Horrocks Farm Market (Battle Creek)

• 5801 Beckley Road
• Battle Creek, MI 49015
• (269) 966-3200
• Website

I’ve told the story so many times about how we found Horrcks Farm Market when we first moved to Lansing 15 years ago. We would shop there weekly. I wasn’t working full time when we moved here while J was working nights. She’d get an hour lunch break and since she worked close to where we lived, a lot of times, I would make dinner and she’d come home for a little bit. Horrocks made cooking dinner every night easy and pretty cheap.

Horrocks was really the thing we knew we were going to miss when we moved from Lansing to Kalamazoo.

There has been a Horrocks in Battle Creek as long as we’ve lived in Michigan. It was in an old Sears store on Capitol Avenue and Fountain Street near downtown Battle Creek. We would stop there occassionaly when we were in Battle Creek but it just wasn’t the same as the Lansing store. It was a little harder to find things and it was kind of cramped which made taking your time and finding what you want was a little more difficult.

There has been rumors for a couple of years now that Horrocks was going to move in to a bigger space. Those rumors lingered for a while but late last month, those rumors finally came true.

The new location for Horrocks in Battle Creek is at the Lakeview Square Mall right off the I-94/M-66 interchange on Beckley Road. The market takes over a large anchor store on the east side of the property that used to be a JC Penny.

We were in Battle Creek to celebrate J’s birthday. The kids were both at a theater camp and we both had the day off. New Holland Brewing had just opened in downtown Battle Creek and that’s where she wanted to go for lunch. After that, we had some time to kill and some errands to run. It was kind on the way home so J asked to check out the new Horrocks.

The store is huge. The former department store was pretty much gutted down to cement floors and it’s structural beams. If the problem at the old location was not enough space this location goes the other way with almost too much. The good thing about that is there is room for nice wide aisles so you have space for two or three carts to make their way through the metal shelves stocked full of the basics but also some unique ingredients.

We also shopped at Horrocks in Lansing for the produce. Many times, we’d hit Walmart in Delta Township for pantry items then hit up the Horrocks on the way home for produce and cheese.

The Battle Creek location has a massive produce department. It’s easy to navigate and there are so many options. The large, wood bins are packed with pretty much any kind of produce you’re looking for.

I mentioned cheese in the last paragraph which seems weird now. When we were shopping at Horrocks in 2008, grocery stores didn’t really carry a big selection of cheese. Now, it’s pretty easy to find stuff other than deli slices or sprinkle cheese but at that time, even finding bleu cheese was hard. Not at Horrocks though.

This new location expands on their cheese selections with a cooler near the back of the space where the prepared food lives.

Need a quick dinner or something to eat? There’s options for that too. There are cases of take and bake pizzas

Plus there are daily rotating soup options.

And the beer. Horrocks didn’t have beer when we used to shop there regularly but they do now and it’s one of the main features. This new location has a huge bar and seating area not too far from where the prepared food area is. You can grab something to eat, grab a beer and sit to enjoy your meal in the middle of shopping.

One of the new things about this location is the butcher counter. Horrocks has always had meat but in the old location it was pre-packaged. There is now a huge fresh meat counter with everything from brats to steaks.

We wanted to check out the new store but one of the main reasons we stopped was to look for a specific candy for J’s mom. We had got it at Horrocks in the past and she asked if we ever went back, that we would look for it again.

Horrocks has a pretty big area with both prepackaged bulk snacks and candies……

..and mix and match bulk candies. We looked through both but couldn’t find what we were looking for.

Horrocks has always been one of our favorite stores. We didn’t buy a whole lot on this trip because we didn’t plan on heading straight home.

I don’t know if this location will make it any more likely we’ll make a special trip…it’s really only three miles down the road…but the new store at the mall is so much bigger and has so many more options. It’s a definite upgrade…from an old Sears store to an old JC Penny.