Made In NC: The Sonder Market

For many UNC students, Chapel Hill is a temporary home. But for the volunteer students who run the Sonder Market, Chapel Hill — and North Carolina as a whole — is a vital, interconnected community that needs good, local food.

The Sonder Market is a student-run local food co-op, selling locally-sourced produce and baked goods to students and community members. Additionally, Sonder holds educational programs such as cooking classes to combat food insecurity.

“Our whole mission is to reduce food insecurity and food waste while being as sustainable as possible,” said Vivian Le, a UNC student and the president of the Sonder Market.

At Sonder, sustainability starts and stays local. It makes frequent use of Farmer Foodshare’s wholesale market to purchase produce only from local NC farms, Le said, which Sonder uses to make baked goods for sale at Blue Dogwood Market and the Meantime Cafe.

(Photo from the Sonder Market’s Facebook page)

Sonder’s recent move to Blue Dogwood put them closer to the community than ever before. As the only student volunteer-run store in the venue, the market has had its own set of challenges.

“We’ve all learned a lot during this process,” said Le. “… We don’t want to over-extend ourselves, but we really value our relationship with Blue Dogwood and plan on holding more community-focused events there in the future.”

Unfortunately, the COVID-19 crisis has cast doubt on whether Sonder will be able to return to Blue Dogwood as a vendor.

Looking to the future, Sonder plans to start selling on UNC’s campus again, as well as restarting its cooking classes – which had taken a backseat to running the location at Blue Dogwood.

“We’re really happy to be able to start those again,” Le said. Sonder’s cooking classes, which focus on cooking inexpensively with local produce, have been popular among students and community members alike.

“It’s important to show people just how much they can make themselves,” Le said. “You can make a lot with something as simple as a sweet potato.”

The sweet potato is actually a staple item of Sonder’s menu; it’s used to make granola, cookies, bars and a load of other baked goods. While Sonder is planning on expanding its menu to include seasonal items that show off some of NC farms’ diverse offerings, the sweet potato will always be central to its less-is-more approach, Le said.

Le said the market also plans to add deliverable produce boxes to its slate sometime in the near-future. The goal is to make the boxes more local and sustainable than other options.

“We saw that with other produce boxes there was often a lot of food waste,” Le said. “So we’re only putting local produce in ours and they come with easy recipes so all the food gets used.”

While the produce boxes are still a developing project, the hope is for them to become central to how Sonder supports local farmers while empowering community members to eat local, healthy and sustainably.

“We find that it’s really important to support the local community,” Le said. “Eating local, we have a personal connection to our food and our farmers that really can’t be replicated.”

Story by Jack O’Grady

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