Black Acres Roastery to leave Lexington Market Saturday

Black Acres Roastery will pour its last cups at Lexington Market after service on Saturday, June 27, ending a four-year run in Stall 42 in the Upper Market. The departure removes one of the more visible local coffee brands from a place Baltimore has long treated as a civic anchor.

Founder Travis Bell said the Lexington Market stall was underperforming and had become unsustainable to operate. Customers can still find Black Acres at Open Works in Baltimore, where the business is open Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.

The exit lands at a sensitive moment for Lexington Market, whose origins date to 1782 and which remains one of the oldest continuously operating public markets in the United States. The current 60,000-square-foot building reopened in 2022 after a major redevelopment led by Baltimore Public Markets Corporation and Seawall Development, with space for 45-plus merchants. Earlier planning for the rebuilt market described room for 55 food vendors.

That redesign was sold not just as a construction project but as a reset for the market’s tenant mix. Seawall said the redevelopment raised the share of Black-owned businesses from 5% to 50%, and more than half of the businesses are women-owned. Maryland’s governor’s office said the state invested more than $12 million across four programs in the revitalization, part of a $45 million redevelopment meant to keep the market operating for decades.

Black Acres, founded in 2018 by Bell, grew during the same period Lexington Market was trying to rebuild its identity. A business profile says the company opened its first full-service cafe and on-site roastery at Open Works in fall 2021, before adding the market stall as it expanded deeper into Baltimore’s food scene. Its presence in Stall 42 gave the roastery a central spot inside a market that was trying to blend legacy names with newer merchants.

Now the question is whether Lexington Market is drawing enough steady foot traffic and everyday spending to hold onto brands like Black Acres, or whether the rebuilt space is drifting toward a vendor mix that is harder for small, distinctive operators to sustain. Bell’s decision does not read like a sudden collapse; it reads like the hard economics of a market stall inside a major public venue. For Lexington Market, losing Black Acres is another test of whether redevelopment has created a durable home for the businesses that give the building its identity.