Chalbeck has lived in Epsom for seventeen years, and until this month, a real grocery run meant getting in the car and heading toward Concord. On a recent afternoon, she drove four miles in the other direction instead, up the hill off Dover Road, and stepped into Chichester Market for the first time. She left telling anyone who'd listen that the town finally had "a lot of convenience for the general area."
That sentence is doing more work than it sounds like. For years, the stretch of Route 4 running through Chichester has been, in the words of the man who just built a market there, dominated by camping stores and car dealerships and little else. If you wanted milk, produce, or a decent cut of meat that wasn't wild boar or elk, you drove out of town. Chichester Market changes that math, and it took two years to get here.
A Barn on the Corner, Two Years in the Making
The building sits at the corner of Dover Road and Main Street, a large barn-like structure that replaced what had been a quiet piece of frontage along Route 4. Its owner is Jason McKay, who grew up in Chichester and has never left. In August 2024, he took over the Healthy Buffalo, the exotic meat shop that's operated on Route 4 for more than thirty years, and almost immediately started sketching out something bigger.
By April 2025, McKay was talking publicly about a market that would move the Healthy Buffalo to a new location on Dover Road and wrap it inside a full grocery store. A year later, in April 2026, he told the Concord Monitor construction was about three-quarters finished, with most of the remaining work happening inside. He was hoping for an August opening, with the caveat that construction always finds ways to slip.
It slipped a little. The store's own target had been July 29. It opened in the first half of August instead, close enough that nobody in town seems to be counting the days.
Part of what stretched the timeline was the site itself. The parcel is threaded with wetlands, and the buildable footprint amounted to less than half an acre. Getting the project through Chichester's Zoning Board required two variances, one for the buildable area and one for the wetlands buffer, both granted in October 2024. The building itself needed a separate waiver, since its footprint runs to 5,928 square feet, larger than what the town's Commercial Village district normally allows even with incentives for rear parking. None of that shows up when you're standing at the deli counter, but it's the reason a market this size didn't simply appear last spring.
What McKay Was Actually Trying to Build
McKay has said the goal from the start wasn't a specialty shop or a novelty stop for tourists heading east on Route 4. It was something plainer than that.
"That was the goal was to be one-stop shop, to limit people from having to drive all the way to Concord or something if they live around this area."
That's a modest ambition on paper, but it's the ambition that actually matters if you live in Chichester and have spent years planning grocery trips around a drive to Concord.
What's Actually on the Shelves
Chichester Market isn't a rebrand of the meat shop with a produce aisle bolted on. It's built as a full grocery, with the Healthy Buffalo folded into one section rather than standing as the whole identity. Inside, shoppers will find:
- A full butcher counter carrying everyday cuts alongside the Healthy Buffalo's specialty lineup, bison, elk, venison, wild boar, and other game meats that made the original shop a destination for three decades
- Fresh produce and shelf staples sourced largely through Associated Grocers, the wholesale supplier McKay has been working with to stock the basics that make a market functional for weekly shopping rather than occasional splurges
- Fresh fish, a category the town hasn't had a dedicated local source for
- A small kitchen turning out sandwiches and takeout, meant for the lunch crowd and anyone who doesn't feel like cooking
- Local specialty goods layered in around the everyday items, the kind of small-batch products McKay has been sourcing from farmers and food makers since his Healthy Buffalo days
The Associated Grocers relationship is worth pausing on. It's the same kind of wholesale buying cooperative that keeps independent stores across New Hampshire stocked with normal grocery basics at something close to normal grocery prices. Without it, a store like this stays a boutique meat counter with a few add-ons. With it, McKay can put bread and eggs next to the alligator and the wagyu, and both make sense on the same shelf.
Filling a Gap Route 4 Never Filled
Chichester already had one food option worth knowing about. The Chichester Country Store on Main Street has long served as the town's bakery and grocery stop. Chichester Market is a different kind of stop entirely, built around a full butcher case, produce, and fresh fish rather than a smaller bakery-and-grocery footprint.
The two stores now give the town something it didn't have before: a real choice for where to run errands, rather than one local stop and a drive to Concord for everything else. For a town McKay describes as small enough that everyone still knows everyone, having two working food stops instead of one is a real shift in how a Tuesday afternoon errand run actually happens.
More Than a Storefront
McKay has talked about the market as something closer to putting down roots than opening a business. Back when the project was still just plans on paper, he mentioned wanting to donate a pig to Chichester's Old Home Day, the town's long-running community event, after a previous year's celebration ran into trouble finding anyone willing to provide one. It's a small detail, but it says something about how he's thinking about this store's place in town. Not as a stop on Route 4 for people passing through toward the coast, but as something Chichester itself gets to claim.
That instinct shows up in how he's talked about location, too. He's said he wants business concentrated on Route 4 and Route 28 so the town can stay rural everywhere else, and that having real amenities close to home matters more to him than growth for its own sake. Whether or not that's the exact language a zoning board hears, it's the reasoning of someone who plans to still be running this store in twenty years, not flipping it in five.
What This Means If You Live Here
If you've been driving to Concord for the weekly shop, that trip just got optional. If you've stopped into the Healthy Buffalo over the years for something you couldn't get anywhere else, that counter is still there, just under a bigger roof with produce and a deli case around it. And if you're the kind of household that likes knowing who's behind the counter, McKay and his team, including staff like Doreen Rich, who was checking out customers on opening day, are the ones running it.
Chichester doesn't get new grocery infrastructure often. This one took two years, two zoning variances, and a footprint waiver to happen, and it happened because a lifelong resident decided the town deserved one more reason not to leave.
If you're curious about what else is changing in Chichester, or you're weighing a move into central New Hampshire and want a local read on towns like this one, Angela D Keef has spent years watching these small shifts add up to real quality of life. Take a look at what Chichester has to offer, and when you're ready to talk through what a place like this could mean for you, Let's Connect.
