Eat and shop local at Cornett Farm Fresh
Don’t expect breakfast at Cornett Farm Fresh in London. That’s when the Cornett family and employees are picking the produce that will be on the diner’s plates for lunch and dinner.
“If it were any fresher, it would still be in the field,” says Rhonda Cornett, who owns the business with her husband, Brent.
The Cornetts, who are consumer-members of Jackson Energy, have a long family history in agriculture. Both grew up in farming families, and their children are involved as well. The Cornetts’ son, Jarrod, recently graduated from the University of Kentucky with a degree in agricultural economics and farms full time. Their daughter, Miranda is a sophomore at UK and plans to manage the farm store after graduation.
After purchasing their farm from Brent’s parents in 2009, the Cornetts began to move away from traditional tobacco and beef production. Their first large vegetable crop was tomatoes, which they had planned to fill labor gap between topping and housing tobacco. They learned vegetables could be highly profitable per acre.
Today, the Cornetts raise about 250 acres of produce, which includes 150 acres of bell peppers, 10 acres of strawberries and 15 acres of eggplant, not to mention cucumbers, squash, zucchini and sweet corn.
“For the store, we grow a little bit of everything,” Cornett says, “whether it’s green beans, watermelon, okra, just anything you could get in a normal grocery store setting, we try to grow it.”
The Cornetts operate three distinct business units. Cornett Enterprises is the wholesale side of the farm, supplying produce to big box stores like Walmart and Kroger. Cornett Farm Fresh is the retail side of the business, including both the farm market and the restaurant. They also run Alliance Packing Kentucky, a packing and distribution business, which takes shipments of fresh produce from farmers around the state and distributes them to large retailers.
Cornett Farm Fresh, the Kentucky Proud market, originally occupied a corner of the Cornett’s barn during the COVID-19 pandemic. Shoppers repeatedly asked for a market closer to town, and in April, the market moved to its current location in London, adding a restaurant that shows off meat and produce from the Cornett’s farm, as well as ingredients from other local farmers. The farm market also offers products from 44 farmers and small business vendors.
The restaurant menu, crafted by manager Stephanie Prewitt, focuses on simple, fresh ingredients with a Southern inflection. Cornett says customers like being able to support multiple farmers at once when they go out to eat, and they can also taste the difference in truly fresh food. “If we have corn, we’re cutting it straight off the cob,” Cornett says.
The menu changes seasonally, but some of Cornett’s current favorite items include the grilled chicken Caesar salad, made with farm-fresh Romaine lettuce, and the Ultimate Grilled Cheese with house-made pimento cheese spread (pimento cheese recipe below).
“This is a true farm family,” Cornett says. “The roots are deep, literally and figuratively.” Located at 319 Route 192 in London, the market is open Monday–Saturday, 9 a.m.–9 p.m.
