The cookies made with insect-based flour hadn’t arrived yet. But the “bat abodes” were there.

So were the organic German chamomile flowers for $44.19 a pound and the free hemp-seed-encrusted banana chunks.

On the more conventional side, there were good-looking organic strawberries for $2.99 a pound. Bulk bins had 16 different kinds of granola, and there was a wide variety of sausage and bacon without nitrites.

The new MOM’s Organic Market drew a throng of shoppers and curious neighbors on its opening weekend, the public’s first chance to check out the high-concept anchor store at the revamped Rotunda on 40th Street.

Some, like retired electrical engineer Paul Schwind, who had never been to an organic food store, represent a demographic the company is courting: “crossover customers.”

“It’s really neat,” said Schwind, who lives six blocks away. He said curiosity drew him to the 17,000-square-foot grocery store that has replaced the old Giant supermarket.

After looking around, the 75-year-old concluded that he would still probably continue shopping at the Giant in its new location (nearby on 41st Street, in Hampden) but could see using MOM’s as a supplement.

“I consider this place a cut above the Giant,” he said, singling out the organic meats and seafood.

Some others in the neighborhood may be a tougher sell.

A woman posting on the Medfield/Hampden Gang Facebook page hooted about the prices she encountered on her first visit to the store. “One dozen eggs: $7.49, 1/2 pound of butter $5.49, one gallon of milk $5.99.”

“That was my laugh for the day,” she wrote. (To be fair, they do have cheaper eggs. We saw some for $4.29.)

The Baby Björn Crowd

One person intently watching shoppers like Schwind on opening day was a smiling man in shorts and a MOM’s tee-shirt. He was Scott Nash, owner of the 15-store chain of organic markets.

The new MOM’s is the first in Baltimore City, the eighth in Maryland and the 15th in the country, said Nash, who first ran the business in the garage of his mother’s house in Beltsville in Prince George’s County when he was 22.

The 51-year-old Schwind joked that he started his own company because “I was always unemployable.”

Nash said the crowd, which leaned toward young mothers pushing baby strollers or carrying children in BabyBjörns, exemplified the chain’s idea of the perfect MOM’s customer – an environmentally conscious young parent.

It also confirmed for him that they had found the right location for their store – off Interstate 83 in North Baltimore, with its mix of artists, college students and young professionals in the gentrifying, walkable Hampden area.

Tara Caulder, 40, of Hampden, fit the profile.

“We’re going to see the meats and seafood next,” said Caulder, who had just selected raspberries and a bag of carrots as she shopped with her son, Nico, a 2nd grader at Roland Park Elementary School.

“It’s our demographic. The community fits us really well,” said Nash, whose chain now employs about 1,000 people. “This is a lifestyle choice for our customers.”

The store’s wide aisles are stocked with seaweed snacks, organic toilet paper, uncured turkey hot dogs, chicken sausage, bulk pasta and grains, rosemary bread.

There’s a wellness section with herbal bath salts and lotions. A cafe serves kale caesar salad, black bean burgers and raw or steamed bowls featuring items like “cauliflower steak.”

The store roasts coffee for seven other MOM’s stores in the region. There’s a recycling station for wine corks, eyeglasses, batteries and more.

After chatting with a reporter, Nash went back to work surveying the scene, as staffers served customers popcorn, tangerine slices and other freebies.

He apologized that one product isn’t on the shelves yet – the items made with insects and other critters low on the food chain (aka “sustainable proteins”). Apparently, a shipment of cookies made with cricket flour was delayed in Boston.

“We have ants coming too,” Nash added with a smile. “And worms!”

Facing Inward to a Plaza

With the grocery store finally open, Chris Bell, senior vice president of development for Rotunda owner Hekemian & Co., is turning his attention to other new retail tenants that are coming, most of them already announced.

Flanking MOM’s are Pet Value, opening later this month, and the Rotunda’s only holdover retail tenant from the old owners, the Rite-Aid pharmacy.

Retail stores at the Rotunda, which once faced into the corridors of the main building, will now look inward to an open-air public plaza. What will they be? National and regional chains, pretty much:

• A Starbucks will open in May or June and Bella Beach, a day spa and salon, in late spring.
• Massage Envy is under construction in one wing of the apartment building.
• Moby Dick House of Kebob and Iron Chef Sushi are expected to open this summer, along with Blaze Pizza.
• Floyd’s 99 Barber Shop is opening later this month.
• And October will see the opening of Cine Bistro, a multiplex movie theater with upscale dining before the movie starts.

Meanwhile, a new office tenant has been relocating in phases from the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins University – the administrative offices of the Space Telescope Science Institute, best known for its work on the Hubble.

Hekemian’s $120 million re-imagining of the mall also includes the addition of 379 apartments and 1,200 surface and garage parking spaces.

The new apartments, collectively known as ICON at the Rotunda, are in active leasing mode, with at least a dozen tenants already paying rents ranging from $1,200 for a studio apartment to $3,000 for a two-bedroom with a den.

How’s the market for those apartments, with hundreds of other apartments built or in the pipeline in booming Hampden?

“We are moving people in every week now,” Bell said.

– Fern Shen also contributed to this story.