesale complex most shoppers never see. Sydney Markets at Flemington traces back more than 200 years and has no general public access, Brisbane Markets moved to Rocklea in 1964 after 96 years in the city and still supplies the public-facing Saturday Fresh Market next door, and the South Australian Produce Market moves more than 265,000 tonnes of fruit and vegetables a year through a site around 10,000 people pass through each week. Western Australia runs the same relationship through Market City, its central wholesale complex since 1989, where Saturday's Clearance Market lets the public buy direct.

Adelaide Central Market has traded since January 1870 and is now the largest undercover fresh produce market in the southern hemisphere, and Melbourne's Prahran Market, trading since 1864, calls itself Australia's longest continuously serving market. Between them, Melbourne's Preston, South Melbourne, Footscray, Prahran and Dandenong markets form an unusually dense ring of permanent produce halls inside one metropolitan area, each open several days a week rather than a single weekend session.

A parallel strand of this category is the fresh food retailer that has grown large enough to call itself a market in its own right. Harris Farm has converted a $12 million former Bunnings site into its largest store in Albury, and trades a second flagship inside Erina Fair, the largest single-level shopping centre in the Southern Hemisphere. Western Growers Fresh has been named Western Australia's best regional produce retailer three years running, sourcing from more than 200 local growers, and Otto's Market in Warrina has traded fresh food since 1966 inside Queensland's first shopping centre built outside the South East. None of these run to a weekend timetable at all, which is the whole point of the category: the door is open whenever you actually need groceries.