Tim Harty, The Business Times

On June 23, the wall came down.

No longer was Fisher’s Market separated from the next-door space to the west that it once leased to Conchitas Mexican Restaurant and more recently used for catering or rented out for parties and meetings.

The two units became one, and now Fisher’s Market, 625 24 1/2 Road, is a bigger, better specialty market and deli, particularly known for its high-quality meats and items or brands not found in conventional grocery stores.

The expansion was a few years in the making as co-owners Brandi and Jay Pollock knew they needed to do something about the increasingly cramped quarters where Fisher’s Market operated.

First, it required committing to keep the business, which is a story itself. Brandi said they bought it in 2009 when it was a meat market where the owner sold only local meats. She and her husband initially thought they would get the business “up and going for a little bit, and we’ll sell it.”

Getting it going meant some changes.

“As soon as we got in here, we’re like, ‘It’s pretty hard to have only local meats,’” Brandi said. “We needed to have a bigger variety of meats and seafood, and then it kind of goes from there, where you’re like, ‘Oh, you need seasoning for all of your meats. And you need sauces for all of your meats. And you need cheese. And you need bread.’

“And as it went on, number one, we loved all the food that we were carrying, and so we’re like, ‘OK, we’re not going to sell it, we want to just keep growing this whole thing.’ … The little market just kind of kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and you were just squeezing it, squeezing everything in there.”

Brandi said she and Jay decided a few years ago, because they own the entire building, they needed to use the next-door space they had previously leased to Conchitas. Once that was decided, they took a year to figure out logistics, because they didn’t want to disrupt the existing Fisher’s Market. Then, they hired a general contractor, Lannie & Rund of Grand Junction “to start making it happen for us.”

“We decided, ‘OK, we’re going to somehow figure out a way to expand the market into this space, but we don’t want to close at all. We want to stay open the entire time. We want to make it work to where we’re in this store one day, and the very next day we’re in the whole thing,” Brandi said.

And they did exactly that, which led to Monday, June 23, “at like 4 o’clock, we took the wall down to start moving things over to this side,” she said while sitting in the elevated office at the back of the new space.

The next day, customers walked into a store that had more than doubled in size.

“It’s really fun to watch the people walk in the door, and they’re like, ‘Wait a second, where am I? Where did I just walk into?’” Brandi said.

Good question.

The answer is they just walked into a Fisher’s Market that has all of the things it previously offered, plus much more. And more is to come.

For now, though, what’s new is plentiful, and the changes include:

• A dedicated deli counter with a spacious area behind it featuring a large prep table.

“We’ve been doing sandwiches forever, but it was just too small of a space, and it was nearly impossible to keep up with all of our sandwiches we were making every day,” Brandi said. “We knew that we needed to expand the deli area. … We moved all of our prep stuff over here, closer to the kitchen, so we can make all of our pasta salad or potato salad, all of our salads fresh every day. So, now we have a bigger area for that. We have room to display all of our deli meats and cheeses. We have more produce. We’re just trying to expand everything.”

• Seating for dining indoors. Previously, customers could sit outside, and that was it.

Now, there’s a long bar-height table along a stretch of windows and about a dozen chairs there for diners. A couple small tables and chairs are in the middle of the new space, and Brandi said there will be more to come as they figure out what they want to do.

• There is a coffee area with an espresso machine for making coffee drinks, and Fisher’s Market will use coffee beans from Mountain Town Coffee, based in Rifle.
• They now carry desserts.
• Soon, they will provide ready-to-bake meals.
• All of its seafood is flown in six days a week, which required a little twisting of the vendor’s arm via reminder that the larger store can accommodate more.

“These companies are like, ‘Well, you’re a little tiny guy, and you’re not selling that much, you’re not buying that much from us,’” Brandi said, to which she countered, “Hey, here soon we’re going to be really buying a lot more from you. And what can you do for us, so that we can have the freshest food and the availability of these products all the time?”

That worked, and now, she said, “We can special order just about anything and have it here the next day. That’s pretty exciting to be able to do that.”

• They’re stocking bread from Denver-based Half Moon Baking Company, and Brandi is thrilled to the point that “I keep telling everybody about it.” Fisher’s Market is selling the bread and using it in its deli sandwiches.

“We really didn’t have a lot of bread that we were selling before,” Brandi said, “but I loved this, because it was a Colorado product and pure simple ingredients with no artificial preservatives, mixed together with a little rock-and-roll attitude.”

• They hired four new employees, and Brandi said, “I’m thinking I’m gonna have to hire a couple more.”
• You can watch the butchers work, as windows allow customers to literally see how the sausage gets made. Brandi said that “was really important to us. We want our customers to be able to come in and watch the butchers cutting up the steaks in our case, so we put windows looking into the butcher rooms, so people can sit there and watch our guys.”

And there will be other new products, which Brandi points out, because a long-held, frustrating misconception about Fisher’s Market is it only sells meat. That’s why its logo no longer says Fisher’s Market Premium Natural Meats. The store name is just Fisher’s Market, and it carries a lot of other foods.

If that wasn’t obvious to people before, wait until they get a load of the bigger, better Fisher’s Market.