Reading Terminal Market is the nation’s best public market, according to USA Today’s 10Best

Reading Terminal Market is sitting pretty at the top of the food chain once again after biting back to reclaim the title of Best Public Market in the country in USA Today’s 10Best readers’ choice poll.

Officials announced the Gouda news at a noontime celebration Wednesday at Reading Terminal’s center court, featuring a surprise flash mob, merchants, and free #1 cookies from the Famous 4th Street Cookie Company.

“This award is special because it’s chosen by people that have made memories at Reading Terminal. It shows the Philly pride that’s coursing not only through the city, but across the country, especially in a year as special as 2026,” Annie Allman, CEO and general manager of Reading Terminal, said in a news release.

Since the category’s inception in 2021, Reading Terminal has made the Top 10 list of Best Public Markets every year and won the top honor twice — in the inaugural year and again in 2022 — but it’s been beet out every thyme since, until this year.

A panel of experts and contributors come up with an initial list of 20 nominees for each of USA Today’s 10Best categories. From there, public voting — which took place between March 16 and April 13 — determined the Top 10 winners and the champion (sing it with me: We are the champions, my friends).

For the last two years, Milwaukee Public Market walked away with the title. Reading Terminal came in second last year and third the year before, after Eastern Market in Washington.

But this year, as our nation celebrates its 250th anniversary in the city where it was born, voters got it right and returned the crown to one of Philly’s crown jewels.

Opened in 1893, Reading Terminal is home to more than 80 small businesses and was visited by more than 5 million people last year. In Reading Terminal, you can find everything from Amish baked goods to Filipino-fusion takeout. The stocked market has everything — produce, poultry, souvenirs! If it were a club, it’d be the hottest one in Philly.

Reading Terminal is a place both tourists and locals go to often, and you can tell the two apart because one of them stops in the middle of the aisles like they have no sense and the other knows better.

Our market is a magical land where Philadelphia’s annual Scrapple Sculpting Contest happens, and it’s also what Yale University professor and sociologist Elijah Anderson described as a “cosmopolitan canopy,” a place where people from all walks of life and all corners of the city “come together, and for the most part practice getting along.”

In other words, we give peas a chance at Reading Terminal Market and we recognize how special it is and how lucky we are to have it.

So, while Reading Terminal should relish winning back the USA Today 10Best title, for those of us in Philly, it’s always been the best public market in the country.