For years, a Sunday market meant a drive toward Federal Highway. You packed up, headed downtown, parked near the 5th Avenue Shops, and browsed tables of produce and baked goods among the same rotating crowd that's turned out for Boca's original Sunday market for years. It was the only real option, and it closed every summer, so from May through September there wasn't one at all.
Then, in April 2025, something opened a few minutes up Yamato Road, inside a building most people in Grand Oaks have driven past hundreds of times without ever pulling in: the old IBM campus. Sixteen months later, that market has more vendors than the one downtown, and it runs every single Sunday of the year, including August.
That's not a small detail. It's a genuine flip in where the closer, bigger Sunday option actually sits.
A Research Campus That Sat Quiet for Twenty Years
The building itself is the part of this story most people in Broken Sound know least about, even though it's been sitting a short drive west of the gates the whole time. Designed by Marcel Breuer, the architect known for defining mid-century Brutalist style, the 1.7 million square foot campus was built in the late 1960s as IBM's North American research and development hub. It's where the first IBM personal computer was invented, back when the site housed roughly 10,000 employees. IBM shut its doors there in 1996, and for the next two decades the campus sat at a fraction of its old capacity, leased mostly to back-office call centers and data operations.
CP Group bought the property in 2018, renamed it the Boca Raton Innovation Campus, or BRiC, and put roughly $100 million into renovating it. City planning documents from a 2021 zoning workshop actually named Broken Sound directly when discussing how much traffic the surrounding roads could absorb, noting that within what the city calls the Park at Broken Sound, 2,500 dwellings had already been built, were under construction, or had been approved. In other words, this isn't a random office park somewhere else in Boca. City planners already treat BRiC and the Broken Sound villages as neighbors sharing the same stretch of Yamato Road.
Ninety Vendors and Counting
The Boca Farmers Market launched at BRiC on Sunday, April 27, 2025, in Parking Lot H at 4950 Communication Avenue. It started as a straightforward Sunday morning setup: fresh produce, baked goods, a coffee trailer, a lemonade truck, a handful of vendors selling handmade goods and natural products.
Since then it has grown into one of the larger weekly markets in Palm Beach County, with more than 90 curated local vendors setting up every Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., year round. Compare that to the market most Boca residents still think of as the default, the Boca Green Market at the 5th Avenue Shops downtown, which runs the same Sunday hours but only from late September through early May, and features 65 or more vendors during its season.
So the market a short drive from Grand Oaks is both bigger, by vendor count, and available every week of the year, while the one everyone assumes is the real option goes dark for nearly half the calendar.
| Boca Farmers Market at BRiC | Boca Green Market (5th Ave Shops) | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 4950 Communication Ave, Parking Lot H | 1954 NE Fifth Ave |
| Hours | Sundays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. | Sundays, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. |
| Season | Year round | Late September through early May |
| Vendors | 90+ | 65+ |
| Distance from Broken Sound | A short drive along Yamato Road | Across town, toward Federal Highway |
What to Expect If You Haven't Been
If Sundays at BRiC are new to your routine, a few practical notes help. Park in Lot H, which is the market's designated lot on the south side of the campus. Go early if you want first pick of produce, since the market's own growth story has been vendor turnout outpacing early expectations for a site that started as a corporate parking lot. Expect the mix to lean toward small local operators rather than chains: farm produce, baked goods, plants, and handmade products, alongside the coffee and lemonade setups that have been there since the first Sunday.
None of this requires abandoning downtown. The Green Market has live music and a longer track record, and plenty of people will keep both markets in rotation depending on the season. The point is that Grand Oaks and the surrounding villages now have a legitimate closer option that didn't exist two summers ago, and it happens to be larger and open more often than the one people default to out of habit.
The Campus Behind the Market Is About to Get Bigger
The market turns out to be an early piece of something larger. In October 2023, the Boca Raton City Council approved zoning changes that gave BRiC an Enhanced Mobility designation, clearing the way for a roughly $1 billion mixed-use overhaul of the 123-acre site. The plan calls for adding residential units, a hotel, retail, and dining to a campus that has been almost entirely office space since IBM left.
By this spring, those plans had moved from concept to filed site plans. According to reporting from earlier this year, the current proposal includes two multifamily buildings on the east side of the campus, an eight-story, 320-unit condominium with a wellness club and pool deck, and an adjacent eight-story apartment building with 380 market-rate units. At the main entrance off Yamato Road, the plans describe a walkable retail village: 76,000 square feet of retail on the west side, including a 13,200-square-foot grocery store, plus another 48,000 square feet of retail spread across six buildings on the east side. A 55,000-square-foot indoor entertainment facility and a 140-room hotel round out the proposal.
None of that is built yet, and site plans can change before ground is broken. But the direction is consistent with what's already happened with the farmers market: a campus that spent two decades as a quiet office park is actively being rebuilt into something residents interact with directly, not just drive past. If the grocery store and retail village move forward as filed, the market that already gives Grand Oaks a closer, larger Sunday option than downtown will have neighbors of its own within a few years.
Why the Flip Matters Now
It's easy to assume the interesting things happening in Boca cluster downtown, along Mizner Park, or out toward the beach. The BRiC market is a clean counterexample sitting on the doorstep of Broken Sound. A market that didn't exist during last year's summer already draws more vendors than the market with the name recognition, and it never takes a season off. That's worth knowing if you've been defaulting downtown out of habit rather than proximity, and it's worth watching if the retail village and grocery store planned for the same campus actually break ground.
For anyone weighing what a specific address near Broken Sound is worth, changes like this to the daily geography around it are exactly the kind of detail that gets missed by a listing sheet. If you want a closer read on how a particular street or village fits into what's happening along this stretch of Yamato Road, Susan Demerer is glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.
