2026 Entrepreneur of the Year: Karissa Kary

Karissa Kary saw a missing link in Springfield’s local food system: a shared way for small producers to grow beyond farmers markets without each one taking on the cost and risk of running their own retail operation. In 2025, she turned that idea into Ozarks Farm Stop, a downtown marketplace built around shared infrastructure and a belief she sums up this way: “Farmers grow food. Farm Stops grow farmers.”

Kary brought years of experience with Springfield-area farmers markets and service as president of the Missouri Farmers Market Association to the venture. As director of Farmers Market of the Ozarks at the time, she had seen the local food system from both a producer and statewide perspective. She says she wanted to create a next step for producers who hoped to grow without needing or wanting to supply a large number of grocery stores.

Ozarks Farm Stop opened Aug. 22, 2025, at 401 South Ave., in partnership with Farmers Market of the Ozarks, according to past Springfield Business Journal reporting. The 10,000-square-foot storefront combined grocery and farmers market offerings, including meat, produce, dairy, pastries, handmade jewelry and pottery, and health and wellness items. At opening, Kary said vendors would receive at least 70% of retail prices, with featured vendors receiving about 75%. More recently, she says producers now retain 75% of consignment sales.

The model gives producers access to retail space, staffing, refrigeration, point-of-sale systems, marketing, aggregation and customers throughout the week. Nearly 100 farmers, ranchers, bakers and food producers now share the marketplace, Kary says. Monthly sales more than doubled from the business’s early months, reaching nearly $50,000 in July 2026. The business has created seven paid manager and staff positions and expanded from approximately 2,000 square feet to a 10,000-square-foot downtown footprint, with about half in daily use.

Kary’s view of growth is deliberately broad. For a small producer, she says, an additional $10,000 or $20,000 in annual sales could help pay for equipment, extend a growing season, support a first employee or make a side business more sustainable. One farmer generated nearly $4,000 in gross Farm Stop sales in June, while an egg producer sold about 60 dozen eggs through regular in-store retail in a week.

Living through SARS in China, Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and COVID shaped Kary’s view of resilience. She says these disruptions showed how quickly transportation, commerce and access can change, reinforcing her belief that communities need viable local food systems before a crisis.

“Supporting local farms is more than a ‘buy local’ slogan,” she says. “They have to be economically viable in ordinary times if we want that capacity to be here in extraordinary ones.”

By building a business that creates sales channels for many independent producers, Kary has linked entrepreneurial performance with wider regional economic opportunity. “The innovation is not simply the store. It is the shared system behind it,” she says.